Social Traffic not as much as expected?

Leave a reply

Social Traffic can get lost in the traffic melee and be mistakenly found under Direct. This can happen when the links to posts do not carry a referrer.

Why is this needed? Won’t the referrer be known automatically?

Yes, on the web. But a very high percentage of facebook and twitter usage now happens on mobile apps and when your urls are clicked by your fans or followers inside these apps, there is no way to find out who the referrer is, and hence they land up in Direct. Remeber, Direct traffic is one without a referrer.

Ditto for links shared over emails (read newsletters), etc.

So, be smart and bring home your lost traffic from social

social traffic

Are you capturing your social traffic correctly?

Safely Remove Hardware?

Leave a reply
usb flash drive

Safely removing usb flash drive

Lack of patience has often resulted in all of us, at one time or the other, just yanking off the USB drive fom the port of our laptops, without due respect to “Safely Remove Hardware” feature that Windows provides. So, how unsafe is unsafe hardware removal really? Devices use the USB port for 2 main reasons:-

Power

Many USB devices (and certainly all flash/pen drives) draw power from the USB port itself for their functioning. Yanking off a device without using safely remove feature could affect both the device and the port, but the chances are very very minimal.

Data Transfer

Certain operating systems do delayed writes to devices to optimize writing. If this is the case with the operating system in question, there is a risk of data getting corrputed if the device is pulled out abruptly. Writes could continue even after the operating system signals that the writing is over. If the light on your device is blinking, it means that it is in use and should not be pulled out.

An out of date article on Microsoft’s website mentions that Windows XP refined its caching policy for removable storage as of Windows XP Beta 2. For consumer-oriented removable storage (USB, Flash, Zip, and so on), write caching is now disabled by default. What it means to the end user is slower writes, but no data corruption when the device is pulled out by surprise. So, the bottom line remains that if you are on an updated Windows XP, you can pull out the device without risk of data corruption. Keep enjoying your habits :)