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We just rolled out our last major software release for 2011 and we’re capping the year off with even more updates to our publisher analytics and our ad platform. This year has been incredible for Lijit, and seen us grow our advertising platform and publisher analytics products to create what we believe to be the best publisher platform out there.
Ad Metrics Updates
We made some great refinements to the way we present ad metrics in our publisher dashboards. We pulled together the most important ad metrics we offer publishers and integrated them into the dashboard. It now features not only the normal graphs and stats you expect, but we’ve included charts that show CPM , fill rate, and click performance. This brings all of the metrics you care about into one area and enables you to , at a glance, understand your ad performance.
Universal Stats Support
We finished rolling out our universal stats package to all of our publisher stats. This means that anyone who uses a Lijit product can now get access to all of the analytics we provide. Publishers who only use our ad services have access to new page view reporting in their Audience dashboard, and will continue to see more stats as we make them available.
Advertiser Insights
In case you missed it, we also recently rolled out our new Advertiser Insights analytics. These cool analytics highlight which brands are engaging with your audience, and help publishers by supporting their direct sales efforts and support development of content to attract brand advertisers. Every Lijit publisher receives this data, so login now and check out which brands are most aligned to your site’s audience.
Looking at 2012
More, more, more. We’re excited about continuing to bring publisher’s the information and analytics they need, and helping them build a business around their publication. We’ll continue to improve our publisher analytics tools, and plan to add even more ways to look at your site and your audience to empower you to be a better publisher.
Our advertising platform will continue to grow to support Lijit’s incredible growth, and you can look forward to world class advertising products appearing throughout 2012. Overall, we’re incredibly excited about what we accomplished in 2011, and can’t wait to show you what we have in store for 2012.
Introducing Lijit’s Advertiser Insights for online publishers.
Dec 5th
by Sonya Caprio in Company, Lijit publishers, features, release announcements
It is a core company philosophy at Lijit that from an analytics perspective we feed as much data as possible back to our publishers, and that we make the data so easily digestible that you can take immediate action on it. It’s what we like to refer to as “actionable analytics.”
Today Lijit released a new tool as part of our audience analytics platform called Advertiser Insights. Advertiser Insights provides publishers with a list of the top brands that align to your site’s readers. Publishers can use this data to support direct sales efforts as well as to develop editorial content that better attracts top brand advertisers. Any publisher using any of Lijit’s services (ad services, analytics, and/or reader engagement tools) now receives Advertiser Insights in their publisher dashboard – just log in today and check it out!
Simple to digest? Couldn’t be easier.
What’s cool about our new Advertiser Insights data is that it highlights the brands that align to your site’s readers, not just your site itself. It aggregates all of the data we have as readers traverse the entire Lijit network, and provides the information back to publishers to apply directly to your site.
With over 150,000 sites and 300 million global uniques, the Lijit Network continues to grow exponentially. We’ve seen a 700% growth in ad calls in 2011 alone, and currently deliver over 11 billion ad impressions each month. Now that’s a lot of reader data we’re trying to reflect back to publishers!
As we look for new ways to help publishers build their business using valuable analytics, we will continue to leverage the power of the Lijit Network to help publishers grow their site and make more money through targeted advertising. To read more about the value of a network, check out a previous blog post from Lijit’s COO Walter Knapp, “For a Publisher, the Network Matters.”
Tags: Lijit publishers, new features, publishers, release announcements | View Comments
Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard about the recent acquisition of Lijit by Federated Media Publishing. What you may not have known, is that we were still cranking out new software updates and features throughout the acquisition process. We were able to introduce a lot of new functionality that helps our publishers better understand their audience, and manage their business.
New Notifications System
We believe that communication is key to ensuring our publishers can easily stay on top of what is happening on their publication and everything Lijit is doing to make you succesful. We’ve just made it easier with the new notifications system we’re rolling out today. Any publisher using our ad services will get alerts whenever there are significant changes to how Lijit is optimizing ad campaigns for them. If we add new campaigns, or update targeting or frequency capping rules, you’ll know about it. If you really want to stay on top of everything we’re doing , you can even subscribe to get email alerts whenever new optimization alerts appear. Check out your Lijit dashboard to see it in action.
More Audience Stats
Many audience stats were previously limited to Lijit publishers using our Analytics and Search tools. We’ve been slowly adding audience data to our dashboard for Lijit Ads publishers, and now we offer even more. Publishers using our ad services will see a new tab in their Lijit dashboard called “Audience”. We’re now providing data on what sites are driving traffic to your website. As we compile more data , we’ll continue to add more metrics to this dashboard to empower publishers with data they can use to better understand and engage their audiences.
Bigger and Better
Our advertising services and reader engagement tool usage is growing at an incredible pace. While we’re rolling out cool new features and functionality, we’ve also been scaling our platform to handle our meteoric growth. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve added new Lijit infrastructure in 4 cities in the U.S, and 1 in Western Europe. We’ll continue to add more as we grow to ensure every interaction your readers have with Lijit is fast and reliable.
More to Come
We’re rolling out more exciting features in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for your weekly stats email from Lijit for a sneak preview of what we are planning…
We just completed another round of updates and improvements to our publisher products. We’re putting a lot of energy behind building out our ad services and publisher analytics and we’re expanding our offerings with every software release. So what’s new?
Reader Demographics:
The most important part of being an online publisher, is understanding your audience. On top of all of the other great audience analytics we provide to help you understand your readers, we now offer reader demographic data right inside your Lijit dashboard. This new statistic allows you to see the overall makeup of your online audience, and further understand who you are creating content for, and the demographic distribution of people frequenting your site.
Why are demographics important?
- Understanding your readers
The best way to effectively create relevant content for your readers, and to attract new readers, is to know who they are. Understanding the makeup of your audience is key to ensuring you are producing content that will engage and resonate withyour audience.
- Monetizing your site
Advertisers looking to reach the right audience for their online display advertising campaigns always consider demographics when making targeting decisions. You will be better equipped to attract and sell advertising for your site if you understand the demographic makeup of your audience
Check out your dashboard to see the demographic makeup of your site and start down the path of better understanding your readers. Just goto www.lijit.com, login and check it out at the bottom of your Lijit dashboard.
Other News:
- Removed MyBlogLog support
We removed support for MyBlogLog and disabled it’s use as a content and network source for publishers who use our search engine services. MyBlogLog had a great run and was a key integration partner in the early days of Lijit. Yahoo is shutting down all MyBlogLog services at the end of May, so we decided to deactivate it on our side before that happened.
- Welcome Widget support
We made the difficult decision to “end-of-life” our Welcome Widget product. Publishers who previously used this feature will no longer see a UI to manage settings for the Welcome Widget, and we automatically disabled the functionality it provided. We’re always looking for ways to enable our publishers to better engage their readers, so keep an eye out for more site tools and functionality in the future.
Tags: features, Lijit Advertising Services, lijit stats, new features, publishers | 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 .
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!
We just released another software update and wanted to give everyone a heads up on what we’ve been working on. We continually strive to bring value to our publishers and advertising partners , and this release is no exception.
Share your Stats:
We are now making it really easy to add one of our engaging “Recent Readers” stats widgets to your site. Show your readers who else is visiting your site, where they are from, and how they found your site. It’s a fun way to show your readers more about your site and the community you are building around it . You can use the “Recent Readers List”, or the “Recent Readers Map, or both. Just login and visit your ”Wijits” menu and select the “Stats Wijits” tab to get the easy to install code.
Ad Tag Hints:
Having trouble deciding how to configure your Lijit ad tags? You can always contact us at support@lijit.com, but we also want to help you help yourself. Whenever you are creating or editing ad tags and setting a floor price , we now offer you helpful hints about the *average performance of that floor to help you make a more informed decision. Also, keep an eye out for our helpful hint image 
and just hover over it to get easy to understand descriptions of the terms and functionality on the Lijit website.
* These are examples only and your experience may vary based on how well your site aligns to existing ad campaigns.
Goodbye old friends:
We decided to remove some old features from our search widget that weren’t being used and tended to clutter the user experience for publishers configuring their widgets and for readers trying to interact with Lijit on your site. We removed the “Explore” and the “Surprise Me” features from the search widget. This will give us more room and flexibility to bring new enhancements and features to our search tools in the future. If you have any feedback about this change , don’t hesitate to drop us a line at feedback@lijit.com.
Everything Else:
This time around there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. We spent a lot of time and energy(as we always do) further enhancing our advertising offerings to help us better optimize our ad campaigns and ultimately bring more value to our publishers.
As always, we build this product for you, and your feedback is invaluable when it comes to what we build next or what we should change. Leave a comment here or send us an email to share your feedback.
Launch of the Lijit Stats iPad Application
Oct 13th
by Todd Vernon in Community, Company, Lijit publishers, release announcements
This week we are launching version 1 of Lijit Stats iPad application for publishers. In the coming weeks the iPhone and iPod versions will launch (the code isn’t quite done yet) with similar functionality.
I got the idea for this several months back when we were talking with some of the early adopters of the Lijit Ad Platform. A good number of publishers using Lijit to monetize their site are one man shows. They spend most of their time writing or curating great content for their site. It’s their full time job and they are keenly aware that when they stop, so does their livelihood. One publisher I spoke with mentioned that he was often concerned when he left his house for extended periods of time that he was losing situational awareness of what was happening with his traffic. For instance, one time one of his posts was featured on the front page of Yahoo. While this should have been a great event for him, it was bad because he didn’t know it and his site ended up crashing without his knowledge.
Another individual told me that it was a matter of knowing what was trending so he could take advantage of it. For instance, when he starts getting a large number of referring pageviews for an older post, that usually means that subject is hot in the news again. He would like the opportunity to re-address the subject to capture those readers.
All these comments resonated with me. We had a full development queue so I decided to pull the CEO/founder card and light this project up as a skunkworks project. As these things go, it grew to a roar of development in the last week trying to get it done for BlogWorld this weekend in Las Vegas. Thanks to our committed development team and the promise of the 12 pack of Bud for its safe delivery we got our final build done this last Friday and submitted it to the App Store Sunday. Our previous build was from a week earlier so we are in a dead heat to see if the latest gets released by Apple before this Friday!
As Chief Beta tester I used the app all weekend to track the traffic on my blog. My blog is pretty small but receives a fairly constant stream of pageviews around the clock. This summer I saw several stops on the RUSH Time Machine Tour which I have documented on my blog. All summer I have watched my Lijit stats tell me that my main referral is from Google for “rush time machine tour”. As the weeks passed by I watched my traffic shift from city to city as the tour progressed through the US.
This weekend as I watched my real-time stats on the iPad I started to see an increasing number of pageviews coming from locations in San Paulo and Rio De Janeiro Brazil, the tour’s final stops. This weekend is the last show of the tour in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now I have started to see page views from there as well.
Another cool feature of the Lijit Stats iPad Application is the integration of automatic IceRocket queries for my blog URL. One of the reasons I receive so many hits for RUSH is due to my mention in another more heavily trafficked site, RushIsABand, that linked to me after the opening night in Albuquerque, NM. The ticker along the bottom of the app shows the last chronological mentions of my site.
While my use case for the Lijit Stats iPad Application is certainly less mission critical than our devoted publisher base, it’s awfully fun to watch readers hit my site in real-time. I am super excited by the way this turned out and I think it makes a great platform to build on as we add more situational awareness to the world of publishing.
Give it a try with your Lijit account, it’s free in the App Store and super cool. If you are at BlogWorld this weekend, stop by the booth (#324) and register to win an iPad – we are giving one away each day. Get a demo and if we are lucky we will have the beta iPhone and iPod versions to see there as well.
Tags: Lijit publishers, lijit stats, publishers, release announcements | View Comments
The 3 R’s : Recurring Payments, Real Time Status, and Referrers
Jul 16th
by Daniel Weiss in Company, Lijit publishers, features, release announcements
We just finished rolling out yet another software release packed with new features . This release has new functionality and improvements to just about every aspect of the Lijit product. There are advertising account updates, search result updates, new stats, and much more.
Automated Recurring Payments
Let’s start with Automated Recurring Payments. If you haven’t checked out Lijit Ad services yet, you should. This new feature makes it even easier for you to get the money you earn by placing Lijit display ads on your site. Instead of requesting a payment each month for your outstanding revenue, you can now provide us with your payment details and we’ll automatically pay you at the end of the following month. If you happen to forget to update your payment information, we’ll send you a friendly reminder.
Continue Reading »
If you can’t get enough of your Lijit stats (and from the feedback I’ve been receiving, that’s just about everybody!), we now offer you a way to bring that stat geekiness to the sidebar of your blog. Whether it be for reasons of pride or curiosity, we make it possible for you to share what’s happening on your blog in a more public way. With the release we pushed last night, there are two new and shiny wijits available for you to use on your blog.
Like our map showing where your readers are coming from?
You can now install that map on your blog. See the pretty purple arrow pointing to the link that makes it happen.
Perhaps you fancy the list of recent page views, complete with country flags?
If that’s the case, it’s now available for display on your blog.
Once again, follow the pretty purple arrow.
How do you go about making this magic happen for yourself? Like everything else we do, we tried to make it super-easy to install these cool facts on your own blog.
- Log into your Lijit account and click on “My Stats” along the top.
- Click on the “Readers” tab of your stats display.
- Choose to show off either (or both!) of the graphics in your sidebar by clicking on the “Install this on my blog” link.
- There is an easy install for Blogger and Typepad publishers. Everyone else just needs to copy and paste code into your sidebar.
To see what it looks like on the sidebar of a blog, check it out on the left side of I Quit for Lijit or The Wizard of Osborne. You need to scroll a bit, but then you too can bask in the glory of our recent visitors and the wonderful countries from which they hail.
We are trying to offer more (valuable) bling for your blog, so if you have other suggestions for things you’d like to see from Lijit, make sure to send those ideas our way. Have fun showing off!