The Online Aud Dev Toolbox

Cheap and easy applications for growing and tracking your online audience.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, July 6, 2009

---

Outside of the big vendor solutions that offer Web site diagnostics and measurement, there are plenty of smaller, inexpensive—even free—tools that allow publishers to analyze engagement and traffic metrics across their sites. Here’s a selection that came out of a session at June’s Audience Development Show in Chicago led by Vital Business Media CEO Prescott Shibles and Variety magazine’s director of online marketing Abe Burns.

One Riot (OneRiot.com)
Real-time search has been getting a lot of traction lately, especially with the rise of social networking sites that have status update and microblogging features such as Twitter and Facebook. Marketers are salivating at the prospect of inserting messages right into a conversation stream as it’s happening. For publishers, One Riot allows you to perform real-time searches across Twitter, Digg and other services. Metrics include total shared count, link-sharing origination and trends according to stories or topics.

Disqus (Disqus.com)
Don’t have a commenting feature on your site yet? Disqus is a third-party commenting service that allows legacy CMS systems to add the feature. Features include standard threaded comments, ratings and video comments, and integration with other social networking sites such as Plaxo.

Google Friend Connect (Google.com/friendconnect)
Have deeper engagement with a community set up and running in minutes. Shibles demoed the service and literally had the feature running on his site in about two minutes. By dropping in a few lines of code, publishers can allow users to “join” your site as members by leveraging their accounts already created with other community sites. Visitors can sign in, leave comments, and rate, review and recommend content.

Ooyala (Ooyala.com)
Have a lot of video content that’s getting spread across the Web? Ooyala provides a range of services and features that allow you to better manage, distribute, and, especially, track your video usage across the Web.