A week ago Buzzfeed announced a new viral traffic tracking tool called "Pound" (Process for Optimizing and Understanding Network Diffusion). Whereas marketers and webmasters are currently used to seeing social traffic in aggregate buckets per source, Pound promises to help us visualize the actual person-to-person sharing of content and the traffic resulting from each step... sorta, apparently the tool can't (or opts not to) match individual users to their corresponding node in the network:
Pound does not store usernames or any personally identifiable information (PII) with the share events. Each node in the sharing graph is anonymous. We are not able to figure out who a user is by looking at the graph data.
Interesting. I assume Buzzfeed is keeping this anonymous to preempt complaints when the company uses Pound to sell ads. More interesting, the hint the Buzzfeed engineers provide as to how this tool works:
Pound data is collected based on an oscillating, anonymous hash in a sharer’s URL as a UTM code.
How might this work? Does the UTM code mutate every time a link is shared or reshared? I don't understand how this is possible. If it's not, how might this functionality be possible?
