Lijit

The Lijit team spent five days in Austin recently at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference. Most people are familiar with the music and film portions of SXSW, but if you’re a tech geek, then the Interactive portion of the conference is like Disneyland. But better because there’s free booze everywhere. Between Todd, Micah and myself, we were able to cover a lot of ground in Austin. After some reflection, I present my favorite moments from South by (which is what all the cool kids call it):

• Seeing Lijit publishers in action

Everywhere I looked at SXSW, I saw familiar names and URLs. Having the chance to thank users and speak with them firsthand about what they want from Lijit was priceless. I went to a session on building community and one of the speakers, Jake McKee, the Community Guy, was proudly wearing a Lijit t-shirt. Bestill my beating evangelistic heart!

• Blog Network Camp

b5media organized this event and Lijit was proud to be one of the sponsors. There was a great turnout and we enjoyed meeting Darren, Aaron, and Christina, among others. Todd gave an impressive demo of Lijit and the response from the bloggers at the event was positive. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can make network search even better!

• How to piss off a blogger

I attended this discussion on blogger relations and was pleased to find out that I don’t do any of the things we listed as ways to piss off bloggers. I’m self-taught and it’s taken me a year, but I feel that I’m in a position to contribute a lot to these panels. As I’ve always said, if you treat a blogger like you’d like to be treated, you’re probably doing the right thing. To read more about what we came up with, check out the post written by the session moderator.

• Hanging in da Bloghaus

This was the place to be to meet anyone who is anyone in the blogging world. Interviews were going on left and right, blog posts were frantically typed, free beer was consumed…and all with the energy and enthusiasm of a frat house. The Bloghaus is where I made the most connections, met the most Twitter friends and rubbed shoulders with the most A-listers. A very dangerous place for someone who freaks out around (very) minor celebrities!

• Startup Metrics for Pirates

Todd spoke on a panel about different ways of measuring the growth of your startup. While the panel spoke with knowledge and experience, it was also a great panel because they spoke like pirates. There were costumes, interactive pirate crowd comments and lots of “Yarrr”ing. Who knew seeing Todd with an eyepatch and earring would be one of the highlights of SXSW?

• The people
  

Duh. Everywhere you went, there was potential for inspiration and connection. Something about the mellow Austin mood must have rubbed off, because I had no problem walking up to anyone, regardless of their page views, and starting a conversation. It was such an electric energy, matching avatars to faces and meeting new friends. (Micah went as far as getting a permanent souvenir of the time in Austin.) You hear people say it all the time in the online world, but honestly, it really is all about the people.

You can read more about Todd’s SXSW experience here and here. Micah wrote about some lessons he learned and posted a round-up of how Colorado’s startups were represented at the event.

At Lijit we collect statistics on thousands of individual blogs, blog networks, and conventional online publications. For some time we have noticed that blogs that use the Lijit Search Wijit, specifically those that use the Re-Search feature, enjoy a page view lift as a result. Recently, we started digging into some of the usage statistics from our database and found some interesting trends.

In an earlier post, I spoke about the concept of “second click“. When a user enters search terms into Google or Yahoo and selects “search”, that is the first click. The large horizontal search engines own the first click.

When the reader selects a result from the list of items that Google or Yahoo has returned, that constitutes the second click. It’s the second click that leads readers to a publisher’s site. The average blog within in our network sees approximately 25% of its page views coming as a result of a referring horizontal search engine (or second click). The big search engines are a great source of new readers and page views if you can successfully hold on to that reader. The Lijit Search widget takes advantage of this situation to promote publishers’ content to readers when a blog page displays as a result of a referring search.

In our study, on a daily basis, the Lijit Search Wijit promoted a publisher’s content an average of 874 times and the content items in the re-search box were clicked on average 4% of the time. This converted to real-world page view increases, which ranged between 0% and 10% with an average of a little over a 1.5% increase.

These are all meaningful numbers in the world of publishers and subscribers. More page views results in more ad revenue and more engaged readers.

Some other interesting observations from the study… Publishers with the Lijit Search Widget above-the-fold (i.e. higher on the site) showed markedly higher second click conversion than those publishers with the Wijit installed below the fold. Publishers with information-centric sites optimized for SEO showed much greater second click impressions. Those publications that were more focused on Q&A or providing concrete information showed significantly higher second click conversions. Interestingly, higher page view publications were more likely to have a larger percent of users arrive from search engines, thereby setting up the second click scenario. Presumably, this is due to the higher page rank of these sites and the positive feedback loop that occurs as a result of this – basically, the big get bigger.

In the future I intend to dig into some of the interesting dynamics of blog networks. Blog Networks have specialty dynamics that make some of these results even more interesting and more pronounced. Stay tuned.

For now, make sure you have Re-Search turned on and your Lijit Search Wijit displayed above the fold to maximize your page views!