Web analytics have been compared with an airplane pilot’s instrumentation with dials and readouts to control the plane. Similarly, experienced web site managers monitor the data from their Web analytics software to help them keep their business on course. Until now there has been little available for the blogger who just wants to build traffic.

Mike Levin at HitTail.com has developed a unique site delivering predictive analytics for web sites. The concept is simple: place a small piece of code on your site that sends information back to the HitTail database about your hits, and generate suggestions for web pages that will benefit you the most in terms of traffic.

After trying it for a month at Niche Modeling, I think it is going to be big — really big.

First: HitTailing replaces pouring over web analytic output. All those graphs and urls never really helped me build traffic.

Second: The predictive analytics have a strong theoretical basis in the longtail distribution of search terms.

Third: The AJAX interface at hittail.com is very slick and worth checking out!

I almost forgot. It’s free.

Basically the idea is this: some search terms put your site on the first page of Google search results. Call this the head of the distribution. For some terms, your site is 5 or 6 pages down. By blogging on these topics you build your site and move those terms up in ranking to the front page. Over time, with more blogging and reranking by the search engines, you are on the front page of Google more often, thus building traffic.

The suggestions generated by hittail.com maximize the benefit/cost ratio of your time. Topics already on the front page give less benefit than topics currently further down the search results.

HitTailing is a bit like investing in real estate. You already ‘own’ the terms that appear on the first page of a Google search. By blogging on the terms further down the search results you ‘acquire’ those terms, which over time builds the ‘assets’ of your site.

My Experiences with HitTailing

The results have been quite interesting. Niche Modeling is a specialist site on statistics and predictive modeling, largely about environmental topics like bird flu, climate change, geographic information systems (GIS) and some scientific fraud issues. If you try this Google search on avian influenza GIS data I get a post at the top of the results, above the post by Declan Butler who writes for Nature magazine, of which my post is largely derivative.

Before, my hits mainly came from click-through of links created on other blogs from a particularly interesting post. This sort of traffic has a number of drawbacks.

• It is ‘bursty’ and fades to nothing very quickly.
• I have to keep coming up with clever ideas for posts.
• The traffic is unlikely to lead to Adsense clicks.

In contrast, traffic from search engines has the following characteristics:

• It is relatively constant.
• I just need to think of a post that is adequate for the front page of a Google search.
• Search traffic is more likely to lead to purchases.

Niche Modeling was started without a real plan, but able to evolve into something. HitTailing is very valuable for this situation as it allows organic growth, directed by potential traffic-generating ideas suggested by hittail.com. And I must say it is much easier to write to suggestions than to come up with my own.

While not overwhelmed with traffic yet, it is growing slowly but surely. I am also getting a sense that following the suggestions leads to dominance of the conceptual space. This is, I think, the promise that HitTail delivers.