Summary: The Problem with Tracking Blogs
You are leading a blog outreach and marketing campaign. You find over 550 blogs pointing to you – great traffic (you see a spike traffic from referrals), great exposure and great for SEO. But, how do you know what those blog visitors from those 550 blogs are up to? Converting? Registering? And Purchasing?
If Technorati has the ability to track and identify over 70 million blogs, why cant it help tell my analytics program, which of the 1,400 referring websites are actually blogs and what the quality of that traffic is like (KPIs like registration, purchase etc)?
Is there an answer to this already? If so, please leave comments below to let me know.
Blogging as a Marketing Channel
The typical Marketing Channels that are readily configurable in an analytics service is paid search (PPC), organic search (SEO), online display (banners etc) and email-based marketing. Click and traffic data from these channels are usually used to segment key KPIs such as registration, using internal search (esp. for ecommerce), and completing a purchase. But what about blogs?
As noted above, Technorati is already tracking over 70 million blogs. Technorati’s identification of blogs could be readily plugged into analytics programs like Omniture SiteCatalyst, which has a “Genesis” program that allows for third-party data integration. Similarly, Google Blog Search could send their data to Google Analytics, so GA can track blog traffic etc.
Of course there will be limitation, not all blog search have each and every blog identified correctly and major websites with quasi-blogging features, like Yelp & Facebook, would probably not be included.
So if this capability already exist for any analytics program – please let me know.
Tantek, David Sifry, Matt Belkin or Avinash: What say you?
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