It seems like forever ago that Eric and I talked about engagement and how I expressed some frustration over Scoble’s post about the need for Engagement metrics. Haven’t we web analysts been talking about this like FOREVER (well maybe 18 months or so anyway).

At the time, Eric told me he was measuring engagement on his site and that he planned a blog post on the subject. So I held off because Eric had some real-world experience, and better tools for testing it out. So here we are, more than a month afterwards and that very busy man finally had a chance to get out his thoughts on his experimenting - yeah! Something to look at and noodle over.

Anyway, it’s time to get to work, so more thought on this will have to wait until later. In the meantime, go read Eric’s post and see what you think.

Ok, so it’s more like what I’ve been keeping my eye on and this is a desperate attempt to make sure that I actually write something this week, but still here are the things that have held my interest.

• Manoj Jasra over at Web Analytics World had four guest posters this week, Avinash Kaushik, Jennifer Laycock, Gord Hotchkiss and Rand Fishkin. They all cover different topics and each one is worth the read.
• Robbin Steif has an excellent post on what web analysts do all day at her Lunametrics blog, so if your bosses, peers, family, or friends have a difficult time understanding what you do - point them to Robbin.
• Both Stephen Few and the guys over at Juice Analytics pointed out this new tool for creating sparklines and bullet charts (among other things) in Excel, so I’ve been playing with it. By the way, it’s called Microcharts by BonaVista Systems
• Of course, the Hewlett Packard BoD fiasco has been absolutely fascinating (and horrifying) - Scoble is keeping tabs on it: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4
• Mom’s back to blogging, this time from Egypt where they’re on a 2 year teaching stint - check out the new masthead for the blog which is the view from her classroom!

Today, I spent some time looking at the blogrolls of folks who have publicly subscribed to my blog via bloglines.

This is a great way to find blogs with related topics. Here are a few cool visualization blogs I found this way:

• Stat. Graphics & Data Vis.
• Data Mining
• Junk Charts

OH! So just to be blindingly obvious about how to do this (remember ‘Sharing the Wealth’ has a serious Duh! factor)

Check the right side of the header for any (yes any) blog that you have displayed in the right pane of bloglines…

…see where it says ‘## subscribers’? That’s a link that when you click on it shows you a list of all the public bloglines subscribers to that blog and from there you can go see their public blogrolls. It’s scent following at its best.

Whenever I discover something totally obvious that I’m embarassed I didn’t see it before - I think I’ll share it with you under this heading (Sharing the Wealth) so that you don’t ever have to feel my shame.

If you use blogger, make your life a little easier…

In Settings > Formatting, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the form and before clicking on ‘Save Settings’ take a look at the field called “Post Template” immediately above the button. I had completely ignored this field because I thought it was an alternate way to put in a blog template (DOH!) actually, it lets you ‘template’ the actually posts. In other words, if your tired of always changing the font or you have elements that you always include in a post and are tired of copying them out of existing posts to put in the new one - this is for you (see how deep my shame goes?).

Remember: Settings>>Formatting>>Post Template

I’m using it for two simple things - changing the font and including my Raw Sugar/Technorati tags so that I don’t forget to put them in.

Pushing on, let’s take a look at where the page views in Part 1 came from.

FYI, this data comes from Google Analytics which I’ve had up and running since April 20 so it’s missing roughly six weeks of data but I didn’t feel like buying the premium service from StatCounter.

It boils down to this: “Eric T. Peterson is GREAT for business!” Since historical referral data has been available, Eric is responsible for 28.9% of all referrals.

Notice too, that even though Avinash has only been blogging for about a month at this point, he is already in what I’d call the mid-tier of Referrers.

Organic searches from Google also do quite well at 8.2% but we’ll explore the Google segment at a later time.

Interestingly, two of the folks that I identified as my key ‘Sneezers’ in the last post show up in the small tier - maybe I just like Jeremiah and Robbin so much that I wanted them to be my key sources.

Finally, we can see that directly referred visits are the number one category (just barely beating Eric) at 29.8%.

Oh! And I was surprised at the volume of incidental traffic received from Blogger; which since I am blocking self-generated traffic, must be coming from the ‘Next Blog’ link in the Blogger chrome. I guess I’ll need to segment that blogger traffic and see if there is any value in it.

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So, how do my chosen sneezers do on a trended basis? Let’s take a look.
A couple of things to note about this chart:
1. Web Analytics Demystified and Directly referred visits are on the left (primary) axis and everything else is on the right (secondary) axis2. As discussed here, I’ve been playing with Excel 2007 and these charts were created in it. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 is still a bit buggy and it kept dropping the x-axis data points so the date range is April 20 - June 14.Okay, with the caveats out of the way, what’s going on here?I’ve got nice smooth growth both from Eric and Direct but my other picks have this odd stair-stepping quality to them.My hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, there is a great commonality between Eric’s audience and those who find this blog useful so I get a relatively steady stream of referrals from his site.The stepwise growth from my other ‘Sneezers’ most probably is a function of when they post something that directly refers to Instant Cognition.The latter is pretty simple to prove - I just need to go look at when folks like Avinash referred here in a post and see how it correalates to the steps in the chart.

For the former, I’m not sure how I’d go about testing it - any thoughts?

One thing that I find particularly gratifying about the chart is the nice smooth growth in direct referrals — I’ll have to do a segmentation study to be sure, but — this seems to indicate growth in brand loyalty (boy I hope that’s true) as my visitors are just hitting a bookmark or typing in ‘instantcognition.blogspot.com’ into the address bar.