Did you forget about me? How to engage visitors who don’t interact with your website.

January 15, 2009

There are visitors who you see in your analytics account each day.

And then there are those you forget.

Those forgotten visitors can still interact with your content, contact your business, forward along your information, and help your business reach it’s goals.

Think about the visitors who see your content off your website:

However, these visitors are not necessarily fully engaged with your site, yet they are still valuable.

Image: RSS ad impressions for a few days in December. 4700 easily forgotten page views (of users who have java enabled in a RSS reader)

For bloggers, the most common of these visitors are those reading full text RSS feeds.

Engaging forgotten RSS subscribers

Your everyday readers know what change are going on in your company or website. They don’t need to be reminded about a new forum section, new newsletters, tools, etc.

However, RSS or eMail readers are often skimming their feedreader and inbox for interesting content. They will skip some of your posts. Some of your emails will be deleted. Don’t take it personally – we’re all busy. The question is: How do you keep forgotten visitors abreast of changes?

Engage these users where they are currently engaged – in your offsite content.

For RSS subscribers, use a plug-in that will add some additional text to just your feed. This way your everyday readers will not see it, but those reading your content in a feedreader will see it.

Wordpress plug-ins such as:

Can add content to the bottom of your feed.

For eMail campaigns, add a ‘recently changed’ section. Don’t rely on a single email to make your announcement. If you’ve devoted part of your website to showcasing these sections, devote a part of your RSS feed or email to continue reinforcing that news. If it was worth a section of your website, isn’t the same true of your newsletter and RSS feed?

Don’t Forget About Your Visitors

It’s easy to get caught up in testing, and testing, and testing some more.

However, what testing tells you is what combinations make visitors more engaged and trusting of your content.

Don’t forget to do the same for your off-site, forgotten visitors.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Blogging, PPC Marketing Blog | 7 Comments

Speed up Wordpress by Trimming Your Bloated Database

September 12, 2008

<new>I’m slowly cleaning up old drafts. This is one from 5 months ago before the redesign (and I’ve not reintegrated Google search yet). However, for those wordpress users – it’s a worthwhile read.</new>

I love analytics. No where else on the web can you get lost in the purity of statistics.

However, there’s a dark side to analytics – storage space.

Admittedly, I don’t take good care of this blog. However, when I went to back up my database today it was 950 mb. Yes, that’s correct, the database was nearing a one gig in size! It wasn’t spam, it wasn’t the huge amount of content on the site, it wasn’t hacked – it was wordpress analytics programs storing stats in the database.

While it’s fun to have access to every possible analytic stat, there’s also something to be said about the speed of your blog (not to mention one should be more concerned about actionable data).

Using phpMyAdmin I removed shortstat, slimstat, and counterize II tables from my database which brought it down to a much more reasonable 50mb; which still seemed large to me. So, after some more rummaging around the database, it seems that Search Meter (a nice plug-in that saves all the searches conducted on your blog) was taking up the last unnecessary 20+ mb in the database.

It was a tough decision to actually put an ad back on the blog. But, the best alternate to the wordpress search was to add a Google custom search. I haven’t figured out the correct layout for the search yet as on some browsers part of the search box is obscured which I’m sure is against the Google TOS – but I’ve not figured out an OK looking CSS yet. However, searches on this site will now have some ads from Google on them. However, I can now get search stats in my AdSense reporting. Unfortunately, that’s not integrated with any other analytics programs yet. I’m waiting for the day Google’s CSE is integrated into Google analytics. That seems the next logical step. One of the best places for keyword research is search results on your own site.

So, after removing those plug-ins, I made sure that both Microsoft Analytics (review here) and Google Analytics (and soon IndexTools by Yahoo) are installed in the blog for full stats. (More free stat programs found via SEMMYs.)

When installing these scripts, please put them in the footer tag (or just above the </body> tag) so that your content loads immediately. It’s ok if you don’t track all your visitors because the tracking script didn’t load. It’s not ok to have your content not load because some tracking script is taking too long to load.

The accomplishment? This blog is loading about 70% faster than previously. A leaner database means a faster site.

P.S. Please use absolute URls for your Favicons. If you use relative paths, the icons will not show up on all pages of your blog.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Blogging, PPC Marketing Blog | 2 Comments

Wordpress Statistic Plugins Comparisons

January 31, 2007

I’m putting together a comparison chart of several wordpress statistic plugins against some other analytics programs to see how they each record visitors, page views, query strings, referrers, etc.

The analytics programs I’m using are:

Google Analytics
AWstats
Webalizer
Feedburner
and if i have time, I’ll do some clicktracks log file analysis.

The Wordpress Stat Plugins I’m using are:

bSuite (which seems to have issues)
Counterize II
Short Stats
Slim Stats

Did I miss any WordPress Stat plugins that should be compared?

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Blogging | 2 Comments

Updated to Wordpress 2.1

January 28, 2007

I updated to wordpress 2.1 today, please let me know if you see any blog problems – they’re not intentional.

I’ve found two issues so far:

BSuite plugin stopped passing stats. However, I’ve had problems with that plug-in before – so it could that issue could be related to something else.

I also had to completely rework the links section. It seems the previousÂ link categoryÂ tags I was using are no longer supported, and I had to rework some of the coding. Although, it seems its also time to update the entire link section as it’s quite outdated.

As soon as I find an easy way to export Windows Live Mail Desktop OPML; then I’ll rework the link section. I’ve become reliant on that reader since Attensa stopped syncing between their web and desktop apps.

Overall, I do like the upgraded 2.1 interface. I stopped using the rich text editor on the previous interface as it had many issues in various browsers and it was quite difficult to switch betweenÂ the code and editor interface.Â WP 2.1 fixes that entire issue (my favorite aspect of the 2.1 upgrade).

If you see any problems with the blog not rendering correctly, please let me know the problem and your browser version.

Thank you.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

Wordpress Help Files

January 14, 2007

I recently stumbled upon two nice wordpress help sites that deserve to be recognized.

The first is Tamba2.org.uk. This site has a lot of step by step help files for wordpress.

The second at headzoo is a list of all the tags available in wordpress, and separates them into the appropriate sections. Quite useful when editing files and trying to remember the nomenclature of certain tags.

Posted by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment