Social Network Acquisition Data

The dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of your website’s performance, including traffic sources, visitor behavior, and conversion rates. To specifically analyze social network referrals, navigate to the Acquisition section, which is located in the left menu.

Within the Acquisition section, you will find a subsection labeled Social Networks. This area is dedicated to tracking traffic originating from various social media platforms. By clicking on Social Networks, you can view detailed reports that highlight the number of visits, page views, and other key metrics associated with each social network. This data is invaluable for understanding which platforms are driving the most traffic to your site and how visitors from these sources interact with your content.

To gain deeper insights, you can further explore individual social networks by clicking on their respective names. This action will reveal more granular data, such as the specific pages visitors landed on, the duration of their sessions, and their bounce rates. By analyzing this information, you can identify patterns and trends that indicate the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. For instance, if you notice a high bounce rate from a particular platform, it may suggest that the content shared on that network is not resonating with your audience, prompting a need for adjustment.

Create a Custom Segment

Moreover, Matomo allows you to set up custom segments to filter and analyze data more precisely. By creating a segment for social network referrals, you can isolate this traffic and compare it against other segments, such as organic search or direct visits. This comparative analysis can help you understand the relative performance of social media channels and allocate resources more effectively.

1. To create a new Segment within the Matomo dashboard, click on the button labelled All Visits in the data selector section. The text label for this button is always set to the current segment, which in this case includes all visitors to the site.

2. Clicking the segment selector opens a dropdown menu which lists available Segments, including the default All visits, plus any custom segments shared with you or that you’ve created. To start building a new segment, click the big green Add New Segment button to load the Segment editor.
3. Begin creating the segment definition using the editor. Start by adding a clear and descriptive Name to identify your segment. For example, “Socials” as shown below.
4. To define the group of visitors for your segment, build a filter based on elements of your collected user and visit data. You can combine more than one filter with a logical OR / AND flow.
5. Click on the initial dropdown field on the first row (it will state Actions in Visit by default).
6. To create a “Social Media Visitors” segment, set the first dropdown to Channel Type under Acquisition, the second to is, and select social from the final dropdown.

7. After building your filter criteria, press the TEST button to bring up a log of all visits matching your Segment. If the details look correct, close the visits log popup and hit the green Save & Apply button at the bottom of the Segment editor.

Now all the report widgets will update to only show results from the Social Networks Channel (it may take a bit of time for Matamo to reindex the data).

Track Specific Events with Goals

You should also consider using Matomo’s “Goals” feature to track specific actions that visitors take on your website. Goals can include actions such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a file. By defining these goals, you can measure the effectiveness of your social media referrals in driving valuable actions on your site.

For more information on setting up goals, check out this related post, Mastering User Acquisition Tracking in Matomo Using Goals, also on our blog. And don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team for assistance at ops@our-hometown.com

The post Analyzing Social Network Referrals in Matomo: A Step-by-Step Guide first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Why Track Traffic Sources?

In an era where brands utilize multiple channels for promotion and advertising, identifying the origin of your leads and customers has become increasingly complex. However, this complexity is precisely what makes tracking traffic sources more important than ever. By pinpointing where your visitors are coming from, you can:

1. Optimize your marketing efforts
2. Allocate resources more effectively
3. Maximize your return on investment (ROI)

Understanding Traffic Sources in Matomo

Matomo categorizes traffic sources into four main types:

1. Search engines
2. Direct traffic
3. Websites
4. Campaigns

Within the “Campaigns” category, you can track various specific sources using the Matomo URL builder, including:

• Google AdWords
• Display ads and banners
• Newsletter and email links
• Affiliate links
• Social media posts (e.g., tweets)
• Facebook ads

Measuring Performance and Conversion

To truly understand which channels are performing best, you need to set up conversion goals and attribution in Matomo. Let’s dive into the process!

Step 1: Define Your Conversions

A conversion can be any valuable action a user takes on your website, such as:

• Subscriptions
• Downloads
• Lead generation
• User registrations
• Purchases

Step 2: Create a Goal in Matomo

1. Navigate to the Goals section in Matomo
2. Click on Manage Goals
3. Click the green Add A New Goal button

Step 3: Set Up Your Goal

1. Name your goal: Choose a descriptive name, e.g., “Subscription”
2. Add a description: Provide context for your goal (optional)
3. Choose a trigger method:
   • Automatic triggers (built-in)
   • Manual triggers (custom JavaScript)

Automatic Goal Triggers

Select from the following options:

• Visit a given URL (page or group of pages)
• Visit a given Page Title
• Send an event
• Download a file
• Click on a Link to an external website
• Stay for a certain amount of time

For URL-based triggers, you can use three matching methods:

1. Contains: Matches URLs containing specific text
2. Is Exactly: Matches a precise URL
3. Matches The Expression: Uses regular expressions (RegEx) for advanced matching

Example: Creating a Subscription Goal

Let’s create a goal that triggers when a user visits the “Thank You” page after subscribing to your newspaper.

1. Name your goal: “Subscription”
2. Description: “Tracks when a user successfully subscribes and visits the Thank You page.”
3. Goal trigger:
   • Select “Visit a given URL (page or group of pages)”
   • Choose “Is Exactly” from the dropdown menu
   • Enter the exact URL of your thank you page, e.g., “https://example.com/thank-you/“
4. Leave the “Case sensitive” checkbox unchecked (unless necessary)

Step 4: Configure Goal Settings

1. Allow multiple conversions: In this case, choose “No” as users typically subscribe only once
2. Set goal revenue: Assign a monetary value to your goal (optional). For example, if you estimate that each subscriber is worth $5 to your business, enter “5” in this field.

Putting It All Together

By following these steps, you’ll be able to track and analyze your user acquisition efforts effectively. Remember, the key to success is continuous monitoring and optimization based on the data you collect.

With Matomo Analytics, you now have the power to:

1. Identify your top-performing traffic sources
2. Measure the success of your marketing campaigns
3. Optimize your budget allocation
4. Improve your overall digital strategy

By implementing these techniques, you’ll gain valuable insights into your website’s performance and be better equipped to make data-driven decisions. In our example, you’ll now be able to track which traffic sources are driving the most subscriptions, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most effective channels.

Remember to create similar goals for other important conversions on your website, such as product purchases, contact form submissions, or download completions. Each goal will provide you with crucial data to refine your marketing strategy and improve your website’s performance.

The post Mastering User Acquisition Tracking in Matomo Using Goals first appeared on Our-Hometown.

In the digital age, the symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and news websites has crafted a narrative of interconnected growth and mutual benefit. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X have long served as significant traffic conduits, channeling curious readers to news websites. However, as the digital landscape evolves, a noticeable shift is occurring in this erstwhile robust relationship. Recent trends depict a significant decline in social media referrals to newspaper websites, signaling a change that digital publishers must navigate adeptly.

The Ebb of Social Traffic

Not too long ago, social media platforms were seen as a firehose, gushing a steady stream of readers onto news pages. Facebook, in particular, was a behemoth in this regard, driving substantial traffic to digital publishers. News outlets flourished as their stories found a broader audience through shares and likes, translating to increased web traffic and, by extension, ad revenue.

However, a series of reports now paint a different picture. A noticeable decline in social media referral traffic has been observed, with platforms like Facebook experiencing a marked slump. The glory days of news articles being propelled to thousands via social platforms seem to be waning​¹​​²​.

Shifting Winds: New Traffic Referral Sources

The decline in referrals from traditional social giants suggests a shift towards other traffic sources. Though specifics were not fully detailed, the trends hint at the emergence of other platforms or channels driving a significant share of web traffic referrals. The digital ecosystem is dynamic, and it’s essential for digital publishers to keep a pulse on these evolving trends to steer their referral traffic strategies adeptly​³​.

Delving Deeper: Understanding the Referral Trends

For a nuanced understanding, digital publishers are delving into detailed examinations of referral trends from social media platforms to third-party websites. These analyses unravel the intricacies of social referrals, providing actionable insights that can help publishers and marketers adapt to the changing digital landscape​⁴​.

Adapting to the New Normal

To address the loss of referral traffic from social platforms, news publishers should consider a multifaceted strategy encompassing different areas of digital marketing and audience engagement. Below are some recommendations and insights gathered from various sources:

1. Diversify Traffic Sources:
   • It’s crucial for publishers to not solely rely on social media platforms for traffic. Exploring other online marketing strategies and establishing direct relationships with consumers can provide a more stable and diversified source of traffic​¹​.
2. Enhance User Experience and Content Quality:
   • Focusing on creating quality content and enhancing user experience is a priority for many publishers. A good user experience on their websites can help retain visitors and encourage them to share content, potentially offsetting some of the losses from social referral traffic​²​.
3. Utilize Email Newsletters:
   • The 2023 Publishing Trends Report highlighted that 56% of publishers are either expanding their newsletter offerings or will start producing newsletters in 2023, despite the growth of this channel showing signs of slowing. Email newsletters can be a robust channel for driving repeat traffic to the publisher’s site​³​.
4. Invest in Video Content:
   • Video content is gaining importance, with nearly half of the publishers surveyed in 2023 focusing on this medium, especially on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Creating engaging video content can attract younger audiences and drive traffic back to the publisher’s website​³​.
5. Explore Emerging Social Platforms:
   • While major platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X are crucial, the emergence of other social platforms could also be leveraged to drive traffic. For instance, some publishers have begun using platforms like Mastodon, Threads, and BlueSky to compensate for the decline in Twitter/X referral traffic​³​.
6. Integrate with Social Networking:
   • Leveraging the power of social networking by integrating it into the publisher’s online strategy can also be beneficial. This integration can help compete with individual reporting and lead people back to the website​⁴​.
7. Innovate with New Media Strategies:
   • Publishers are encouraged to keep abreast of new media strategies and recommendations as they head into 2023. Adapting to changes and innovating based on these strategies can potentially mitigate the impact of declining social referral traffic​⁵​.
8. Engage with New Audiences:
   • Seeking and engaging with new audiences is a priority for 53% of publishers in 2023, which can also be a viable strategy to offset the loss of social referral traffic​³​.

Recent changes by Elon Musk on X

Musk decided to remove headlines from news articles shared on X, displaying only the lead image. This move, aimed at curbing clickbait and encouraging users to add context, also invites journalists to publish directly on X for potentially more income​¹​. However, this change has been met with criticism, with some journalists labeling X as “borderline useless” due to this new feature​²​.

Given this scenario, news publishers could consider the following strategies, adapted to include Musk’s decision on X:

1. Direct Publishing on X:
   • Given Musk’s urging for journalists to publish directly on X, publishers could explore this avenue to maintain or even increase their visibility on the platform​¹​.
2. Engage with Images:
   • Since only the lead image will be visible on X, publishers could invest in high-quality, engaging images that entice users to explore the content further.
3. Personalized Context:
   • Encourage followers to add personalized context when sharing articles on X to make up for the missing headlines and entice others to read and share.
4. Interactive Content:
   • Create interactive content like quizzes, polls, or live Q&A sessions to engage audiences on various platforms, fostering a community and driving traffic back to your site.

These strategies offer a holistic approach to mitigate the challenges posed by the decline in social media referral traffic, enabling publishers to explore new avenues for audience engagement and traffic generation.

Written with ChatGPT-4 and Bing Search.

The post Navigating the Shifting Sands: The Decline of Social Media Referrals to News Websites first appeared on Our-Hometown.

In our latest podcast, the Our-Hometown team shares their insights on an episode by ColdFusion on the Dead Internet Theory, a concept suggesting most internet activity is the work of bots. They believe this issue, driven by profit and occasional geopolitical interference, is a significant challenge we need to address.

The video discusses a study showing only 57.7% of internet users are human, with harmful bots making up 27.7%. It’s alarming to see the proportion of humans on the internet at its lowest in eight years, while bad bots are increasing at a rate of 5% per year. The team believes the growing abilities of generative AI will impact these numbers in the future.

They also touch on the different types of bots, the use of plugins to identify bots, and the issue of bots spamming comments on YouTube videos. They discuss the implementation of CAPTCHA and the need to mitigate security risks, and the use of two-factor authentication (2FA) for user security.

The video concludes by discussing the creation of an AI version of an influencer named April Isabella and the potential for AI influences on social media platforms like Instagram. They warn about an inversion point where YouTube bots would make up a larger percentage of viewership than real people, distorting analytics and making it harder to identify real traffic from fake traffic.

The team encourages us to develop critical thinking skills and technological literacy to combat the wave of low-quality AI-generated content. They believe that developing safeguards like content credentials is as important as the development of the technology itself.

Chapters

00:00 – Intro
02:33 – Dead Internet Theory
06:23 – Bots and Bots
21:05 – AI Influencers
23:52 – Fake on Facebook
25:28 – Turing Turns
29:25 – AI and Trust
32:17 – Final Thoughts

The post Dead Internet Theory by ColdFusion | OHT Commentary first appeared on Our-Hometown.

In this commentary video, the Our-Hometown team engage in casual forum-style discussions based on an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast featuring Mark Zuckerberg.

They highlight how Zuckerberg’s discussion about AI aligns with their vision of developing chat bots. The team mentions the availability of open-source AI models, such as GPT, and the potential use of Facebook’s AI in their own chat bot development. They delve into the importance of open sourcing AI and the benefits it offers to researchers and developers.

The conversation also touches on the significance of alignment in AI models and the potential risks associated with AGI. The team explores various possibilities of utilizing AI, including customized chat bots for businesses and content generation based on specific prompts.

The video concludes with discussions on training models, generating summaries, and potential applications for AI in journalism and local events coverage.

Chapters

00:00 – Start
00:53 – AI and Open Source
10:01 – Models and Datasets
11:57 – AI Chatbots and Personalization
14:26 – AI Engine for WordPress
19:22 – Model Alignment
21:13 – Open Source = More Secure
22:44 – Custom Chatbots
25:00 – AI Engine: Content Creation
Original Podcast Video:    • Mark Zuckerberg: …  
Transcript: https://steno.ai/lex-fridman-podcast-…

The post META and AI: Insights from the Lex Fridman interview with Mark Zuckerberg first appeared on Our-Hometown.

All in One SEO Setup

All in One SEO provides a convenient wizard to guide you through the initial setup process, prompting for information about your website, including metadata, contact information, social links, and search appearance.

All in One SEO Dashboard

Admin Dashboard

AIOSEO Dashboard

Setup Wizard

First we will go to the admin dashboard and find the All in One SEO menu and click on Dashboard.

This brings us to an overview of all the SEO features provided by the plug-in.

Scroll down to SEO Setup and click the Improve SEO Rankings button to start the wizard.

Step-by-Step: All in One SEO Setup Wizard

The following is a walkthrough of the setup process utilizing the wizard.

Step 1: Site Category & Description

Prompts you for basic information about your website: Category, Title and Home Page Description.

Step 2: Additional Site Information and Social Profiles

Asks for additional information for a representative contact and default logos for the site and social media.

Scrolling down on Step 2 provides fields for all your various social media links.

Step 3: SEO Features

Allows you to choose or accept the default SEO features to enable on your website.

Step 4: Search Appearance

Provides a preview of your search appearance including a Google Snippet showing how your site will appear on their search results page.

Step 5: Site Analyzer and Recommendations

On this step you can choose to provide an email and enable recommendations from the plug-in. This step doesn’t affect your SEO rankings but enables the plug-in to audit your site and provide feedback for ongoing SEO management.

Step 6: Upsale to the PRO version of All in One SEO

This is another optional step prompting for an upgrade to the PRO version of the plugin to gain access to additional features or enter a license key if already purchased. Additionally, several of these PRO features are provided by other plug-ins on the Our-Hometown platform.

All in One SEO Quicklinks

This set of links from the dashboard provide more advanced and granular control of how the plugin handles your website’s content. These same links can also be found in the All in One SEO submenu.

Search Appearance

These settings affect how your content will appear on major search engines, such as Google.

Global Settings

This tab provides similar options to Step 2 from the All in One Setup wizard: Title separator; Homepage snippet preview, contact, and default site logo.

Content Types

You can further differentiate how different content types (posts, pages, articles, pdfs, etc.) will appear in search results on this tab.

Taxonomies

Here you can dive deeper into search results previews based upon categories or tags, depending on how these are used across your website.

Image SEO

Unless you are using the PRO version of All in One SEO, the only feature offered on this tab lets you decide how image attachment urls are to be implemented. The defaults are recommended.

Archives

This tab allows you to specify search appearance parameters for archive types, such as author, date, or content (articles, posts, ads, pdfs, etc.).

Advanced

Finally the Advanced tab offers options for Robots, Sitelinks and Shortcodes, as well as Meta Keywords and Pagination formats.

Social Networks

These settings affect how your content will appear on major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Social Profiles

This tab is the same as part two of Step 2 in the setup wizard, where you can specify all your links to whichever social media platforms you use.

General Facebook Settings

Here you can control how you want Facebook and other social media to display a preview with images and a text excerpt when a link to your site is shared. Of particular note is the Default Post Image Source as for most social shares you want to include the featured image from that post. The Default Post Facebook Image in the next setting is only used for shares that do not include any images. At the bottom of the tab you will find a preview of how your default shares will appear.

Twitter Settings

Similar to the Facebook tab you can select the type of twitter post to be used upon sharing, as well as the default image source and the fallback image to use, in addition to a post preview.

Pinterest Settings

If you are using Pinterest you must first provide a verification code which will then give you access to the similar sharing options to the aforementioned tabs.

SEO Analysis

If you provided an email address in Step 6 of the setup wizard, you will have access to the SEO analysis tools provided by the plug-in. Note that from the plug-in dashboard in the support panel you will find a link “Relaunch Setup Wizard” if you want to be led through the initial setup again.

SEO Audit Checklist

On this page you will be shown an Overall Site Score based upon the results of its Checklist. You can filter items on the checklist by All, Important, etc. By then clicking on the arrow to the right of each listing you can see the current status and choose to edit a particular setting directly from the recommendation.

Analyze Competitor Sites

You can provide the plug-in with any URL and it will run the same checklist returning a score and recommendations for comparison to your own site audit.

Headline Analyzer

This tool will give you feedback based on a headline you provide, with an overall score and a breakdown of properties that will improve the headline’s search appearances.

SEO Management Per Article

The most common options for customizing SEO are available in the Lite version of the plug-in. In particular, you may Focus Keyphrases or provide an alternate Title, Description, Excerpt or Featured Image apart from those in the article being shared.

General Settings

Under this tab you can change how your article snippet will appear in contrast to the default settings established in the setup wizard or via the Search Appearance quicklinks on the main plug-in dashboard.

For the article and meta description, you can use the provided tag variables or simply type your desired text into the appropriate field.

A very important SEO feature that is also set here is a Focus Keyphrase. In the Lite version of All in One SEO, you are allowed only a main keyphrase, while the PRO version allows you to enter additional secondary keyphrases. 

According to the plug-in documentation on keyphrase usage:

This feature is especially helpful when writing blog Posts where you may write about a primary subject (Focus Keyphrase) as well as secondary terms (Additional Keyphrases).

It’s not as useful for Pages of your site which may have multiple focuses for this content, or where the content is generic such as a Contact Us page.

Start by entering the primary subject you’re writing about in the Focus Keyphrase field and click the Add Focus Keyphrase button.

You will also see our recommendations for improving your on-page SEO beneath each keyphrase and in the Page Analysis section.

The Page Analysis section provides three categories of recommendations: Basic SEO, Title, and Readability. This final sub-tab is quite informative with analyses of passive voice, transition words, sentence length, etc.

All in One SEO social settings such as Title, Description and Image Source can be modified from their defaults under the Social tab.

Facebook

This sub-tab provides you with a preview of the article as it will appear on Facebook. If you would like to change anything from the defaults, perhaps a differently-cropped or completely new image, or any alterations to the title and description.

Twitter

The Twitter sub-tab is very similar, although you have the option to pull data from the Facebook tab (Title and Description). The Image Source can be changed from the default as well as the Twitter Card Type.

If you have any questions or would like assistance, please reach out to our customer support team at ops@our-hometown.com.

The post SEO Features on the Our-Hometown Web Platform first appeared on Our-Hometown.

Facebook’s director of product management for ads commented in a blog post:

“There has been much debate in recent months about political advertising online and the different approaches that companies have chosen to take.  While Twitter has chosen to block political ads and Google has chosen to limit the targeting of political ads, we are choosing to expand transparency and give more controls to people when it comes to political ads”

They are offering tools to edit your profile settings to remove yourself from campaigns and filter out political ads, but that responsibility is deferred completely to the user.  The default is to see every ad targeted to your demographic.

Read the full article on The Verge.

The post Facebook Adds No Restrictions to Ad Targeting first appeared on Our-Hometown.

• 20% more clicks than mobile web articles
• 70% less likely to abandon the article due to page load speeds
• 30% more shares than a mobile web article

Seems too good to be true, right?   What Facebook doesn’t come right out & say is that publishers, especially smaller publishers, without an active Facebook page will make very little revenue, almost nothing, if they upload their articles to the Facebook Instant Articles feature and do nothing else.

This is exactly what happened to our publishers when we ran our first Facebook Instant Articles test. They made maybe $2 in a month and we posted a lot of articles via an integrated feed.

Facebook’s documentation does not tell you how much money can be made or what has to be done to improve performance when the initial payout is low.  Instead, they insinuate if you spend a lot of time adding articles to their platform, the rewards will be high because of how people read & share on mobile.

Facebook pays out a percentage of their advertising revenue when your uploaded stories are read by other users on their mobile app. But Facebook does not actually promote publishers’ articles. In reality, getting readers to the articles is your job.

Without an actively maintained Facebook page, Facebook Instant Article revenues are only generated when a Facebook user takes the time to link to stories on the publisher’s website in a posting.

These numbers are usually very low, as we experienced when we implemented Facebook Instant Articles on two weekly newspaper publishers’ websites.

However, if a publisher makes it easy for Facebook users to share stories, revenue can be much larger.

Our new WordPress platform now makes it easy for publishers to maintain an active Facebook page with the ability to automate article posts to Facebook.

There are other factors involved in how successful your Instant Articles can be, such as how many followers a page has and how interesting & shareable the articles posted are.

You have to take the time to promote your Facebook page to your readers & make sure you are creating relevant, shareable content. Our Hometown can help take the hassle out of manually maintaining a Facebook page, so you can focus on creating interesting content that people want to read and share online.

The post What isn’t Facebook telling Publishers about Instant Articles? first appeared on Our-Hometown.