As an involved volunteer for the Web Analytics Association, I've been maintaining the official WAA Search Engine and several widgets you can use on your own site. I also published a couple versions of the Web Analytics Conversations, a list of dozens of web analytics related blogs grouped into one master RSS feed. New blogers around the world are submitting their blogs for inclusion in this growing list.
But I had another pet project in mind...
Web Analytics Conversations v2.0!
Something annoyed me in the fact of simply listing blogs. How can we easily identify top blogs? What IS a top blog anyway? Is it because of authority? Is it keeping it fresh and publishing often? What about quality of the posts?I've been working on a mashup of Technorati, Google Blog Search and other sources of information to create a dynamic tool that shows top web analytics blogs by Authority, Freshness and Activity. It's not ready for prime time yet, but click on the image below for a larger view.
As you see, it's dead easy to see the top authorities in the field of web analytics, and what they are talking about. Base on the snapshot above, what else would you expect to see in this tool? But first, would you find it useful and use it?
Defining an Attention or Engagement metric for blogs
I'm a huge fan of the concept of Attention Economy, and on the other end, "engagement" is a hot topic in web analytics. The base metrics are:- Authority: Technorati's authority estimate, based on number of inbound links over the past 6 months,
- Freshness: or Recency, how long ago the blog was updated,
- Activity: How many posts in the last 30 days
The tool shows the blog title, description, author and blog picture, recent posts and allows to sort by any of the 3 metrics.
Now, how would you calculate an engagement metric? What's your pick:
a) I would take the sum of relative % for each metric (this would be close to an RFM scoring)
b) I would use a weighting factor because one metric is more important than the other
c) I would calculate it in a totally different way
c) It's impossible to automate an engagement metric, you're crazy!
I would love to hear your feedback about the sneak preview and how you would like to see the ranking.
Named one of the most influential industry contributors by the Digital Analytics Association. With over twenty years’ experience empowering organizations to analyze and optimize their online channels, Stéphane has cemented his position as a leading voice for online analytics and optimization.
4 comments:
Hi Stéphane,
As someone who will not score high on this new list, I was wondering how you ponder the relative weight of your variables. Would you also add the average number of comments per post, which could be an indication of how much the blog engages readers?
The RFM reference made me think you would suggest bucketing each variable into quintiles and then apply weightings for an over all score.
Other variables e.g. propensity to share may also be helpful in determining overall influence index.
Hum,
I guest most of the top blog would be listed, but a newcomer will have a hard time getting attention.
Can Authority be calculated using feedback from user of the WA Conversations 2.0?
Instead of looking at the whole blog, could we look at posts level (with some factor for de-evaluate old post over new posts?
Just brainstorming here.
Sébastien: the Authority is coming straight off Technorati, which is based on the number of incoming links in the last 60 days. Some people have argued (notably Eric Peterson in one of his posts) that it's a poor source of data and it can be easily tricked. But for lack of any better suggestion, I'm using that one.
Recency is based on the latest blog post timestamp. A blog that gets updated only once every 3 months would rank lower than a blog with frequent updates (and that includes comments too, if they are available as a feed)
Frequency is the number of posts and comments (if available) in the last 60 days. Posting more frequently will get a higher WAC score.
The nice thing is even a new blogs can quickly rank better since the Recency, Frequency have the same weight as Authority.
If you (or anyone else!) have a some suggestions for improving the WAC score, let me know!
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