So, while up on baby-watching duty, I decided to drop by the Tracer site and check out my stats for the first day and a half or so. Mostly my expectations were in line with the results.

Aside from a test copy on the initial post about Tracer and one on a job scam post, the other 13 copies identified in the top 20 most interacted with pages all came from 2 of my more popular blog posts where I've posted working PHP code snippets. This was pretty much what I expected. I have one page about a PHP routine to detect mobile browsers that is consistently popular. It had 41 visits, 8 selections, and 11 copies, meaning that either 20% of visitors highlighted the code and some copied it twice, or that 25% of visitors copied the code.

Two images were listed as being copied. My "Urkelbama" design (Obama as Television's Urkel) and the browser stats screen cap from my Google Analytics visitor data for the year to date. Each image was listed as being copied once.

Backlinks tracked/traced due to Tracer... nada. But it's been a day and a half.

As for how users are engaging with the content, the list of words was sort of weird. No phrases were listed, just individual words or partial words. These were the top 10 and the number of times users did something with them:

1. Alain (89)
2. not (51)
3. google (45)
4. into (42)
5. didn (40)
6. got (37)
7. going (36)
8. vinnie (35)
9. reese (33)
10. content (31)

For fans of Hell on $5 a Day, you may be interested to know that "kurt" tied for 11th place with "blood" and "around" at 28.

Honestly, I have no idea what those word counts indicate. It could be just copied words or it could be highlighted words. Right now, while in beta, their dashboard doesn't have a lot of help, or any really. They don't actually have a help section. If you want help, it's in their blog (yes, very intuitive placement), and their documentation of the dashboard is pretty much nonexistent.

I'm going to give it a full week before I decide whether or not to keep it. Right now, I'm still on the fence. There's a balance between the value it provides to me and the inconvenience it creates for users, because while that little "read more" link seems neat, most people are going to delete it anyway and all I may be doing is annoying them by forcing them to do that extra work. I've found that once I got past my initial "ooh, neato" phase with it, it began annoying me when I copied text from my blog. And as the only person who benefits from it, I should be the least annoyed by it out of all the people on the planet, right?

On the other hand, I had ~400 interactions with page content out of ~600 page views and no one has e-mailed me to complain. When we first allowed pop-ups on IMDb, we got complaints, but the business manager looked at two elements:

• complaints to users ratio: If we get a million visitors and 50 complain, even though you can feel overwhelmed looking at a customer service queue with 50 complaints, they actually represent 1/200th of 1%. Even if you assume that only 1/2 of 1% of users who dislike it will bother to complain and 99.5% will just quietly leave, you only extrapolate out to 1%.
• are people clicking: People who hate pop-up ads won't click on pop-up ads because they don't want to encourage them. If we're getting a good click-through rate, then that (and the revenue it generates) can be measured against the angry users to determine if this is harming or helping the bottom line.

Don't know if I'd be so clinical when it comes to my blog. This is more of a personal statement than a moneymaking vehicle. Well, I'll look at the numbers again on Friday and we'll see.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 5:27 am and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.