Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

NYC SEO Meetup

Hi everyone, please stop by Aspen Lounge if you're in the New York City area this Monday, February 11th. There will be a short talk from our own Mike Levin, Kevin Heisler (executive editor of Search Engine Watch), and Marshall Sponder (analytics specialist at Monster.com). Doors open at 5:30 and the formalities begin at 6:00. It should prove to be a great chance to network with other search marketing professionals and bloggers as we already have over 40 people who have RSVP'd for the event.

Details are available on Meetup.com!

New HitTail Live Widget being Tested

Hey baby, wanna see my HitTail?

Would you share the first page of your HitTail Search Hits data with the world?

Well, it used to be that you had to log into your own site (or as Connors) to see how cool and addicting our real-time Search Hit tab in HitTail is. But we wanted to start giving everyone a feel for the “black river of keywords” that exists in any site without logging in.

So, we’re testing this new “HitTail Live” widget on our own site for now—but based on whether people like this feature, we might make it available to the public. First, I’m interested in what you think. So, comment!

This widget it somewhat in the spirit of the “search voyeur” features that used to be built into sites like Excite and AOL Search in years past, where you can have insight to the “search stream”. Lately, this has been supplanted by Google Zeitgeist. But somehow, we still think that viewing the real-time flow in a voyeuristic fashion is still hugely appealing. It’s the same issue as day-after Google Analytics, vs. the viewing the real-time click-stream that makes folks like this blogger continue to use HitTail over other choices. Both have their uses, but as this writer states, there’s just something about watching those hits come in.

So, if you’re interested in using this widget on your website, let us know with comments. It’s not a sure thing. For example, would you actually be OK with SHOWING OTHERS the flow of traffic leading into your site? Is it giving too much away?

Personally, I feel it will help reveal the trends on the Internet that the online marketing community doesn’t want to acknowledge: natural search is king. Paid search (which is indistinguishable from natural search from a referrer perspective), which you can identify by the “lack” of a natural listing, is just way less common than people think. Sure, it can drive traffic, but can it even begin to compete with natural search niche domination?

By showing you this widget, we’re now also showing you a slice of the traffic coming to the HitTail site itself. It’s also a wonderful example of how awesome our filters are. Doing this should by all reason pollute our data with people surfing or referrer links. But it won’t. Think about that. If you click one of those links in the Widget, and surf BACK INTO the HitTail site using a reproduced Google search, shouldn’t you see that you just did that in our widget? Shouldn’t that sort of self-referential referrer loop ruin the data?

In any other tracking system, it would.

And THAT sort of subtlety is why folks like Tatraplan detect something special about HitTail’s particular brand of showing referrers.

And with this new public-facing widget, we think there’s a much easier way to check out HitTail’s coolness, without “logging in as Connors”.

If you agree, and might like one of these for yourself, let us know.

Sometimes, Tracking Less is More

For those who watch the Flash HitTail Demo, the words "WE'RE NOT ANALYTICS" is probably quite familiar. And for those who run multiple tracking systems, like HitTail plus Google Analytics, you will notice that HitTail doesn't track everything.

What???!!!

That's right. And I am often explaining why this is so brilliant, and saves users of HitTail so much time in zero'ing in on what's important... actionable data!

Going against common logic, our patent-pending tracking system knows when to not listen to the activity on your site, and therefore it collects LESS data. And when you're looking for long tail keywords that might be useful for making new content, less is more. Why? Because other systems that capture everything have to sort it out later, reducing the real-time services they can provide. They sometimes make you wait a day or more. Also, they can't keep the data forever. And they have a more difficult time figuring out which of all the garbage data they collected is the meaningful stuff.

What sort of collected data is garbage, you may ask?

Think about it. Where are your hits coming from? Are YOU perhaps responsible for some of your hits (I think you are)? Should you include every search test you perform as part of your competitive intelligence data, especially when what you're trying to do is get into the mind of your prospective website visitors? You're actually polluting your own data with your webmaster testing activities. You're telling yourself things you already know! And isn't the same true of your competitors searching on your site? How many of their keyword tests should you allow to pollute your data? They might hand you over a few interesting terms. But on the whole, they're going to be searching on a bunch of industry insider terms that don't really represent the thoughts of your real prospects, and might be interesting to you maybe once--not over and over, as they're doing.

So, HitTail filters all this ridiculous traffic at the source. In fact, when we detect such situations, our tracking system "goes quiet", preventing excess Internet traffic, and makes your pages load even faster. This is one of the various reasons we are one of the most light-weight tracking systems on the Internet.

While HitTail is awesome for watching search hits that come to your site, indeed, almost hypnotizing, it doesn't record EVERY search hit. It only records the search hit data of each visitor only once, then ignores subsequent visits during that browser session.

That disappoints a lot of people. But it shouldn't. You should be shouting for joy that some tracking system is doing this for you.

Because in the end, you're on the lookout for some very important events in the history of your website--events that every other tracking and analytics system ignores--for example, HitTail captures he first time a particular search led to your website... EVER!

Yep, that's part of what HitTail does. And even that is just pre-filtering. We take this pre-filtered data, which is already throttled to prevent garbage, and it is to that we apply our writing suggestion-finding algorithm to determine which of the BRAND NEW topics (which never led to your site before) qualify as viable writing topic candidates.

The unique experience that this all produces is fueling HitTail's incredibly positive reception.

The Gold Coast Discovers HitTail

Today, there was a major mention of HitTail in the Ventura County Star. Be sure to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt: Fred Simanek, chief executive officer of MyNextDeal.com in Thousand Oaks, uses both for his commercial real estate Web site.

Simanek said an important part of launching a new site is driving traffic to it. He found a product called HitTail, which gives Web site owners, whether casual bloggers or large businesses, a piece of code that tracks how people find their Web site.

It uses that information what keywords people used in which search engines to create a report for the site operator. That allows a business to incorporate the search terms into its Web site content so people using similar keyword searches in the future can find the company more easily.

It even creates a "to do" list.

Gaining intelligence

Simanek said he liked that it was so simple to use.

"Who doesn't want to have a to do list telling you, Here's some improvements you can make on your site,'" he said.

Simanek said he checks the report every day.

100,000 Visits per Month Sound Low?

Welcome to another reason to love HitTail--an honest measure of how active your site is...

...among NEW visitors!

We took almost 8 months to decide what that traffic level was going to be under which HitTailing remains free. And we categorized just about every website in creation into this free category. You can find this as your "Visits/Month" figure under the "My Account" tab.

Impossible, you say? My sites is WAY over 100K hits/mo. you say? And we're only reporting 5,000? Well, let us explain why we might be the only honest traffic monitoring tool company you deal with. The spoiler is that we only count initial referrers and search hits against this number, de-duped based on user sessions.

That's so much mumbo-jumbo for most people. So, if you're a tech-head and don't get it, read on.

If you're NOT a tech-head, forward this to one of your buddies who is, and they'll explain it to you.

We must open the discussion with the fact that almost every number quoted in measuring web traffic is SUBJECTIVE. Let me count the ways...

First, there are infinite "paths" through the Internet whenever you load a web page, so no one in that path can accurately measure the overall traffic to any given site. Not even the ISPs and companies, like HitWise, who strike deals with those ISPs. They have part of the picture, but not all. Folks like AT&T and Level 3 who sit on big chunks of the "series of tubes" that comprise the Internet are in a slightly better position to measure this... but they don't... at least not for YOUR purposes.

Second, there are "caches" all over the Internet, keeping the TRUE page-load activity unclear. There are caches at the local level (your own PC), cashes along the way (squid), and cashes at the hosting level by content distribution networks, such as Akamai and Panther. And finally, your own ISPs, such as AOL also cache. There's just no way that even your own web log files contain the true referrers. This is why so many tracking systems such as HitTail rely on JavaScript-based code embedded into the HTML pages themselves to overcome this caching problem. It's marginally more accurate.

Third, even once you have a decent record of activity on your website, there's the artful process of filtering it down to MEANINGFUL traffic and an OBJECTIVE measure of hits. The problem is that there are spiders and crawlers belonging to Google and other content-monitoring companies all over your site looking like users. To make it worse, for every page-load, there is sometimes dozens more hits as the graphics for the page are also fetched for the same user. In fact, here was a time when people would quote "hits" as just a count of the number of lines in their log files, in which case sites with lots of small graphics would be totally overinflated. Even with the best of intentions, deriving an HONEST and OBJECTIVE measure of hits is a subjective and artful practice.

With all that background, it's time for...

...even MORE background! Sorry, but it's got to be done in order for you to understand why HitTail is so much more honest, and therefore better, than other systems at measuring unqiues and therefore giving you unique insight into the minds of your prospective audience and customers.

It's why HitTail under-reports hits, and is therefore better (better in this context, where we're asking you to take actions to make that number go up).

Once you strip out all the garbage of Web crawlers and graphics loads, you are left with a nearly-objective count of uniques, right? Wrong, what you've got is a nearly-objective count of page-views (sometimes also known as page-loads, which I'll user interchangeably). For you see, there are TWO nearly-objective numbers for the activity on any website. And NEITHER ONE is a count of uniques. The first, is he aforementioned count of page-views. The other is the count of initial referrers.

Initial referrers are sort of like uniques, in that for every visit to a website, there is only one page-load that was your first page-load of the session. And IF you came from somewhere else on the web, that page-load carries a piece of data known as the initial referrer. 9 times out of 10, this is Google, for well-optimized sites. 9 times out of 10, this is the first person to link to you for brand-new sites. As sites age, their initial referrers gradually shifts from being "non-search" links to "Google hits". And the initial referrer number is maybe 10 times smaller than your page-view count described above.

"But wait!" cry all the experienced Web marketers out there. If the average page-views per session for a website visitor is 5, then how can initial referrers be 10-times less? Shouldn't it only be 5-times less?

The answer comes in all those bookmarked pages, links in email, and websites that are directly typed-into the browser (factoring out social bookmark websites and web-based email, which DO carry initial referrers). And there's a heck of a lot of these referrer-less visitors--at least as many as come from links and search engines. These "initial referrer-less" visits are completely invisible to HitTail, as they carry no competitive keyword intelligence. But once you've subtracted out subsequent page-loads by the same visitor AND initial referrer-less visitors, you have about 1/10th your page-load number. And you also have a nearly-objective number, known as initial referrers. And finally, THAT'S what HitTail cares about, measures, and reports in the Search Hits tab.

So, if a site receives the nearly-objective number of 1 million page-loads per month, chances are that your initial referrer number is going to be about 100,000, and exactly the HitTail cut-off for a high-volume site. If your site has 10,000 page-view per month, then your initial referrer number is probably about 1,000, and disappointingly lower than you might have thought. And FAR from the HitTail cut-off for free service.

But we DO have our share of HitTail users in this 1,000 initial referrers/month range that contact us in a panic because their "high volume" site is going to be over the limit, and they're worried they'll be forced to pay. Sometimes, you have a site with a small base of incredibly addicted users. The site owners think they're sitting on an active-site gold mine for advertisers, who pay based on page-loads. But the truth is, they have a tiny, fanatical group of readers, and nearly NO INFLUX OF NEWBIES--which, in the end, are the lifeblood of any site.

And so simply put, HitTail's measure of uniques is our measure of initial referrers--which we call "Visits/Month" under the "My Account" tab. The only difference between our "unique" and other analytics software companies' version of uniques is the delusion that cross-session persistent cookies can be trusted. They can't. They violate privacy. We don't use 'em. And initial referrers is so close to other peoples' count of uniques, that it's not worth the trouble.

As a result, HitTail triggers off no security warnings. Our non-persistent cookie, required only to "hush" HitTail and network chatter subsequent to the initial referrer event, makes for the most polite and lightweight tracking system on the Internet.

You should feel good about adding HitTail as that "one more piece of code." It's the one more piece of code you SHOULD use, because we planned it that way.

And you should also feel good about how we report how active your site is. Because if someone is telling you that your site is optimized, and HitTail tells you you've only got 5,000 visitors/month, well then, you're not as well optimized as you think.

And thanks to Jon of WickedFire, and one of the best Affliliate Marketing guys I know, for prompting me to make this post. He wanted us to show that our Visits/Month number was a measure of Search Hits, and not Page-Loads, as many affiliate programs use.

I guess I could have said it more simply, huh?

HitTail is Real-time, Easy and Actionable.

With HitTail premium here, and a unique chance to get grandfathered into our "thank-you" introductory pricing, I pause to think about why our non-analytics package has received such unilateral praise. We don't track conversions. We don't tell you whose online now. We don't do A/B switch multivariate testing. We don't do site visitor geo-dexing. So then why is everyone jumping onto the HitTail bandwagon?

By boss, Connie Connors, would remind me that we're real-time, easy and actionable. But these are buzzwords to my ears, and I think people have to have the "I get it" moment. Before that, there's no amount of explanation that will suffice. Sure, we've tried, with our snazzy flash demo, personal appeal, live login, and collecting the tons of spontaneous endorsements around the Internet. And now we're about to demonstrate that it has legs as a paid service. But what does real-time, easy and actionable really mean?

Deep down in every marketer's heart is the desire to watch a website's raw log files and understand what they're seeing. At some point in their marketing career, someone loads it into Notepad.exe to demonstrate to them the futility, and they are crestfallen, spending the rest of their marketing careers looking for second-best. What they discover is highly evolved and complex software that goes way beyond log files in the ability to ferret out every little fact about the site. But with this capability, comes complexity, and to really pursue this path, you have to become a career analytics person--or worse yet, rely on someone who is. It's still not as good as just watching your log files.

HitTail's "real-time" capability is about satisfying that basic marketing need--finally. Massively powerful databases, stunningly fast parallel processing, new programming techniques (AJAX), and a new way of thinking about the problem were required to make this happen. But when marketers finally see it, they get that at long last, they're getting a real-time view of their log files. Better yet, it's distilling the list to just what they want to see--sources of initial referrers. Because, in the end, when you're just sitting there watching traffic, who cares about page-to-page internal page-loads. What's most interesting is how people are getting to your site, and why. And that's exactly what HitTail shows you in real-time. No more. No less. And as the icing on top, it's also extracting the keywords and evaluating writing suggestions right there as you watch. There's no one-day wait. A one-day wait for site activity data is so 1990's.

So, how about when we say "easy"? Well, that's always a loaded term. One person's easy is another person's puzzle. HitTail's "easy" means that there are just 4 tabs to our user interface and the activities under each tab are fundamentally the same. We don't make you play "drill-down-surprise" and we don't make you play "expand and explain". Instead, we make you play "pair down the list". Every list is addictively interesting, and this addictive nature of HitTail enhances the "easy". Everything remains in fixed positions on the screen, and we correspondingly let you "get into the zone". When you're HitTailing best, you're thinking least. Things just sort of run on automatic, until it comes time to write. THEN you think.

Contrast that with the labor-intensive keyword research processes of the alternatives. Worse yet, contrast that to the complexity of trying to do complex things, like user path analysis.

The sad truth is that when you try to do complex things, you have to do complex things.

"Duhhh", you say? Well, not really, when you think about the state of analytics today. Sometimes just getting to your list of initial referrers is a complex thing. Forget about serious keyword analysis. Analytics software loses most people at "Hello". In contrast, HitTail inspires a surprisingly enthusiastic following. Never before on the Internet has the formula for systematically drawing in more and more potential customers... been... so... EASY!

And finally, how about the term "actionable"? What exactly does that mean, anyway? Isn't analytics software actionable? When I pull up those charts and graphs, can't I turn around to my website and know exactly what to do?

Well, no.

First, you need to know what questions to ask, so your analytics software is telling you the right things. Once you have that, you need to interpret the raw data. Are you dealing with usability adjustments? Are you dealing with a deficit of referring sources? Are you dealing with flawed sales-flow and conversion? And once you have your answers, who do you turn to, to do the work? Your webmaster? Your marketing team? Your programmers? Or how about you yourself? Are you personally a candidate to carry out the work that your interpreter of analytics data says needs to be done?

With HitTail, you are.

With HitTail, you receive explicit instructions, you need to write about this, or you need to write about that. And we strongly encourage you to use best-of-breed blogging software, so all publishing friction is eliminated. You don't need to go to webmaster, marketing team, or even programmers. You just go to Blogger, TypePad or WordPress (not the hosted version), and type in a few words to the title field, and write as well as you can about that topic. Press "publish", and within a few day or weeks, you will be attracting more visitors to your site on that term. So, with "actionable", we mean that we tell you precisely what to do with the data that we provide.

It is a demonstrate-able and reliably reproducible effect, making HitTailing a delightfully scientific natural search marketing technique. And it is indeed a technique, rather than a mere tool, exactly because it is actionable.

So, there you have it. HitTail is different from competitive marketing tools, because it is real-time, fulfilling the hidden desires of marketers worldwide. HitTail is easy, in that you can figure out everything you need to know within a few minutes. And HitTail is actionable, in that you are explicitly instructed to take specific actions on your website... repeatedly.

And when you do it, you'll see results.

And that's HitTail.

• Real-time
• Easy
• Actionable

Finding Long Tail Keywords

Looking for long tail keywords? You found them. As our friend Jack Humphrey stated it well, keyword tools are useless for the long tail. Most analytics packages want to show you top-this or top-that. Well, once you're "top" there's really not much room for improvement, is there? Would you examine your top sports team performers to see where your team needed the most help? And if you sent out scouts, would you waste their time one every high school kid on the field? No, you need a logical method of zeroing in on just the most promising candidates.

Most important, you need to do it faster than your competitors, and hopefully in a fashion that your competitors can't breathe down your neck with access to the same data. If you're using any keyword suggestion tool or inventory tool that aggregates content from many sites, there are two things wrong from a competitive standpoint. First, everyone else has access to those same keyword suggestions. And second, these words are not specifically chosen for their ability to perform well fast on your particular site.

How well can an automated keyword talent scout work? Well, HitTail suggested that I write about finding long tail keywords. It's sort of dumbfounding that I didn't think to bring people into the HitTail site on that particular word combination. But I didn't. And HitTail pointed out that blunder. So now, I'm targeting it. How well did I do? Well, give it a couple of weeks, then search on the aforementioned term. I bet I'll be in the very first position in Google. If not, it'll be Jack, which is pretty much just as good.