Blog Tours – What Mattered and What Didn’t

First, I need to give another disclaimer about data set. It is too small to draw a lot of conclusions. However, it is large enough to help me develop some future tests for measuring the power of blogs.

That said, here are the two variables that seemed to matter the most in predicting whether a blog would send traffic or not.

WHAT MATTERED? 

1) Google PageRank was by far the single most valid predictor of traffic.

Like I said yesterday, there is a reason Google rules the world.

To put this in numbers, here’s a chart that shows the percent of all blog traffic referred to us, sorted by Google PageRank.

% Traffic Sorted By PageRank
PageRank 5: 53.7% (3 blogs)
PageRank 4: 16.3% (7 blogs)
PageRank 3: 6.8%   (4 blogs)
PageRank 2: 2.4%   (2 blogs)
PageRank 0: 2.0%   (4 blogs)

Clearly PageRank matters quite a bit, even accounting for the shifting numbers of blogs.

But some PageRank 5 blogs sent us significantly more traffic than others. More importantly, some individual PageRank 4 and 3 blogs out performed individual PageRank 5 blogs. That means PageRank is a good indication of traffic, but not a fully accurate predictor of which blogs will send traffic and which won’t.

Still, the correlation between Google PageRank and incoming traffic was a healthy 0.49.

Presumably, PageRank is a good predictor of the amount a traffic a site receives. The more traffic, the more potential for a blog to send us bits of traffic.

But some blogs still sent us far more traffic than we expected to receive based on their PageRank.

Clearly other variables are important too.

2) Technorati authority seemed to predict traffic fairly well.

This is slightly different than the Technorati Rank you may be used to seeing. In fact, Technorati seems to have unveiled their new Authority system in early May.

To put this in numbers, here’s a chart that shows the percent of all blog traffic referred to us, sorted by Technorati Authority:

% Traffic sorted by Technorati Authority
Top Quarter:         53.4% (426-687)
Upper Middle ¼:  15.9% (82-188)
Lower Middle ¼:  5.8%   (20-71)
Bottom Quarter:    6.1%   (0-18) 

Clearly, Technorati Authority will prevent the gaming that was going on with their faulty Ranking system that counted nothing but links. That’s good. I always like Technorati, even though their ranking system sucked. Now that they have some data that doesn’t suck, I like them even more.

The correlation between Technorati Authority and incoming traffic was a healthy 0.47.

Clearly any regression model for predicting traffic flow from blogs should include these two ranking systems. (Though both ranks would need to be cardinal data to be really valid, says my father-in-law the statistician. Whatever that means.)

WHAT DIDN’T MATTER? 

Surely, you’re interested in what didn’t matter, right? This is the interesting part.

1) Technorati rank didn’t matter.

It’s too easy to game the system and some of these bloggers have gamed it. They raised their Technorati Ranking with link exchanges that never built any real traffic or real relationships.

Also a telling sign. Any time I tried to include Technorati Ranking in a regression model, it messed everything up. This particular variable was just faulty.

2) The number of times people posted.

I hate to admit this, but it didn’t matter whether someone linked to us in one post or three. In fact, it may have even turned people off. Certainly, it was more work for the blogger.

So, to all of you who participated and posted loyally for three days. I’m sorry. Your efforts aren’t in vain because now I know they didn’t matter. Um, I mean, I won’t ask anyone to do this in the future.

3) The length of the post didn’t seem to matter.

I actually did some word counts on all of these posts. Talk about mind-numbing. Igor, do you have that fresh brain, yet?

I checked where the link occurred in the post and how long the post was. It didn’t matter. There may have been a slight tendency for posts to send more traffic if the link occurred earlier in the post. Also, providing two or three links, rather than just one might have helped. But there’s not enough data to tell.

For sure, the wonderful people who gave us 15 links to different articles with annotations about each one earned a smile from me, TheHighCalling.org content editor. But alas, their efforts did not send more noticeable traffic based on their efforts.

4) Whether a blogger included images or not was moot.

That’s a fun word, right? Moot.

And it describes the importance of a blogger providing images in their post. That doesn’t mean the images weren’t a good idea. They seemed to have excited the bloggers themselves. Many of them enjoyed the free image they could grab.

But posts with images didn’t send us more traffic than posts without.

The secret formula is coming soon. Don’t give up! And later today, I have a cool poem cued up.

Image Pongo pygmaeus provided by Malene Thyssen via wikicommons.