Playing with Bees

Update: I supplemented this post with two others that detail my use of both 103 Bees and HitTail for this post.   They both describe how I actually used to tools to craft the post.  The post below describes the effects of the post.  On Using 103 Bees  |  On Using HitTail

I received an email from a colleague today asking about my use of 103 Bees and other analysis tools.  This is a slightly edited version of my reply to him.

103bees.com is a long tail observation tool that led to this post which made my hits look like this

This graph, incidentally, is from StatCounter which is still my favorite daily activity tracker.

Google Analytics gives you good relative link strength information

HitTail gives you a good look at your long tail graphically, but it does it by entire search strings. Most of my search hits are really <something> Torrent which doesn’t appear on HitTail.

103Bees, however, shows the relative value of specific terms. When you combine all these tools you get some pretty deep insight into what’s happening on the site. Note how much larger the 103 Bees’ reported search keyword Torrent is to Archaeopteryx which led the HitTail ranking.

 

Update: I supplemented this post with two others that detail my use of both 103 Bees and HitTail for this post.   They both describe how I actually used to tools to craft the post.  The post below describes the effects of the post.  On Using 103 Bees  |  On Using HitTail

Technorati tags: HitTail, 103bees, statcounter, google analytics, long tail, blog analytics

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Comments

[Webomatica]

Wow, all that for a post with the word torrent in it? Make my Paris Hilton mentions seem paltry in comparison! :)

[Jim Benson]

Heh,

I tried keywords as general rules. Kind of accidentally, but kind of on purpose. So I wrote a post on how Naked was beating Nude in the court of public opinion (search engines loved Nude, but the press always said Naked.)

It didn't get much hits.

So the secret of this post was that it was actually useful to the torrent community. I noticed I was getting unfocused hits for torrents and this helped them focus on useful sites for them.

That got picked up in the torrent community and then the hits started rolling in.

[Mike Levin of HitTail]

Hi there. HitTail under-reports specific searches when they're all coming from the same person. Typically, this is the Webmaster or a competitor searching and clicking and searching and clicking. That type of traffic tends to skew most analytics packages, and HitTail is designed to issue writing suggestions based on the thoughts and actions of genuine prospects. It's some times a tough concept to get, but HitTail is a writing suggestion tool, and not analytics.

[Jim Benson]

Thanks Mike,

That's an excellent point. But for HitTail to register the entire search strings need to be identical. As near as I can tell. So, in this instance, I was getting a lot of activity for the word "torrent" but it was in search strings with a varying array of other words. So it was quite relevant to my tail, but wasn't being picked up.

HitTail has been very helpful for getting an idea of the spread of recurring searches and then analyzing or getting recommendations from that. I keep going back to HitTail every day to watch the building volumes.

HitTail is one of those tools that will increase in value as it collects more and more information.