Alex Schultz: APIs

Cocktail Recommendation: Part 4 - the results

Wow did it work or what! The cocktail recommendation engine I produced earlier this year has been a fabulous success. I set up an AB test of the cocktail recommendation by randomly assigning my visitors to either see the cocktail recommendation engine or not and the main target was to reduce the bounce rates of visitors to my cocktail recipe pages (both buckets contain c. 1million page views).

The above graph shows you the overall impact of the test across all my cocktails with 100days of data. This impact is diluted because of the volume of cocktails for which I don't have enough data to produce cocktail recommendations so below is a list broken out by cocktail id (I have removed the names since work people see this blog and some are naughty). The cocktails in the list below are essentially the cocktails found as the first 10 here (you are warned... that page contains rude words) under the tab "Graph of cocktail recipes in order".

On average for the top 10 cocktails the recommendation engine reduced the bounce rate by 16% with some cases (esp. slippery nipple) having an impact as high as a 31% reduction in bounce rate for the page.

Tickle.com - impressive revenue generator

I am a little bit of a sucker for anything that makes me feel clever and so for the first time in a very long while I clicked on a banner ad yesterday. The advert took me to tickle.com and an IQ test.

This IQ test was pretty cool and took 12 pages to complete. Once I had completed the test it through me into a string of 6 co-brand sign ups before I got the results of my test. Each page carried 3 cpm banners from rotating sources. I can get a $1cpm so I expect they should be able to get the same or better. Just the banner ads earned them $0.036 from me doing the test. Each of the 6 cobrands make >$1 per sign up so again low balling it let's say 1 in 10 signs up to only 1 that's another $0.1 a visitor from one test their earning is at least $0.14 and they claim almost 0.5billion tests served, that's $70MM in revenue with the conservative estimates above.

This however isn't the end of the game. Today I received the following email:

Another smart move, I clicked and visited their site, being pushed through multiple pages of co-brand sign ups again, returning to the site and being merchandized a bunch of other pretty cool looking tests, which the internet marketer side of my brain stopped me from taking but I strongly considered.

Tickle.com is owned by Monster.com so it isn't that surprising that they are really professional and good at what they do but it's pretty cool to see such a smoothly operating affiliate/cpm business model out there where arbitrage traffic purchasing is a real opportunity. Great job Tickle.com and keep it up.

Always Use The Keyword In The Title

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together :)

A week ago today I wrote about an error I had made with targetting the keyword "cocktails" on my cocktailmaking.co.uk website. Despite my little project recently to boost the backlink love on my site using the keyword "cocktails" I did not have the word "cocktails" itself in any of the important places in my homepage. I changed that exactly a week ago and now have moved from position 9 to position 2 for the search term cocktails in google.co.uk (although no similar success on .com as of yet).

This has also resulted in a really awesome boost in my traffic as the graph above for this month shows (I made the change on the 22nd). So more thoughts on that front coming in the future I guess but backlink love is nothing if the relevant keyword isn't on the page being backlinked... bear that in mind :)

User Targetting Rocks

DVD play and Safeway's just got a massive thumbs up from me for awesome and timely user targetting that just set me thinking. I am a regular purchaser of DVD play dvd's for 99c. Directly after shopping I often go to one of their machines and I take a movie home I chose not to watch in the cinema. I then return it the next day when I pick up milk or dinner or whatever.

I haven't used the machines for a month or so due to being away, watching some stuff from google video and so on. I went into Safeway and bought my usual groceries and got a token that gave me a free movie rental. I used it immediately... took out the shooter (an awesome movie where Mark Wahlberg acts instead of just taking his shirt off). I loved the movie and have been reminded I love DVD play and will totally go back again for another movie next Sunday... GREAT JOB on user targetted advertising.

Now I guess this isn't internet targetting but I can totally think about how this could be amazingly well used by all manner of ecommerce websites when someone completes their checkout... the majority of the time I checkout I get no cross selling, upselling and certainly not targetted based on my past actions. So come on guys... pick it up. There are a lot of sites I use regularly who could do a better job :)

Schoolboy SEO Error

My sites live and die on SEO. For cocktailmaking.co.uk 80% of my traffic is from SEO but for the key cocktail search terms I don't appear in the top ten. For search term "Cocktails" (see image above) I am currently 32nd on Google and for search term "cocktail recipes" I am currently 17th in the US (although top in the UK). I accept this has something to do with my domain having ".co.uk" and being on uk servers but this hasn't hindered me getting #1 for paper airplanes.

So I have been working on a plan to move up from #32 in the search term "cocktails" esp. since as you can see above it is a search term 5x the size of paper airplanes so even a top 10 position would be amazing. My cocktail widget now has helped me get close to 17000 back links. The cocktail widget backlinks amongst those have the anchor text "cocktails". Sadly this hasn't move my position on the term cocktails at all.

So looking at my title and description text I realized I didn't use the word "cocktails" at all, not once. Therefore I have now added the word cocktails to the title and description meta tags and also twice extra in the body of my text... I hope this will see a movement for me in the search results for "cocktails". We shall see, watch this space for reports.

Google Adsense Defaults

Recently I noticed that only about 56% of my page views are having adsense ads served on them and I am serving a lot of Google Adsense Defaults. Looking at the distribution of page views on my site and where the Google Defaults were being shown was very telling. 

The above graph shows the % of times google shows an adsense ad when I serve the google adsense skyscraper code on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc... page a user views on my site. It also shows the % of my page views that fall against each of those buckets. ~25% of my page views come on the first page viewed by a user on my site and 50% of page views come on the 6th and greater pages viewed by my users on my site but on that crucial bucket Google is serving AdSense ads <20% of the time.

It seems Google Adsense simply is uninterested in users who have seen an adsense placement 4 times in a row on my site and not clicked. In this case they roll in your Google Adsense Default selection. That seems pretty fair to me and tallies up with what I have seen in past analysis. What I don't like is that Google only lets me have a static A HREF and IMG banner as my default... that is pants. I would like to fill in with CPM ads from a mix of Burstmedia and Valueclickmedia (my two favourite CPM networks). So what I am going to do now is to swap out the majority of Google impressions for users seeing their 5th page or better but keep a small Google rotation in there so I can monitor if things change. I am going to do that when I get home from my holidays :)

The one thing I would like to change in this market today is for CPM and CPC networks to have API's via which I can reliably pull my earnings and optimize what I am doing. That would revolutionize how I make revenue off my site and I estimate increase my earnings by c. 85% through serving the right ad to the right person at the right time. If anyone knows how I could get this set up I would be really stoked so let me know :)

PR is a beautiful thing

This month has been amazing for me in PR. The image above is an article from the "connected" section of the Daily Telegraph in the UK telling people to try out my cocktail website this summer. I did nothing to prompt this and yet it is worth thousands of visitors to me AND the back link in the article is a really positive natural search boost. I also managed to get featured (only offline) in FHM Australia this month for my paper airplanes book.

Over the years PR has been great to me and so finally I am starting to think about putting together a bit of a pr plan to seek out some press for my websites rather than just wait for it to happen. Here's hoping that will work out!

Awesome Discovery

A friend from work accidentally opened my eyes wide last week at eBay live in Boston by creating a potential new design for my cocktail recipes website.

The eye opening event was using some stock photography from iStockPhoto (an example of which is above). The concept of iStockPhoto is simple photographers and designers offer up licences to use their photos and designs through iStockPhoto for a small fee and people like me can buy them for PPT use, posters (up to 500k reprints) and websites. The photo above cost me $1 and I just integrated another $1 photo into my facebook app newsfeed posts to have an even greater impact when my news feed stories appear.

I am a terrible designer but a pretty good coder. I thought my websites would forever be doomed to look rubbish because of this but now thanks to iStockPhoto I have hope. Look for improvements in the future and even new projects!

Revver Blows Me Away Again

I want revver to win in online video... badly. These guys do a really fantastic job on quite a few fronts. #1 they pay you a revenue share of the money they make with your content. #2 their product just works... no fuss no faff, upload your video and go. #3 they don't shy away from user forums so I am confident can give my input and will be heard.

They even have a developer program which I hadn't even looked at man I have ideas how I can make money with that. Today's post is however all about their analytics.

 

They now offer me reports by video for the revenue I am making

They also graphically displaying completion rates for videos.

Using this data I can do a lot of optimization for my site of which videos to display and where. Ideally I would like to be able to do some more granular tracking by inserting my own tracking ID by which I can report as well. Perhaps some classes of user do not convert well into advertising dollars and so I shouldn't show them a video. Perhaps some users only ever view videos and so I should put the video above the fold for that class of user. Who knows? I would love to track it.

The future is bright for people exploring online videos to help improve user experience AND make money. Long live revver and their undeniable talent...

Understanding Cocktail Rating Distribution

Something interesting with my facebook application is that in the past week I have gathered >1000 ratings on the cocktails in my database from 745 unique users of my cocktail making application. This is a fairly small number for data analysis but 3 things stood out:

The most votes were given in the bucket of "10" - people seem to tend to vote on the cocktails they like.

The cocktails that were rated 10 tended to get more votes in general i.e. 3 votes per cocktail and not the average 1.5

When looking just at the users who gave a ten and what % of each voting bucket they made up it became clear that these users were pretty much all or nothing guys relative to the crowd, either they gave a cocktail a 10 or they gave it nothing.

More to come on user voting behaviour over time I am sure and also on the most popular cocktails, cocktail ingredients, favourite cocktails lists and so on... I now have far too much data to work through and that is great!