What Are People Saying About Master Class #6

@rikeneville

I am at the part of “What’s a page view” and dying laughing because these are the questions I’ve asked for years (asked myself, not other people) and part of why I disbelieve the data TpT provides and why I don’t trust anything really with data.

@rikeneville Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @rikeneville

Wait, what? All that counted as a single view? Then things have changed. In 2019, while I was making a HUGE round of updates to my resources, I sometimes updated a resource, saw an error in the product description, updated again, saw another, updated again,…..you get the picture. Anyway, I was wondering about views, so I checked my view number for one particular product before updating it. Then I updated it. I checked, and the view count had gone up! So then I updated the description by adding a random period. Checked, the view count was up again. So I did it five times in a row. Checked, and the view count had gone up exactly by exactly five. I lost what little trust I had in data at that point.

@rikeneville Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @rikeneville

Hahahahaha….and now I’m at the part where you talk about how it might have been true ten years ago that TpT counted every view as a page view….not quite ten years, more like four, but yeah, I get your point. (Watching and taking breaks to think, so this video is going to take me FOREVER)

@rikeneville Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @SEOTpreneur

Hey @rikeneville – great minds think alike! Isn’t it funny how something as simple as a “page view” can have so many interpretations… and it doesn’t matter what we think a pageview should be… it only matters how TPT is defining / measuring it.

(I saw your next comment about everything counting as a single pageview. I’ll reply to that separately!)

I’m in the same boat. I view most of my TPT data with heavy skepticism and look for large trends. Sometimes I can’t dig down and track UTM sales from my blog, but I’ve had a few odd coincidences where I update the blog, and then that product sells.

Then again, from the cookie example at 10:44, it could all be random noise.

On a side note – what factors do you look at to guide your TPT business? Are you looking at overall sales and creating more products that sell well?

See you in the next comment! Cheers, Mike

(PS, keep an eye out for an upcoming episode. I’ve created a simple model / formula to guess the TPT SEO scoring system. I’d love to get your take on it.)

@SEOTpreneur – Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @SEOTpreneur

@rikeneville lol take your time! There’s a lot of meat in this Master Class #6. (My favourite part is when I say, I’m going to take a coffee break and forgot to cut it out so you have to wait for me to drink coffee… and I only noticed it once it was posted on YouTube. Oh well! It’s 80% good enough!)

If you haven’t watched Master Class #5, the value proposition section is pretty good too: https://youtu.be/crUsY7HnTTI?t=353

See you in the next comment! Cheers, Mike

@SEOTpreneur – Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @SEOTpreneur

@rikeneville Thanks for confirming your experience in 2019 with multiple page views by a single person counting as separate page views in the TPT Seller data. I had that experience as well back in the day.

But don’t trust me!

I might be wrong – or my experiment could be an outlier because (I visited too many times.) I did the ChatGPT experiment with 100+ visits using different IP addresses via a VPN. (I did record my screen for science… I should publish that lol)

If you ever get the chance (or other people reading this comment thread), can you independently confirm that multiple page visits now count as a single page visit?

To be fair, I believe Google Analytics does that as well – track multiple visits by the same user as separate page views.

(When we install Monster Insights on our WordPress TPT blogs, it intentionally blocks the Google Analytics code when you’re logged in so that a logged-in user working on the site doesn’t artificially inflate the page views; it might be nice if TPT did that as well and block logged in TPT Sellers from getting tracked in the TPT Seller data.)

Based on observations and some conversations with TPT support, I believe the TPT dashboard used Google Analytics 3 (technically Google Analytics 360). It makes sense that every page reload counted as a page view back in the day.

I’m not sure what they’re using now to power their TPT seller data. I think I’ve seen comments from their emails that Google Analytics 360 was getting sunset now that GA4 is here… but a quick look at Google suggests Google analytics 360 still works with GA4, so who knows.)

https://fingerprint.com/ is super cool (and creepy.) I’m not sure if TPT is using it, but it shows you where we’re at with technology.

See you in the next comment! Cheers, Mike

@SEOTpreneur – Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @rikeneville

OMG. I’m at 1:12:54. Something just clicked when you mentioned how TpT counts page views. I know for a fact that they used to count five edits of a product as five views of that product. The last time I paid attention to this was in 2019. So, sometime between then and now, that changed. The question is WHEN EXACTLY? Could this count for some people’s lower views now (because the previous view count was incorrectly tabulated)? If someone spent a great deal of time updating their products, changing out thumbnails, and optimizing their product descriptions, at one point, all that activity was counted as views….and then that stopped, wouldn’t that be at least part of the reason that the same person would now have lower views? *just thinking out loud here* In case you haven’t guessed, I’m basically using this comment section for my own personal notes, which is silly when I have a notebook and pen right next to me.

@rikeneville Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @SEOTpreneur

@rikeneville actually, that’s brilliant. So it could be when TPT sellers were saying “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”… no wait, sorry, wrong story.

It could be when TPT sellers were saying their pageviews dropped drastically, that might have had nothing to do with changes in the TPT search algorithm (deciding not to show a TPT product page for a TPT keyword search) … a significant drop in pageviews for active sellers might be due to a change in how TPT tracks pageviews.

I’m glad you left a public comment on YouTube (as opposed to a private note in your notebook) because it allows others to chime in and crowdsource an answer. We all have a small piece of the puzzle…

On a curious note, this might also give TPT sellers who were around before the fingerprinting pageview update a huge advantage in TPT SEO. (Unless the TPT SEO algorithm has a modifier / penalty factor to account for artificially inflated pageviews due to self visits. )

But, maybe this is all speculation. Can anyone independently verify that multiple visits today only count as a single visit the following day in the TPT product stats?

It’s fun listening to you think out loud! Thanks for sharing your two-cents!

See you in the next comment! Cheers, Mike

@SEOTpreneur – Nov 13, 2023

Reply from @rikeneville

STILL haven’t finished it. I know–I’m the slowest viewer ever. BUT….I’ve been selling since 2015, and just now I signed up for my very first TpT ad. Absolutely frustrating as my niche is adult ESL and ESL is not offered as a subject and adult education is not offered as a grade (in TpT’s world, all education pretty much stops at grade 12). Fun part: I somehow signed up for January. No idea how I did that. LOL By the time January rolls around, I won’t have any memory of any of this having happened. But the important thing is…..I signed up for a TpT ad.

@rikeneville Nov 13, 2023