We’ve learned quite a bit in our first round of beta, and we’re happy to roll out a big set of improvements in these three areas:
1) Improving visibility
2) Improving clicks with machine learning
3) Growing your Network
1) Improving Visibility
When the widget is in the sidebar, people don’t see it. Our data shows that sidebars load significantly later than the main pages of our beta sites. Why? It’s the the number and size of the other widgets on the page. Just to load the 5 largest external services on a seemingly straightforward beta site requires 144 browser requests, and transfers 985,000 bytes of data(!) Considering the main HTML page is 41K, the other widgets represent a significant size/delay.
The consequence of the “slow sidebar” problem is that for users who rapidly want to change pages, the widgets aren’t even rendered yet. And those who are reading a page will have scrolled past sidebars widgets by the time they appear. If they don’t see the widget, they can’t click.
Indeed, our measurements indicate that less than 5% of all page loads yielded any click anywhere that generated a second page view. (95% bounce rate).
In with the fix
Our new footer bar is a fast, lightweight solution that will work seamlessly on nearly every site. A small 30px tall footer appears at the bottom of the page and when a user hovers with their mouse, it expands to provide instant access to your best content and and the best links from blogs you follow. You have FULL CSS control, so color/font, etc. are fully customizable to look like your site and there’s no Liveflows branding. This is all about you.
The footer bar will work no matter where you have the js installed, but it’s so small and sub-second fast that it can be part of the main page. To upgrade, just login to your admin page and click [ ] show footer.
2) Improving clicks with machine learning
Once you switch to the footer bar, Liveflows uses more intelligent algorithms to improve clicks.
Our machine learning / genetic algorithms framework becomes active and we advance from static variations of “most popular” to multiple dynamically-selected algorithms to present other links “You might like”.
The links in “You might like” are determined by a half dozen algorithms that each use a combination of different inputs (such as user history, page popularity, referrer, click paths, time spent, etc.) and each is continually being A|B tested against the other algorithms.
However, this isn’t a simple winner-take scenario. As the system learns from interaction, we’ll be able to match selection algorithms that work best for each user, so sites can enjoy better results across the board. We’re also looking forward to adding more selection, wording and display components into the mix, while our machine learning framework automatically promotes the better-performing tests. With the first set of algorithms, we expect that the biggest gains will be from repeating visitors who view more than 7 pages in a month.
3) Growing your Network
Perhaps the biggest improvement to footer bar is that your network is now featured (instead of hidden on a 3rd tab) so your ability to expand your reach and be promoted on other sites increases significantly.
Liveflows’ networking component allows “blogs to follow other blogs” in a simple twitter-like manner, and links to your best posts can appear on blogs that follow you. It’s now very easy for like-minded blogs to follow each other and effectively expose all their best content to the traffic of the whole group. More exposure and more promotion of the good stuff.
This is an “open-web” approach to networking, since the destination sites are the blogs themselves and Liveflows is simply providing the plumbing and displaying the best posts.
As always, please contact us at beta@liveflows.com if you have any questions.
Cheers!
*significant widgets by size as measured on a beta site
9 browser requests, 250K bytes of data (facebook)
26 browser requests, 240K bytes of data (disqus)
19 browser requests, 220K bytes of data (Outbrain)
62 browser requests, 200K bytes of data (Lijit)
28 browser requests, 75K bytes of data (friendfeed)
4 browser requests, 24K bytes of data (google analytics)
5 browser requests, 21K, bytes of data (FFholic)
7 browser requests, 15K bytes of data (Liveflows 3 tab)
One Comment
Hi all
till today I really liked the widget on the sidebar. I thought it was an excellent piece of work significantly increasing traffic in my site. I absolutely agree to what you mention above with the loading time and partly visibility - “accessibility”
However we need to also mention that:
1) Tabbed content is very very popular and very convenient
2) Having the list of the popular POSTS on the rightside as I noticed from day one I installed the widget, draw users’ attention and they clicked on them. NOW in order to see this they first have to click on the “you might like these” adding an extra step to the process. An extra click is very important.
Placing the widget at the footer might look or sound good, but I guess Liveflows is not the only widget or content item that would like to have such a prominent place in a blog or generally USER SCREEN. Thus, as soon as another widget appears or in the case that other widgets function similarly, users will have to choose which one to place there.
Last but not least…. to me it seems like another toolbar (googlebar, yahoo and so on). Even though it is somehow discreet it still looks like a toolbar!
SUGGESTION: I REALLY REALLY like your work and I suggested it to other bloggers as well. What you can do is to simply allow the user to choose where they want the widget placed!!
Sidebar or footer? Simple as that!