Yesterday, I completed the first version of my EntreCard analytics program. Over the past several days, there has been a discussion about ‘ghost droppers’ or ‘cheaters’ on EntreCard that use some sort of script to give an appearance of having visited your site when they really haven’t.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at data from Google Analytics and compare it to EntreCard data. While many people are concerned that EntreCard drop data may over represent the number of visits, Google Analytics data may under represent it. First, it only shows people who have stayed around long enough for the whole page to load. People who visit, see that the most recent article hasn’t changed and move on before the rest of the page is loaded are not counted.

Likewise, this is based on data of people who have visited from the EntreCard drop inbox. In my case a little over half of the traffic coming from the EntreCard website comes from people’s drop inbox. Another third comes from Advertisements and the rest from other parts of EntreCard. Unfortunately, it is only easy to tell where a person is coming from if the incoming link is from their drop inbox. It should also note that EntreCard traffic makes up only a very small amount of my total traffic.

This tool only shows visits from people that you have dropped your card on. If you haven’t dropped your card on someone, your card won’t be in their inbox, and they cannot return the visit this way.

Related to this, it does not provide information about people who have visited your site because they came to it from EntreCard at some point in the past and have bookmarked the site, or who click on your ad on a different network, like Adgitize or CMF ads, again, because they’ve seen your ad or visited your site from EntreCard in the past. Martin considers this a ‘flaw’ because it is likely to under represent people who might have come to your site via EntreCard, but ended up coming via a different network. I think Martin is overstating his case. This tool does what it does, it reports the number of page views generated by having a card in someone’s drop box.

With that, I have now made this tool available to anyone who uses EntreCard and Google Analytics. If you go to EC Analytics you will be asked to give permission to my program to access your Google Analytics data. The program will then list the various websites that you have data on. When you click on the website, it will provide a list of EntreCard userid numbers and the number of pages they have viewed on your site over the past thirty days when clicking on your card in their drop inbox.

By visiting the people that are most likely to return the visit, you are increasing the chances of people becoming repeat visitors. By skipping the people that are already visiting you because of other sites, like Adgitize, CMF ads, or from their own bookmarks, you are focusing on the people that are less likely to come through other methods anyway.

This is still a first version of the program, so improvement suggestions are welcome. To the extent that this becomes a helpful tool, I may gather data from this page to provide aggregate information about which people seem to visit the most pages from cards dropped on them.