Hits, Clicks, Visits, Unique Visits, Pageviews, or What? Understanding the Jargon of Online Advertising

Working in the online ad business and dealing with various clients and web publisher partners for some time now, I think I explain these jargon to someone somewhere, at least three times every week. Every week I meet people from various online publications in Sri Lanka, canvassing for advertising packages on their websites. On the other end, I sit with various clients who then evaluate the value bundle in these packages, and making the decisions whether to buy it or not.

I noticed a problem, which happens repeatedly in most of these discussions. Increasingly, people use “hit rate” as a matrix to justify why someone should place an advertisement on their website. “Our website attracts more than 1 million hits a week”, “We recorded 40 million hits last months”, “Hit rate to our website is increasing significantly”. These are some of the words, I regularly hear from the people I meet.

Most advertisers (clients) don’t fully understand this jargon, so they blindly believe that, a website with a higher ‘hit rate’ is a good place to place their advertisements. Publishers (website owner) on the other hand, are also not fully aware of the difference between “hits” and “visits” or they are trying to exploit the ignorance of the client to exaggerate the popularity of their websites.

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Safe and Responsible Social Media

 Thank you Nazly Ahmed of Refresh Colombo and Learn TV for producing and uploading this video for Youtube. This was my presentation on the topic "Safe and Responsible Social Media" at Refresh Colombo last December.

Synopsis

Social Media gives everyone a voice to speak in public domain and it serves as a tool to network freely with people all around the world. But how far you should go when expressing yourself on Social Media? What would be the consequences of what you share on social networks? Content you share on social network, can possibly change your life or someone else's. Now it is the ideal time to take a look at the ways we can use Social Media safer, and in a more responsible manner.

Back to Blogging - Template Revamp and Other Stuff

Yes, I’m back on blogsphere once more after nearly a two months silence. This time, I’m back with some changes to the layouts of this site and added couple of additional features as well.

I’ve been writing on this blog for nearly about five years now, and what keeps me going is the nice feeling I get, when I look back at some of the posts I’ve written in the past. There are some posts on this blog which are still being found as useful pieces of resources. For example, the posts I did about cheapest Androids in Sri Lanka, how to create newsletters with Feedburner, what motivates people to participate in Social Media, how to conduct online surveys using Google Docs, are still receiving hundreds of visits every day and still remains as some of the most visited pages on this blog. I think, this is a great example for those bloggers who measure the success of a blog purely based on the number of comments they attract, and quit blogging simply because they don’t get enough comments on their posts! In average, I gather only 3 comments per post, but I receive over 800 daily visitors purely through Google, because I’ve created some content which helps them to solve some of their problems.

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Google+ Pages Contest and Promotion Policies

Image Credit: Joyoftech.com

It is now the yesterday’s news that Google+ has launched and equivalent product for Facebook brand pages. Companies around the world are flocking around Google+ to create their brand profiles. Already I’ve seen Mobitel and Dialog has already created their Google+ profiles and in time to come we will see more local and international brands joining the race to convince us to add them to our circles. 

But how are they supposed to convince us? It’s not much difficult to guess, an intuitive strategy would be to run a promotion on Google+ to drive more followers to a brand page. We’ve seen this happening on Facebook, and I’ve blogged several times about how badly some brands violate the guidelines set by Facebook for promotions. Could this be happening on Google+ pages as well? 

Before you think of running a promotion for your page on Google+ to attract more followers, be informed that just as that there are policies for running a promotion on Facebook; Google+ has also laid down some ground rules for running contests and promotions on their platform. You can find their official Google_ Pages contest and promotions policies on this page. 

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How Reliable is SocialMention.com Sentiment Analysis?

The #AndroidForum #Fail and @SocialMention #Fail 

I always love to test out these new Social Listening and monitoring tools coming up every day. Recently I did a ‘trial’ with Sprout Social, which was heavily advertising on Google Display network these days. It is a decent social media management tool particularly for Twitter, if you are managing more than one Twitter handle at a time. Another social monitoring tool that I love is SocialBakers. It virtually is “the” source for Facebook statistics and a very reliable source for Facebook demographics and penetrations statistics for local markets.

Another tool which I was always recommended in most of my workshops and training events was “Social Mention”. For about an year, I’ve been using this as a decent tool to measure social media sentiments of brands I work with.

However, a recent experience (a very recent… just a few minutes ago) with SocialMention.com prompted me to think twice before using Social Mention for serious social media decision making.

Throughout the day, I’ve been monitoring an event took place in Colombo today named the #androidforum. I was passively following the tweets coming up from the event, until I suddenly notice a pattern in the tweets.

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