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Lijit Study Shows Publisher Adoption of Social Media Tools Grows 80%
Mar 2nd
by Sonya Caprio in Community, Company, Lijit publishers
Over 15,000 sites on the Internet use Lijit’s advertising services, on-site search tool, and other widgets (analytics widget, recent readers widget, related content widget). Analytics are built into all of our tools but we do not sell the data. Instead, we feed it back to our publishers to help them better understand their audience and monetize their site. We also aggregate the data and use it to optimize CPMs and fill rates for our publishers.
Over the last few weeks we ran a detailed analysis to see what widgets are most often deployed on publisher sites across the Lijit network. We compared 2009 and 2010 data to identify market trends. Outlined below are some of the most interesting takeaways.
Background:
- 2010: 735,834 sites surveyed, 84.8% with widgets installed (13,541,022 widgets)
- 2009: 744,848 sites surveyed, 84.7% with widgets installed (13,826,562 widgets)
Key research findings:
The Lijit Top 50
Below is a list of the top 50 widgets and tools implemented on publisher websites. The adoption of social media widgets – including tools used for social networking, micro-blogging, bookmarking, and photo sharing – grew 80% from 2009 to 2010. Widget adoption specifically related to Facebook and Twitter almost doubled, growing from 6.96% to 11.86%.
Additional analysis revealed the following trends:
- Many content and engagement tools joined the Lijit Top 50 list for the first time in 2010. These tools include Twitter’s image sharing service, LinkWithin, Wibiya, and Tynt.
- Related content tools to keep readers on-site longer didn’t make the list of Top 10 tools in 2009 but are now being used by 3.68% of sites surveyed.
- Online advertising services continue to track at a 20% adoption rate; however, new monetization tools used in affiliate marketing programs such as Skimlinks, Infolinks, and Amazon saw a 16% increase in 2010.
- Audience analytics tools from Quantcast are becoming much more prevalent. Over 44% of the sites that use analytics use Quantcast to gather reader data, representing a 15% year-over-year growth.
- Website commenting systems now integrate social media components. Disqus, used on almost 75% of the sites that use a 3rd party comment provider, now supports social media commenting and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, Twitsteps, a Twitter-powered commenting system, now ranks the second most widely used commenting system after growing 356% in 2010.
Referring traffic
Three main categories of referring traffic data were analyzed: 1) search engine traffic; 2) organic traffic (defined by sites linking to each other); and 3) social media traffic. A deeper look at referring traffic from social media sources verifies that both social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter as well as social sharing tools such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit are being used to drive traffic to publisher websites.
For additional insights into our research analysis, please read our press release, “Lijit Networks Announces Results of 2010 Publisher Tools Analysis.”
Our methodology:
Our definition of “widget” is “any regularly-occurring functionality on a website powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the site owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.”
- “Functionality” includes analytics widgets. These add functionality for the publisher but are invisible to visitors.
- “Voluntarily” excludes widgets automatically added by the hosting platform. We are only interested in widgets that publishers make an effort to install.
- Image-based badges, such as FeedBurner subscriber counts, are not counted. HTML forms, such as the original Google search boxes, are also not counted. We may include support for these in the future.
- Our crawl is “centered” on sites with the Lijit widget (ad tags, site search and other Lijit widgets). Our crawler then expands outwards by following blogrolls and other linked sites. This may skew the overall results since research originates from sites within the Lijit Network.
Tags: industry, Lijit publishers, lijit stats, publishers, widget statistics | View Comments
We just wrapped up another successful software release cycle and can’t wait to share the fruits of our labor. We’ve got some great updates to our site that help publishers better understand their readers, create quality content, and monetize their sites.
Updated Stats UI
We completely redesigned the look and feel of the stats and analytics sections of our site. The code we used to generate charts and graphs has been completely replaced and given a new look and feel. The static maps we previously used to highlight where readers come from have been converted to Google Maps to make it even easier to find out where your readers come from. One of the best parts about this change is the additional support for mobile devices. Not only does everything just look “cooler”, you can now view your stats on your iPhone, iPad, Android, and many other devices.
New graphs are easier to read and more informative.
Google Maps allow you to zoom in and really see where your readers are coming from.
New Ad Stats UI
In the pursuit of transparency in reporting, we bring you ad stats you can’t get anywhere else (fill rate). We also want you to understand them, so we restructured the way we display ad statistics to make them easier to read and make it easier for you to, at a glance, see how your ad tags are performing. If you want to dig deeper, it’s as simple as clicking on an ad tag’s title to see more data.
Search Plixi Photos
We’ve added search results support for one of the most popular twitter photo sharing tools. Plixi (formerly tweetphoto) allows you to share twitter photos via mobile device and the web. Their API is also integrated into many popular twitter applications for mobile and desktop environments. By integrating your Plixi account with your Lijit search engine, you can expose relevant photos and tweets to people who search your Lijit profile. Check it out by selecting the “Content” section of your Lijit profile and providing your Plixi account name.
And More…
We’re constantly building tools to make our ad operations more efficient. This translates into more optimized campaigns and more revenue for our publishers.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, let us know at support@lijit.com .
Lijit CEO, Todd Vernon Featured As Cover Story On VUE Magazine
Feb 2nd
by Grace Boyle in Company, Featured, employees, industry
Our fearless leader and founder, Todd Vernon was just featured on the cover of the January/February issue of VUE Magazine (the magazine of the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association).
In the four-page spread, titled: Going Lijit: Mining and Monetizing Blogrolls, Todd discusses online publishing, advertising, and how Lijit has built a network of over 15,000 sites by providing tools that help publishers engage and understand their readers.
Introduction from author and Editor-In-Chief, David Hamburg:
The founder and CEO of Lijit talks about the tools and services his company provides to Internet publishers, the small as well as the large. It’s all about providing relevant information, connecting publishers to their audiences, linking them to advertisers, and monetizing their sites.
Here are a few highlighted questions from the lengthy interview:
VUE: Are your aggregate search returns truer than those of Google, where search engine optimization tactics often get the higher placings rather than the best search results?
TODD: Exactly. What happens – and this is one of the premises that we got into this space – is that people bond with blogs and individual publications for a reason. Theose blogs tend to be spicier, but the real reason they bond with those sites is bceause of the persona driving it. It’s about the author. You’re getting all the opinions and all the thought. And they really believe what they write.
One of the things that we do for these bloggers is expose all of their content. We provide a great search service on everything that they have written on the subject, but also we will include photos from their Flickr account and videos from their YouTube account and stuff they’ve tweeted about. So it glues the audience to the publication and forms that one-on-one metadata that you get when you really know somebody.
You are accessing numerous conversations with these small publications. They are kind of proxies for real relationships, because all ships float higher. SO when a message about whether a pain reliever works for my child is out there and those bloggers are super-engaged, it becomes way more interesting to the reader than an ad is.
VUE: Your goal is to deliver value to both sides. The bloggers get their analytics, and the agencies or companies get to have their message delivered to a wide but highly targeted and engaged audience – a perfect fit for their products.
TODD: Spot on. We can put an advertiser in contact with specific authors and then do something like either a campaign or product review. We are like a giant site rep firm from the agency side. Actually, our relationship is very large and far-reaching with all our publishers, because we contact them once a week with an email and they come back to our site to look at their statistics. It becomes an escalated sort of relationship with our publishers. We start with the free service: the bloggers learn something about their audience. And as they become more interested in monetization and getting contacted by marketers or even newspapers, we can also provide them with a monetizing service. We are kind of like a business partner on the publisher side. On the agency side, however, we are about finding those authentic conversations and getting the agency into it.
To view the PDF of the January/February VUE Magazine in full, click here.
We recently conducted a survey of Lijit users to learn more about the products, services, and resources we can provide to help our publishers engage their readers and monetize their site.
There was a bunch of interesting information we learned from the 180 surveys we received. Below is a snapshot of our findings.
Who uses Lijit? There was a surprisingly even breakdown between those who write for fun, those who write to make a little extra money on the side, and those who do it for a living:
How do you consume information? We wanted to see what tools our publishers use to learn about their craft. What did we find out? Publishers are hungry for almost any tool – both online and offline – as long as it helps them get better at what they do! Here’s a breakdown in order of priority:
How can Lijit help you become a better publisher? The number one thing our publishers asked for from Lijit was tips for promoting content. Over 70% want to learn more about SEO and social networking. The next most important thing? Staying up-to-date on Lijit news and learning how to better leverage our tools and services… now that’s music to our ears!
What are we doing to help? We’re working on a newsletter, videos, and other tools that provide Lijit news/tips and best practices for promoting your content, monetizing your site, and better engaging and understanding your readers. Stay tuned for more information…
What put a big smile on our faces? An astonishing 70% check their Lijit stats at least once a week! Lijit search stats provide helpful information on a site’s readers – who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re searching for. For those using our ad services, ad stats provide details on fill rates and CPMs so you can optimize revenue.
What was the biggest shocker? In a world consumed by social media, when it comes to getting company updates over 60% want to receive information through email. Email was the chosen method of communication over our blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed. It looks like email isn’t going the way of the dinosaur after all!
What other takeaways? We’re proud of our publisher partnerships and thankful to those who provided comments on Lijit. Our product team is reviewing your feedback and will be rolling a bunch of it into our 2011 roadmap.
If you didn’t take the survey and have some thoughts you’d like to share, please give us a shout. Thanks for your support!
Tags: industry, Lijit publishers, lijit stats | View Comments
Today we announced crossing 1B pageviews in a 30-day period. That’s an amazing milestone for us for sure. I have a graph on the wall of my office that Tara printed out after we released Lijit Search back in 2007.
As you can see we were quite excited when we passed 100K pageviews in a single day. I used to say that “pageviews are oxygen” for our business. Today we see about 40M pageviews in a single day and the numbers are accelerating. Although we are announcing 1B pageviews today we actually passed that milestone a few weeks back and the 30-day run rate number is now closer to 1.1B or 1.2B.
Our goal from the beginning was to develop a service that would help publishers make their site better by understanding their readers, creating better content through analytics, and finally, leveraging their unique audiences and data to better monetize their site.
Last year we released Lijit Ad Services for publishers. It started out similarly with a nascent number of ad calls but grew super fast because publishers who were already our partners were quick to adopt the service. Today Lijit serves about 613 ads every second onto one of the 15K sites in our network. Combined, about 90M people a month see a Lijit ad on one of our publisher sites.
I’m really looking forward to 2011. One thing that is always constant in the Lijit universe is that there is always more oxygen!
Tags: ads, Lijit publishers | View Comments
If you’re a blogger, author, contributor or editor of a website you need to read this and think about how it affects your content strategy and reader engagement.
Chances are you spend a lot of time looking for things. Sometimes that means you go to Google (or Bing if you swing that way). You shop, you look for directions, you search for people, you do market research, and you keep up to date with news and weather. Lots of that looking around starts with a simple search engine query. Like most people, you are doing one of three things when you search for something:
- Navigating to somewhere (example: type in a website by name)
- Transacting something (example: type in a brand or product name)
- Information seeking (example: How do I ______?)
As a reader, I search and I want to find the right answer to my question. Google and the major search engines are constantly improving to help me find the needle in the haystack. They use page-rank, my social network, my location, and other signals to help me get to what I want in an ever expanding sea of pages, content, and information.
But… what happens when you turn the paradigm to the publisher’s point of view? If you’re like most writers or authors you do a lot more than just write. You tweet, you post to Facebook, you take and share photos and videos, and you may even have several sites or belong to a network of sites. In fact, the average publisher in the Lijit Network uses six content sources (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in addition to their main site. Needless to say, publishers create way more content than what might show up on a single site.
As a publisher, author or site owner you want to present to your readers ALL your relevant content when they’re searching for something. You want to present it in a way that is engaging and that of course answers the query. This is important for many reasons to you, the publisher, not the least of which is that it helps you establish a deeper and more trusted relationship with your audience. A reader on your site expresses their intent to find something and now it’s your opportunity to give them what they want so answer their question, engage them! As a general rule of thumb, readers search a site .5% the number of pageviews on the site; more engaging and informational sites get searched as much as 10% of the total pageviews.
Guess what? If you engage your readers more by presenting them relevant information from all your available content then they stay with you longer and come back more often. They view more pages, spend more time on site, and refrain from simply bouncing away. If you can engage a reader by delivering the right search results, they view 3-5% more pages on average than if they didn’t have a positive search experience.
Guess what else? You get incredible information and insights about what your readers care about. For example, 30% of site visitors on average come from a major search engine like Google and each carries with them an important referring search query. Through statistics you gain vast amounts of reader data. What they want to find and what they successfully found. What they searched for and didn’t find. Our CEO Todd Vernon describes these concepts well in a recent post about search results. Pretty important stuff for publishers don’t you think?
At Lijit we built our technology and offerings to help authors and readers connect, engage, and understand each other. It’s the people that listen to their audience and respond to what they want that separates successful publishers from the rest.
Tags: Lijit publishers | View Comments
Even though you didn’t ask for anything, we went and got you a gift anyway. It comes in the form of a software update and we know you’re going to love it. We continue to build on the strengths of our ad platform by optimizing the advertising we deliver to your readers as well as creating new partnerships that help provide you with more ways to grow revenue. This, coupled with our great publisher products that help you engage and understand your readers, makes for a pretty good gift(in our opinion).
So what did we get you?
View Ad “Fill Rate” in your Lijit Ad Stats.
First off, “fill rate” sounds like a fairly technical term. In a nutshell, it’s the number of times an ad was shown to your readers vs. the number of times an ad was requested. In the ad serving world there are many cases where an ad tag can request an ad and there is no ad returned. Our goal at Lijit is to be as transparent as possible when it comes to how we are helping you monetize your site. That now includes telling you how often we are able to find an ad for your readers, and how often we can’t.
Why is this important? Many ad networks or ad services don’t provide visibility into this particular statistic. Some may even pad the numbers by filling your ad tags with public service ads or serving “blanks” so you aren’t able tell how often your readers are seeing real ads. Since Lijit gives you control over how your ads are displayed, you can use this statistic to better understand how well your ads are performing.
What if my fill rate is lower than I expected?
There are a couple of reasons why your fill rate could be low and just as many ways to manage it.
- You set a floor price. When this happens, Lijit only fills ads at the $ floor value you selected. If this is the case, you should be providing a passback or default tag to use when Lijit can’t fill an ad on your site. You are in control of how to allocate your ad impressions. You can either lower your floor to increase fill rate, or ensure your passback tags are set so you get the most out of the ad request on your site.
- Campaign alignment. It can take time to find the right campaigns for your site based on your size and the type of content. Rest assured we are monitoring these statistics daily to ensure you get the most out of your relationship with Lijit and will do our best to fill as many ad requests as possible.
If at any point you have a question about fill rate, or setting a CPM floor,or enabling a passback tag, don’t hesitate to contact our friendly support team.
We rebooted our signup flow!
If you’re already using Lijit, this won’t help you much. But we did make it easier and faster to signup and get access to our world class publisher tools, and apply to be part of the best ad platform for online publishers. If your friends have a site, and you love our publisher stats,search tools, and advertising products, send them this link and tell them to give it a try.
We had a great year, and we had a lot of fun building tools that enable you to not only learn how to be a better publisher, but to make some money at the same time. We wish everyone a happy new year, and we can’t wait to show you what we have up our sleeves for next year.
Happy Holidays!
Jeff has patience. All day Jeff is the trafficker responsible for answering (or ensuring they’re answered) your technical or support related inquiries as our Publisher Support Manager. Although Jeff isn’t “new” at Lijit, it’s better late than never to do a Get To Know series this month for rock-n-roll, futbol and football-loving Jeff.
What is your Lijit contribution?
I help provide support to our existing customer base as well as to our sales team to help get new accounts off and running with our search and advertising services.
What is your least favorite word and why?
It’s a phrase, “cool beans,” I hate it. “What does it mean?” (Please reference double rainbow).
What is your favorite sound and why?
Well, Jack White’s guitar is pretty good but I think my kids laughter takes the cake.
What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?
Something in the alternative energy sector. I just think creating energy from sources like the sun or wind is a very cool thing.
Something you’re guilty of…
I have seen Twilight.
Yesterday we released the latest revision of the iPad app, now with full support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now, no matter what iDevice you use you can stay up to date on what is happing on your site in real-time!
This project has been a lot of fun. We had a few different reasons for experimenting with this platform so I thought I would give a little insight into this thought process.
First, of course, was the publisher use case outlined in my first blog post. It’s difficult to be an individual publisher because by definition you are forced to be jack of all trades. Most high profile and influential publishers are great content producers. They write things people want to read. Lijit’s publisher app helps publishers keep on top of real-time traffic behavior. Now, they have the freedom to attend to other things in life while still keeping their finger on the pulse of their site.
Secondly, we wanted to explore an alternate stats metaphor with the app. All existing stats packages tend to be roll-ups of past activity, telling you what happened yesterday rather than right now. We wanted to play around with the idea of experiencing statistics as they happen. Some of these features we are planning to roll into the web dashboard. The mobile platform gave us the opportunity to experiment in a sandbox outside our production environment and with more UI freedom than we had with the web version.
Finally, we wanted to lay a foundation for an entirely new level of audience information we could provide our publishers. In the coming months we will be rolling out more global audience information that we have insight into because we power search and ads on so many different publisher sites. We are pretty excited to make this larger body of information available to our publishers in a consumable and actionable way. Your traffic stats will expand to include more specific information about your readers including detailed demographic information and content interests.
We like to do something outside the box from time-to-time and the mobile platform for our publishers was a fun and interesting project. We intend to keep developing on the platform so that it remains valuable to publishers already using our web version. Drop us a note to tell us what you think.
Tags: Lijit publishers, lijit stats, release announcements | View Comments
Beer Is Lijit – Beer Bloggers Conference 2010
Nov 12th
by Grace Boyle in Community, Company, events, speaking
This past weekend Perry and I headed to the inaugural Beer Bloggers Conference here in Boulder at The Marriott to present about Lijit during their Boulder Tech Session.
Three other local, online/tech companies presented alongside us – our friends, Pete Sheinbaum, Jason Cormier of Room 214 and Holly Hamann of The Blog Frog.
Perry and Grace at the helm, early Saturday morning
When you tell people you’re attending a Beer Blogging conference they might think “Oh yeah, bloggers and beer,” or “Wait, there is a group of people big enough to have a conference about beer blogging?” The latter is true. It’s a strong, niche community filled with passionate bloggers and writers.
The Beer Blogging Conference sold out and 108 beer bloggers from around the United States showed up in Boulder for the conference.
The Chief Beer Blogger for the conference (like: evangelist attendee) was Ashley Routson of Drink With the Wench. Great name, right? Ashley also uses Lijit and part of our presentation in learning more about your readers through our search and stats, was using her blog as a demo.
We didn’t attend the entire conference, but we loved what we saw during the Saturday morning sessions. We followed their #BBC10 Tweets and know they’re a fun group, who thoroughly enjoyed the local Boulder beers and breweries that we have to offer. The conference was a first of its kind and I think it was a great mixture of learning, connecting, enjoying (and of course, drinking).
Some of the enjoying included visiting Oskar Blues Brewery in Longmont, Boulder Beer Company and even ended the event with a Boulder Beer Crawl. To check out the pictures here is a great Flickr Group Set from the conference and if you’re interested in next year, they’re already planning 2011 (it will be in Portland, OR)!
Special thanks to Allan of Zephyr Adventures, the brains behind the conference (they also do wine and food blog conferences!) His team was great and they put together a great event!