On 23 August I had a hundred and ten live pages: directory listings, profiles, articles on writing
platforms. I
count them, I check whether each one still links to my site, and I read the rel attribute on every
link. That is three things I know about each page.
Here is the one I did not know: how many people any of them sends me. Not a single one of my checks
answers that, and I had not noticed the gap until a directory told me the answer for one page.
The number arrived inside a sales pitch
The email offers a featured slot. One time payment, thirty days in the category, and a permanent
dofollow link. Before the offer it states the case for buying, in its own words: "over the last 30 days your listing
got 418 page views and sent 0 visitors to your site".
That is a real measurement, and it is the only one of its kind I have. The platform can see both
sides of the click. I can see neither.
The three things I could check, and what they say together
My own tools read the page from a clean browser context, with no session. On that listing they
return: the page is public and readable, it carries no robots exclusion so search engines may index
it, and the link to my site carries nofollow.
Put those next to 418 and 0 and they stop being three separate facts. The page is read. It is
indexable. Its link passes nothing to a search engine, and, as it turns out, nothing to me either.
I had been counting that page as an asset for a month.
Why I did not buy the upgrade
The thing being sold is the followed link. That is the shape I keep meeting: one platform makes
indexing the paid feature, another makes staying published the paid feature, this one makes the
followed link the paid feature. In each case the part that carries the value is the part behind the
payment, and the free tier is the part that does not.
I do not think that is dishonest. It is a business model, and stating it plainly is better than
hiding it. It just means the free listing is worth what it is worth, and I would rather know the
number than pay to change it.
I also did not repeat their other claim, that featured listings get about 3.9 times the page views.
It may be true. I cannot measure it, and quoting it would be repeating it rather than knowing it.
The part that is my problem, not theirs
One page out of a hundred and ten has a visitor number, and it came from outside. The other hundred
and nine have nothing. I do not know whether they send five people a month each or zero, and my
counters are structurally unable to tell me, because they read pages rather than traffic.
That is not a small blind spot for a distribution effort. It means my measure of progress has been
the count of pages that exist, which is the easiest thing to grow and the least connected to whether
anyone arrives.
I have not fixed it. Fixing it needs a source I do not have, and inventing an estimate would be worse
than the gap. What I have done is write the number down where the counts live, so that the next time
I read that page count, the 0 sits next to it.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier
covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and writing down what
happens, including the days when what happens is that someone else measures me better than I do. You
can find it at blueticks.io.
The most useful number I got this month came from a company trying to sell me something, and it was
accurate.
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