Posts Tagged ‘release announcements’
Introducing Lijit’s Advertiser Insights for online publishers.
Dec 5th
by sonya 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
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
Launch of the Lijit Stats iPad Application
Oct 13th
by toddvernon 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
We just finished releasing one of our most ambitious software and product updates since Lijit started serving search results for bloggers back in 2006. In a relatively short amount of time we were able to create exciting new features and functionality , and completely refresh the look and feel of our website. From the features and functionality perspective we have a ton of great stuff to show off.
The New Lijit Search
Our search product has always led the industry when it comes to exposing your content to your readers and helping to show them all of the things you create online (photos, videos, status updates, and more) . In our latest update we’ve made it even easier to share who you are with your audience. We are slowly rolling these great new features out to our publisher base right now. If you aren’t seeing it yet, don’t worry, we’ll be making these features available to everyone soon.
- Social Media Content Integrations
- Twitter
- Show recent “tweets” as well as including your real-time status updates.
- Facebook
- Share your Facebook status updates and photos in your results
- Photos
- View your flickr photos and see full size image previews inside your search results
- Videos
- Share your YouTube videos and watch them inside your search results.
- Twitter
- Dig In
- One of the greatest things about these new integrations is the ability to search for more within the different types of content. If you want to see all of the flickr results for a particular search term, you can click “More Photo Results” to see all of the photos associated to a search term. This applies to all of the new content integrations we rolled out.
- Lijit “Picks”
- This new search tab will now be available to all of our users. The “Picks” tab gives your readers a summary of the top search results for every part of your Lijit Search engine. It shows results from your site, your online content, as well as your extended network, all on one page!
- New Look and Feel
- We rewrote the search results pages from the ground up. This means better looking and faster loading results.
- Try it out
- Watch your “Wijits” page over the coming weeks. If you see an option for “New Lijit Search”, click the button, give it a try, and tell us what you think.
The New Lijit Website
As you may have already noticed, we completely updated the look and feel of the Lijit website. It can often be hard to tell your story and present it in an engaging way, but we think we nailed it with our recent updates.
Check out our new publisher pages to learn more about what Lijit can do to help you better understand and engage your readers and how we can help you make money in the process.
Are you a marketer or advertiser? Check out our advertising section to learn about how Lijit can help you get your message to the right audience, in the right context , and at the right time.
New in this release
Viglink Stats Integration-
Viglink not only provides great stats about what people are clicking on and how they are leaving your site, but they also provide you the ability to monetize affiliate links on your site. Want to try it out? Just visit the “Readers” tab in your stats dashboard and enable it in the “Top Outbound Clicks” module. Want to make money from your affiliate links? Click the “Start Earning a Commision” button to signup with Viglink and start monetizing affiliate links on your site. It’s quick and makes it easy to amnage all of your affiliate relationships in one place.
Did you Mean?
We added a spellchecking feature to search results to help in those situations where you get a misspelled search term. Typos in your search box can now turn into opportunities to give your readers what they were really looking for.
There was a lot of other stuff we did also did behind the scenes to make our products better, faster, and more scalable. This software update was a huge one for us, and hopefully will be for you too. As always, we thrive on feedback from our publishers. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, or what you want to see next.
Tags: new features, new products, release announcements | View Comments
Beginning in August, Lijit will provide auto payment processing for all publishers earning advertising revenue. This change should streamline the payment process because publishers no longer need to request payment every month. To take advantage of auto payment, please set your payment details between July 19 and July 31 using the following instructions:
- Login to your account and select the “Account” section
- Select the “Earnings” tab, and click the “Edit Payment and Registration Info” button
- Fill in your Paypal payment details and tax information and select “Save Changes”
Additional auto payment transition details:
- Request payment deadline for June revenue is July 19th. If you don’t request payment by the July deadline, your next payment will be processed as part of August’s auto payment.
- To be paid for July revenue, all publishers must set auto payment details by July 31.
- We have amended our publisher agreement to include auto payment updates.
Please visit us here for more information on Lijit’s publisher advertising services.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at feedback@lijit.com.
Tags: Lijit publishers, release announcements | View Comments
Note: the following email was distributed to all Lijit publishers on June 23. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at: feedback@lijit.com.
We would like to inform you of an upcoming service upgrade that we have scheduled for Friday, June 25th starting at 11:00 p.m. MST. Here are the key points we want you to know in advance of Friday’s service upgrade:
No action is required on your part.
- Your Lijit search box will be temporarily unavailable to your readers while we conduct this service.
- Your ad passback tags will work as configured.
- The overall performance (i.e., page load times, etc.) of your site will not be effected during this service.
Lijit service windows are rare and this is the first time in three years that we have had to make back-end infrastructure improvements to better support our growing publisher base. We have chosen this day and time because it reflects low impact and low traffic times for our publishers.
Advertising Services: We will not have the ability to serve any Lijit ads during the upgrade. As stated above, passback tags will still be available for publishers using them as part of their Lijit configuration. Please see our advertiser FAQ for additional information on passback tags: http://www.lijit.com/help/pub-ad-faq#_Toc_passback.
For more information on our advertising services, please see http://www.lijit.com/publishers/commercial-publishers.
We appreciate your understanding and apologize in advance for any inconvenience this service interruption may cause.
Tags: Lijit publishers, release announcements, service alerts | View Comments
This is our first software release of the summer and we definitely consider it a “blockbuster”. We work hard every month to bring you valuable tools to make you a better publisher and to help you monetize your content. We think this software release does both!
More Ad Stats-
We greatly expanded the range of ad stats available to you in your stats dashboard. Prior to this release we limited the ad stats data you could report on to the previous month, and current month. You can now run reports for any date range you wish, as well as have quick access to your current day stats, yesterday, week to date, and month to date. This should give you even more visibility into how Lijit is helping you monetize your site, and allow you to see the “big picture” when it comes to ad performance on your site.
Tags: features, release announcements | View Comments
We had one of the longest release cycles in the history of our company come to a close last week. Named after an office favorite, the Q*bert release is live and with it, a few new things that you might be interested in…
Our Team page has been redesigned and updated to reflect the growing nature of our company. In addition to adding some new folks to the mix, we’re highlighting the executive team and VPs while displaying all the other peeps underneath. Take a minute to check it out if you’re at all curious about who makes this cool stuff possible.
Tags: release announcements | View Comments
Our first release of 2010 is an exciting one. And we’re not just saying that because we worked extra hard on it. However, there’s nothing like a new look and new features to really kick off a new year. Check it out.
Web:
Our homepage is getting a little bit of a facelift. We want to be sure that when people come to our site, they know what we do. Crazy, I know. With this release, we’ll be doing a more effective job of explaining our value to both blog publishers and advertisers. In fact, with a simple click, you can find out why using Lijit can help both you and your blog readers.
This release also brings an enhancement to how you can build out your network within Lijit. When creating your network, you can now add the blogs of your Twitter friends and make those searchable. To see this feature in action, simply log into your Lijit account and click on ‘Network’ at the top. You’ll see a shiny, new Twitter tab. For now, this feature is an all-or-nothing add, which means that you can either add all the sites of your friends on Twitter or none.
Ads:
There is a new zone size available to the publishers using our Ad Services. This new zone size is an IAB standard 728×90 leaderboard. If you’re interested in running this size ad on your blog, simply log into your Lijit account and click on the ‘Ad Wijit’ tab to change existing zones.
Search Results:
In case thumbnail images weren’t enough bling in your search results, we’re now doing more with video thumbnails. We previously supported YouTube and Vimeo thumbnails on your Content tab, but as of today, Viddler has been added into the mix as well. And as before, you can play those videos from within your search results.
This means that if you do a search for ‘cage’ on our CEO’s blog, you’ll now see a Viddler video listed in the search results.
AND? Even cooler is that we are slowly rolling out the ability to see video thumbnails from your blog posts. If you embed videos from Youtube, Viddler, or Vimeo in your blog posts, we’ll show thumbnails for those videos in your blog search results.
Told you this was an awesome release. If you have any questions or feedback about the new stuff, feel free to leave a comment. We love hearing from our users!