A few of you have asked how you can get involved with RealRank. More to the point, how do you sign up to get one, what do you have to do to participate, how do you check it, and so on.

When is this all happening?

Tomorrow, fingers and toes crossed, we'll be calculating RealRanks for all PayPerPost users that have ITK (PPP Tools) installed. We'll be displaying your RealRanks to you inside PayPerPost.com.

At the same time, Advertisers will be able to start segmenting opps based on RealRank. They'll be able to choose to limit an opportunity to people in the top 10%, 20%, 30% and so on of the RealRank ranges.

Late next week we'll roll out a new site showing detailed analytics on blogs and also open up RealRank reporting to non PPP users.

January, SocialSpark will tie up the loose ends, with face based analytics and even more data reporting.

How to get a RealRank

If you already have ITK installed (PPPTools) then you don't need to do anything at all.
If you don't have ITK installed, go to the PPP Tools page in PayPerPost.com, get the Javascript snippet and follow the instructions to install it on your blog, and you're all set.

What does it do?

The new ITK (again, formerly known as PPPTools) simply monitors traffic on your blog. We track inbound referrers, unique visitors, page views, geographic location of your visitors, and also identify which PayPerPost and SocialSpark users visit your blog. We use the count of unique visitors, incoming links and page views in a mathematical equation to come up with a score for your site. The resulting score is also weighted in some areas. 70% of the score relates to unique visitors, 20% relates to inbound links and 10% to page views. The formula also takes into account gaming (repeatedly refreshing a site to boost traffic artificially and other such practices) and downplays those activities so that they don't have a big effect on the score.

Once all the blogs we are tracking have had a score calculated we rank them. The site with a rank of 1 is the top site in the network. If we are tracking 100,000 blogs, then the site with a rank of 100,000 is currently the weakest.

How do I see my RealRank?

As a PPP user just go to the PPP Tools page in PayPerPost.com and you'll see it there, right alongside the other ranks we currently use. We show you the rank for your blog and the size of the network that it's based on. That's after we roll the changes out, of course.

Once Thanksgiving is out of the way we'll be opening up a new site where you'll be able to see much more detailed data on your blog. You'll be able to see actual traffic figures, your RealRank's movement over time, and more. You'll also be able to compare your site's performance to that of others in the network.

When SocialSpark rolls out we'll expose face-based analytics. If we identify a visitor to your blog as someone we know (an IZEA network user), we'll show you a picture of them.

What if I don't want the world to see my vital statistics?

All this openness is not for everyone. From within PayPerPost.com, just go to the PPP Tools page, scroll down to the bottom, and hit the checkbox that says you don't want your data published. We'll still give you your RealRank score, but when the dedicated RealRanks site launches we won't let other people see all the nitty gritty detail about your site.

What if I don't want the world to see which sites I visited?

Same as above. If you don't want your face showing up on other people's blog stats in SocialSpark in January, just hit the checkbox that says to hide you.

Is this all part of an evil ploy by Izea that we don't know about?

Nope. We just think it's time Google PageRank died a quick and quiet death. We'll be exposing API's for all the world to get at RealRank data further down the road, and whenever we change the calculation that works out a site's score, and thus rank, we'll happily publish the changes for everyone to see.

Posted by Peter Wright at 04:54 PM in Development , IZEARanks | Comments (41) | TrackBack (0)