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One of our goals here at Lijit is to offer our users more value-filled features with each release. We pushed a new release on Tuesday night and with it, have made our stats even more robust. There is so much analytical information that we had to change the entire layout of our stats display and we now offer tabs. That’s right…tabs and tabs of detailed information…
These tabs open the door to a whole world of interesting information about your blog. If you click on the Readers tab, you’ll see your page views and the list of search terms that brought people to your blog. The fancy new stuff on this page is a map that shows you where in the world your page views are coming from and in a partnership with AideRSS, the most popular posts.
Look at that….even more information to help you better understand the people that are reading what you are producing. Todd Vernon, Lijit’s CEO and owner of the stats pictured, wrote a great post recently about the importance of Lijit stats and the picture they paint of your blog’s audience. Take some time to check out what we’ve done and let us know what you think.
In other release news, there are two other little additions that you should know about. We’ve added a cool link on our home page that takes you to the magic that is our Live Search Map. Now it’s even easier to enjoy the fun…
And the last thing that we changed is a feature request that we had been hearing from users for a while. You now have the ability to pick the default search tab that your searchers will be sent to. Let me explain. In the past, if someone did a search from your blog, they landed on your blog’s search tab for the results. But if they were doing a search from the your Lijit profile page, then they landed on your network’s result page. This sometimes caused confusion. As of Tuesday night, you can choose where your readers will end up first. Click on “my search wijit” and scroll to where you see the drop-down menus to change your default search tab and where to display your search results. (The default will always be set to your blog.)
We hope that you enjoy the new updates and wish everyone a happy, healthy end of the year! Just wait to see what we have up our sleeves for 2008….
In our quest to continually enhance the stats that we provide to Lijit users, we’ve recently introduced a way to see where your searchers are coming from. Literally.
On your stats page, you’ll see a few new things. This map graphic shows you the location of the person doing the searching and what topic they were searching about. So if you wanted to know how much of your audience is made up of Romanians curious about your topic of expertise, you now have the tools to find that information out. Along with the map, we’ve also added some colorful flags to the 25 most recent searches list…
So where in the world is Lijit? That depends on you and your blog’s audience. But thanks to our recent release, you now have the power to see your readers and get to know them even better.
Sometimes we release new features that are big, glitzy, flashy, and scream, “Hello! I am a new feature! LOOK AT ME!” Other times, the features we release are more subtle. Things you have to look for. Things that quietly beckon you to try them. “Come here, gentle user,” they say. “Click me.” I love those kinds of features and we released a couple last night.
If you haven’t visited your stats page of late, drop everything you’re doing, and go check it out right now. Seriously. I’m not kidding. We’re embarking on a stats page overhaul and the first of many updates came out last night. Most noticeably, we combined the two “Source of clicked results…” pie charts into one (new name: “Type of Results Readers Clicked”). In the space left over we added a new pie chart, “Where Readers Came From”. This new chart shows you a breakdown of how readers reached you — via Google, other search engines, a direct visit, etc.
We further added a new stats detail page, which you can reach by clicking on any of the terms in the “Last 25 Searches” (new!) or “Top 25 Searches” lists. The detail page shows you exactly when, over the last 30 days, you were searched using these terms, as well as the number of times you’ve been searched about them. Again, these changes are just the first in a long line of enhancements we have planned for the stats we provide you. We hope you enjoy them and hope they help you better understand and serve your readers.
The other subtle feature we released last night involves little green bubbles. (And no, thank you for asking, we weren’t drinking too many Lijit cocktails when we came up with this feature.) You’ll see them too. On the home page. On your profile page. Give ‘em a click and let them guide you through the Lijit-o-sphere…
Color customization of the wijit was the number one thing that users kept requesting. We pushed an exciting release on Wednesday night and now, that question becomes easier to answer. Feeling a little blue?
Or maybe you are one of those people that cannot think without pink?
What if you don’t view the world in black and white, but in shades of grey?
Whatever your style, you can now pick a wijit to match. Not to mention, the newfound ability to match your wijit to the color theme of your blog. And, if you are one of those people who wants even more control, we’ve added something special in the drop-down menu of the wijit style options. You can now choose to “style your own wijit”. By choosing this option, you can use CSS on your blog to make the wijit of your dreams.
To access all the color goodness, simply log into your Lijit account and click on “my search wijit” along the top. You will see the wijit configuration page with lots of new options. Besides changing colors, you can also change the size of your “popular searches” cloud by choosing how many terms you want displayed.
There was one other big addition to our latest release. I’m only going to touch on it lightly because I know that Stan has a BIG post about it in the works. If you look at the shots of the wijits above, you might notice a little something different about them. Do you see the Explore button located under the wijit? Feel like exploring the world within a blog and seeing a visual representation of that blog’s relationships with others? Well then, what are you waiting for? Click the Explore button on any blog’s Lijit wijit and watch in amazement….
We just launched a stats page on Lijit. Very cool. Now you can see how people are searching you, which of your content sources are being clicked on, who in your network is providing good results, and lots of other goodies.
For example, here’s my page
Looking closer, the first stat gives a view of how often I’m being searched
Next is a graph showing what and who (my content and my network) is being clicked on from my search engine: Posts from my blog, posts from someone else’s blog, pages from my delicious bookmarks, etc…
You see that posts from my blog (“blogs | wanderingstan”) are clicked the most, then some stories from the TalkOrigins archive, some posts from Read/Write web, some stories I’ve dugg, and so on.
Next is a graph showing the distribution just within my content
Again we see that my Blog is the most popular, with my delicious, digg, and StumbleUpon (that’s the “wanderingstan’s” one at the end!) accounts also serving up some clicked-on results.
We also give a listing of the most popular clicked-on results, and a more detailed account of top search terms used.
I’ve made my stats page public, so you can see it here.
Another cool one to watch is the stats for the Ask the VC blog, you can see the stats here. For example, check out the range of blogs that are serving up results:
Check it out on your own search engine page. The results might surprise you!
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