ConversionRater - Pat McCarthy's Blog.
A discussion of online advertising, web entrepreneurship, and personal ramblings from Pat McCarthy..
Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik has announced he’s leaving his position at Intuit and is setting out on his own to be an independent consultant (and soon to be author). His first job is working with the Google Analytics team as an Evangelist. Sounds pretty interesting.
Good luck Avinash!
ClickTracks has announced a couple of free online classes coming up this next week on February 26th and 27th with web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik.
The class is about “Unleashing the Power of Web Analytics” where you can get some advice from Avinash on how to make a difference in your business with web analytics. It sounds pretty worthwhile, but I’ll be in New York on business and won’t be able to virtually attend.
There’s also an interesting story behind the class where Avinash asked for more free features in ClickTracks Appetizer product, and they’re going to use web analytics to test the results and decide if they keep the additional features. In the process, they asked Avinash to teach a class.
I’ve always enjoyed how ClickTracks has made themselves different from the rest of the web analytics vendors out there. Their product has always had a different feel and workflow (although I must admit that I used ClickTracks twice in the past and didn’t stick with it), and they seem to behave differently by doing things like these free classes.
Compete announced today that they rolled out some enhancements to the Compete.com site. Compete is now a site I’m visiting more often to research web publishers and get a different look at data instead of just using Alexa.
The primary improvements they made were to their search feature. Their search is powered by Yahoo Search results which isn’t that unique, but they added a couple of things to make it an improved experience over just using Yahoo directly if you’re in site research mode. In the upper right corner of the screen a preview of the Compete snapshot will appear when you search for a term that’s likely to be a specific website. Such as this search for Apple.com shown in the screenshot below. You can see the traffic graph for Apple.com over a recent time period.
Additionally, if they have data showing that users spent a lot of time on any sites in the results for that term, they’ll highlight it by making them “Compete picks” that show up in the blue box. I found that I skipped over the box at first thinking they were sponsored ads, but now that I know it’s pretty helpful.
Compete also announced an API that allows developers to play with and use Compete data, which is of course cool. If more APIs were available from other data services I could build a tool to make my Web Revenue Blog Rankings automatic!
And last but not least, if you’re curious about how they get their data and how it compares to other services like Hitwise, Alexa, and Comscore, check out their detail matrix that explains it.
While I’d still like to see their overall data get more complete, I think Compete is on the right track. I also enjoy reading their blog as they highlight interesting data comparisons of top web properties.
Vidmeter is a site I’ve found useful lately as the best way to find good/hot videos on the web as it tracks videos across all the major video sites and shows interesting data about them as well.
They’ve taken it one step further and now have a free service called Vidmeter Tracker that allows anyone to track their own videos or videos that they’re interested in and see statistics on these videos across 23 different video sites.
It works by entering in the URL of where the video is located on the various video sites, and then Tracker starts compiling data for you and updating it daily. You can get the data by logging in to Tracker, subscribing to an RSS feed for the video’s stats, or having it email you and your colleagues email reports.
What does it track?
Screenshots
Click the thumbnails to view screenshots of the Tracker interface:
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What sites can you track on?
What’s also really cool about Tracker is that you don’t have to be the person who submitted the video to the video sites. So it’s a great way to track videos of your competition or just track videos you may be interested in to see how much traffic they’re getting and from where.
Overall, Tracker is very easy to use and well done. It feels like a surefire winner to me for all the new video content producers to have their own version of web analytics. Let the Video Analytics era begin.
Most people know by now that Alexa is far from perfect, but it’s one of the only and best traffic ranking and monitoring tools available. On Friday they announced some new features:
Not too much interesting I can learn about this site from there, besides that I’m ranked much higher in the USA at 12,417 compared to 53,294 overall. Regardless, I like seeing more free data for people to learn from.
I’ve often thought about Alexa and other statistic services problem of really getting a more complete and true sample. One of the strongest ideas I keep thinking of is if the browser companies themselves compiled this data. So we could see rankings for sites based on Firefox and IE usage, because those two browsers really would capture the vast majority and be able to accurately track web-wide ratings.
I admittedly hadn’t heard of Touch Clarity before, but web analytics powerhouse Omniture has announced that they purchased them for $51.5 million (plus approximately $8.5 million in assumed vested stock options).
What does Touch Clarity do?
Touch Clarity, headquartered in London, England, provides technology that uniquely combines the most sophisticated advancements in real-time predictive modeling, data mining and machine learning via the on-demand, software-as-a-service model.
Well, that’s not entirely clear, but it’s also summarized as automated behavioral targeting. It looks like combined with Omniture’s web analytics platform they hope to automate a lot of the manual work in behavioral targeting combined with being able to see your results in Omniture’s web analytics.
Ian Kennedy of flashpoint posted about the rebirth of web analytics tool Reinvigorate. Unlike Ian, I didn’t use it before but he seems to be excited about it’s rebirth.
It’s currently in beta but I’m hoping to get a chance to check it soon and will provide any detail I can gather. Ian has screenshots and more detail in his post, but below is a YouTube video that walks us through. How convenient! Unfortunately I can’t hear any sound and sometimes the screen is too tiny to see much.
I always enjoy posts from bloggers where they mention the top tools or resources they use to master whatever it is they are an expert in. Along those lines, I thought it’d be a good dea to pass along the list of the top ad tools I use and know of to help web publishers and bloggers make more money.
The basic assumption for these tools to be useful to you is that you run a blog or website that uses advertising to make money whether that advertising is sold directly by you, through an ad network, or you use a contextual solution like Google Adsense or YPN. Some of them are very direct in how they help make more money, and some of them are helpful tools that provide information to help you make more money from your advertising. For the most part they are free tools with a couple of exceptions.
CrazyEgg
Self-described as a visualization tool to improve, test, and track your site, CrazyEgg is best used for publishers to generate “heatmaps” of where people are clicking on their site. This data can be used to make better decisions on where to place ads to get more clicks and response from users. CrazyEgg allows you to set up tests so you can effectively test the difference between two different ad sizes in the same spot, two different color palettes, or totally changing an ad’s location.
It’s easy to setup, it just requires signing up for an account and placing some code in your page footer. You then create a test and start tracking clicks. The free version allows you to track up to 5,000 visits and track 4 different pages at once. There are paid plans if you want to do more in-depth tests.
RMX Direct
If you’re working with ad networks, you should be working with RMX Direct. RMX Direct is a free ad network manager that helps you sell your inventory easily and for maximum revenue. It allows you to work with networks directly that are part of the Right Media Exchange, as well as auction your own ad networks like Google Adsense, YPN, Valueclick, Tribal Fusion, or anyone else.
Auctioning your inventory is the best way to maximize your revenue, and RMX Direct has other cool features that make managing ad networks a much better process. Check out a previous post about using it manage contextual ad networks.
Feedburner
If you run a blog or a website with RSS, you need to be running your RSS feed(s) through Feedburner. There are numerous benefits alone in the streamlining, analyzing, and optimizing of RSS feeds by using Feedburner, but if you have enough subscribers it’s an ad revenue stream as well. If I wasn’t consolidating and tracking my RSS subscribers through my Feedburner feed, I probably would have never bothered advertising within my feed. Feedburner makes it extremely easy to advertise in your feed once you hit 500 subscribers, so I’m now just making additional revenue without additional work. Bravo.
AdsBlackList
If you’re using Google Adsense, you should be using AdsBlackList. It’s a site that compiles user submissions of sites that are “Made For Adsense” sites and low cost per click advertisers. When you sign up for an account, it has you enter your site and some keywords about it. It then returns a list of “Made for Adsense” and low cost per click advertisers you can then ban from showing ads on your site. Besides probably helping increase the quality of ads, you’re also hurting the distribution of a lot of junk in Google’s system. I have not run specific tests on if the overall revenue per click goes up after banning their suggested lists, but other publishers have reported good results.
Google Analytics
Yes, it has performance issues. Yes, there is a lag time before you get your data. Yes, it’s Google. However, Google Analytics is still the most complete free web analytics tool out there. For this article, the benefit of Google Analytics as it relates to ad revenue is that you need to analyze your traffic and find out what type of content is interesting to them, what keywords are they using to find you, what referring sites are there, and what geography your users from.
Armed with that data you can now make decisions. Can you identify an underserved area of your site that users are interested in? Interested users means more page views which equals more money! Do you have a lot of visitors from a foreign country? Perhaps it’d be good to sign up with an ad network based in that country and geotarget it to those users with a tool like RMX Direct? You can’t make smart decisions without data, and Google Analytics provides it for free.
Amigo
For those of you who are still signing up users for email newsletters, Amigo operates much like an ad network except it’s a tool for email advertising. Sign up with Amigo and they’ll match ads and stick ads into your email newsletters earning you additional revenue. If you don’t have an email newsletter, maybe it’s time to start one?
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
I know this tool is meant for Adwords advertisers, but it can be a great way for publishers to find out what search phrases are paying a lot per click if they’re using Adsense or YPN. Click on the “Site-related Keywords” tab, and enter in the URL of a site in the topic you’d like to research. Check the “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL” box, then select “Cost and Ad Position Estimates”, and enter something large like $50.00. You’ll get a result that shows keywords along with an estimate of the CPC they require to get to the estimated ad position.
This is a rough way to find out what topics and terms are generating high revenue per click to focus your content. You can also get estimates of search volume and search volume trends if you’re curious as to how the keywords in the topic stack up there.
Yahoo/Overture Keyword Tool
The famous Yahoo/Overture tool returns keywords that contain the keyword you enter, along with the number of searches on Yahoo Search from the previous month. Many question the accuracy of this data as some strange terms sometimes have really high search counts, but regardless it can be a good estimate of search volume and provides a way to brainstorm additional topics to cover to get more traffic and ad revenue. It also provides a good counterbalance if you’re using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If a keyword looks interesting to you in both tools, chances are it’s an interesting keyword in reality.
Quantcast
A newer and very cool data/ranking service is out called Quantcast. Quantcast “quantifies” publisher sites and provides an Alexa-like traffic estimate and ranking, but takes it a step further and provides demographic estimates of your audience such as age, gender, household income, ethnicity, and education.
It doesn’t stop there either, and shows interesting things like “Siteographics” which shows what entertainment the audience likes, what retail stores they shop at, and what magazines they check out. It also shows what keywords they used and what other sites are similar in audience. Here is the Quantcast data for YouTube.com.
Why is this cool? Well, once you start selling advertising on your site directly to advertisers, they are often interested in demographic data. The beauty of Quantcast is that they’ll get the data for you and you can point advertisers to this objective third party that has the data. If your site is big enough, they probably already have you listed. If not, you “Quantify” your site by placing a bit of code in the footer of your site template and it will start grabbing the data.
SurveyMonkey
If you don’t trust Quantcast or want your own specific data, you can use SurveyMonkey to create surveys you can show to your audience via popup windows or direct link. It’s a free service, and is pretty easy to use to setup surveys and distribute them.
Just like the benefits of Quantcast, this is great data to provide to advertisers about your audience, and SurveyMonkey results make a great addition to your online media kit or page that pitches advertising on your site.
Webmaster Forums
While not specifically a tool, I felt it necessary to point out some of the top discussion forums where there are web publishers talking about advertising and how to make more money. In no particular order here are ones that I’ve found value in on a consistent basis:
Conclusion
If you have additional tools to suggest, please list them below in the comments. If they make sense, I’ll add them to the list.
It’s been announced that web analytics company Omniture bought Instadia, a Danish web analytics company. I’m not very familiar with Instadia, but I imagine the strategy here was to help Omniture grow their international business, and maybe Instadia has some good technology?
