For bloggers: Taking care of your returning visitors

We like having fun and we like to explore the world of real time behavior targeting. Ok, maybe these words are a little bit too big for the wordpress plugin that we developed, but it points in the same direction. Just like the title says, the plug-in will offer you the possibility to display a list of published articles on your blog since a returning visitor’s last visit.

It only interacts with returning visitors, the ones that are not coming from a feed and only where and how you wish to. We’ve been secretly testing the plugin so far and we decided it’s stable enough to release it to the world. Check it live on our blog.

Go to the plugin page to download (and some more information).

Using the CSS styles already defined by your theme, it will fit perfectly on your blog. Here is how it looks for our blog:

I like to think of this plug-in as the returning brother of the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin. I think both plugins can can work great together. Published articles since last visit is targeted in resolving a problem of the end user and not the blogger: getting very fast what he came back for – latest content.

For geeks: how does it work

For the start, the plugin does not place any cookies on the end-user computer. In order to identify if a user is new or returning it simply uses the content of the Google Analytics cookies. From the same cookies it is able to identify the users last visit and based on that data it just displays the titles of articles that your faithful reader might of have missed.

Even more, we offer the possibility to not display anything even to returning visitors coming from a RSS reader (only if you use FeedBurner for distributing your RSS feed). Here is a glimpse of the settings area for the plugin:

The best part: it reports its own performance

Basically we didn’t want to just build a plugin that people might find funky and go with it. We believe in measurement or the performance so we implemented the possibility of tracking how many people view the suggested articles by the plugin and how many people click on them.

Further more, we send that data to your Google Analytics account as events. We allow you to connect to your Google Analytics directly from the plugin page and extract that data automatically. So you’ll know for sure if this plugin is worthy for you. I hope it is and I hope you will let us know about it. The comment area bellow never closes