Google Analytics
Apr. 20th, 2009 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foxfirefey posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
dreamwidth_metaLiveJournal has never allowed any real web analytics to be added to personal journals, although sponsored communities were able to get them. Sure, you could add stat counters or web bugs from LJ Toys. But I'm unaware of any way on LiveJournal to get the referral URL of people who were linking to your post, save for the recently implemented and entirely optional pingbacks.
Dreamwidth, however, is going to give paid users Google Analytics as a feature. This means that paid users will be able to know who in DW is linking to them, leading to some interesting changes from the way things used to be. I think this has the potential to surprise and upset people.
For instance, let's say you link to someone's post in a friends only post in your journal or use <user name="user"> to link to their journal in a locked post. Some of your access given subscribers click on that link, and if the user you linked to is paid and using Google Analytics, they'll know you were talking about them in a post they don't have access to, and if you linked to a specific post, they'll know which post you're talking about. Stealth talking about people has become that much harder and unreliable.
There's a limited ability to avoid this. URLs are automatically turned into links; you can do formatting to make it unlinked, so people have to copy and paste, but some people have browser extensions that will autolink anything that looks close to a URL, so you can't always depend on that. You'll have to go above and beyond to obfuscate the link to make sure that doesn't happen and not use user tags to link to someone--but if you don't do that, someone is bound to make a Greasemonkey script that could go to a highlighted name, and they'll still get the referral. Edit:charmian and kaki point out that URL obfuscators might get used more, like TinyURL and anonym.to. I agree with this! However, there are even browse add ons that resolve those services to their actual URLs, so even that is not a failsafe.
What effects do you think this is going to have on social interactions on Dreamwidth? What other effects will Google Analytics have on users?
Dreamwidth, however, is going to give paid users Google Analytics as a feature. This means that paid users will be able to know who in DW is linking to them, leading to some interesting changes from the way things used to be. I think this has the potential to surprise and upset people.
For instance, let's say you link to someone's post in a friends only post in your journal or use <user name="user"> to link to their journal in a locked post. Some of your access given subscribers click on that link, and if the user you linked to is paid and using Google Analytics, they'll know you were talking about them in a post they don't have access to, and if you linked to a specific post, they'll know which post you're talking about. Stealth talking about people has become that much harder and unreliable.
There's a limited ability to avoid this. URLs are automatically turned into links; you can do formatting to make it unlinked, so people have to copy and paste, but some people have browser extensions that will autolink anything that looks close to a URL, so you can't always depend on that. You'll have to go above and beyond to obfuscate the link to make sure that doesn't happen and not use user tags to link to someone--but if you don't do that, someone is bound to make a Greasemonkey script that could go to a highlighted name, and they'll still get the referral. Edit:
charmian and kaki point out that URL obfuscators might get used more, like TinyURL and anonym.to. I agree with this! However, there are even browse add ons that resolve those services to their actual URLs, so even that is not a failsafe.What effects do you think this is going to have on social interactions on Dreamwidth? What other effects will Google Analytics have on users?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 12:46 am (UTC)I think the answer is yes, people will post stuff to get traffic they can feel good about.
I don't think they'll spread articles across multiple entries to increase their page views. The main reason places do that seem to be to increase ad views, and there aren't ads on DW posts. They might do it for another reason I can think of, though, and that's to see how many people are actually reading to the end of a long epic, instead of just loading the page and leaving quickly.
I don't think anybody's going to obsess much over bounce rate, which I wager is always going to be pretty high. Bounce rate doesn't mean as much is this instance, as it's a metric designed mostly to determine whether people who clicked your ad later went on to "convert", ie perform some particular goal, like fill out a survey or purchase a product. If you have a high bounce rate, your landing page isn't compelling and you should improve it to increase your ROI, yadda yadda. On DW, return on investment is mostly in the attention itself, not whether somebody leaves your journal right after they read an entry.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 04:37 am (UTC)I don't know if DW will support it (I suspect not) but from the GA perspective I could set up specific "campaigns" to follow things like this.