Alex Schultz: APIs

Making a little effort on improving my cocktailmaking.co.uk facebook integration

A little bit of time investment can really pay dividends. Up until last weekend my cocktail site has been running off of the old php connect sdk. One of my little projects for Christmas was to see if I could migrate everything to the new Facebook Platform. It was shockingly easy to get everything done. The Facebook Javascript SDK is really easy to use and there is a great example of how to get the data back and forth from Facebook.

I work for Facebook but am no means a developer or working on the platform team. It’s just great to see how big a change the platform improvements from earlier this year have made to my integration (now I finally found time to implement them).

Big impact from reducing page weight and load times

Another holiday project for me was to work on reducing the load time for my pages. There were a few reasons for this:

1. I was using bandwidth like it was going out of fashion and finally was about to violate my (very generous) limits
2. My pages were taking a ridiculous time to load and it was just embarrassing
3. Google have very publically been stating that page speed is important for ranking (and the whole web has focussed on this in 2010)

As such I used my webalizer log file analytics package to pull out the highest bandwidth files and I isolated that the moo tools js (I was using for some super simple text animation) and a promotion banner were using 40% of the bandwidth. Although this is stating the obvious usually 90% of the actual impact of the problem you are dealing with is driven by 10% of the problems. Webalizer is a great way (on bandwidth usage) of homing in on the causes. I did about 2hrs of work to hack everything around and reduced my bandwidth usage by 25%. The surprise for me was that I saw an immediate impact on my data:

All year my pages per visitor has been down substantially. Users were getting bored and leaving the site faster. Reducing the page weight by 40% increased my page views per visitor by 25%. What was really interesting about this is that it stood out in all my data. For example even though I should have cut total bandwidth usage by 40% it only went down 25% since the number of pages being downloaded from the site spiked substantially. This was awesome to see :)

2010 really was (finally) the year of mobile

A few high level stats that really show how much mobile has shaped 2010 for my websites. The following data is from one of the automated reports I run using the google analytics api. Firstly here is the weekly visits by OS, # growth year on year and % growth year on year.

As you can see iPhone has grown at >200% and android at almost 1000%. What is really interesting is that together they equate to 15% of the total windows desktop visits in that same period. Even though my cocktail site is not designed for mobile, it is now, rapidly, becoming a mobile site. One other interesting point to notice is how large the iPad already is, 1/3 of android from absolutely nowhere.

A second interesting data set is screen resolution:

Once again the super interesting data point is that teeney tiny screens (e.g. 320x480) are growing at 1000%s year on year whereas the classic desktop resolutions are growing far slower.

I am seeing this across both paperairplanes.co.uk and cocktailmaking.co.uk. It is super interesting to see that all the predictions of the year of mobile coming have finally come true. It’s supported in the data not just the hype on the street.

The traffic impact of Facebook social plugins on my cocktail site

The above shows referred traffic from facebook to my cocktail site. It is pretty clear where I installed the social plugins, most specifically the comment box. Facebook is now my #1 non search engine traffic referrer and is very close to bing and yahoo (which are about equal) as sources of traffic. By the middle of next year I expect facebook to be the #2 referrer of traffic to my site which is super exciting considering I have not optimized the integration for traffic at all yet :)

Below is a great example of a discussion thread on a the flaming lamborghini cocktail recipe on my site :)

Changing search behavior and the depressing truth of a shrinking market

This image is interesting to me. Firstly it shows that paper airplanes (for whatever reason) are getting less and less interesting to people over time as a proportion of what is being searched for online (the red line). I think there are a lot of reasons for this but in the end kids are getting more and more into computers. Analog entertainment like paper airplanes are just not as cool as angry birds.

The second trend that is interesting to me is the only growth keyword (amongst the major paper airplanes keywords) is “how to make a paper airplane”. This definitely fits with the general refinement trends I am seeing across all of my sites and work. Queries are getting more complex and specific.

Also it’s irritating that this is a query I lost a few years ago and still haven’t won back :)

Search data backs up eBay starting to stop the rot

I love what you can find in the Google Insights data:

The blue line on the above graph was plumetting throughout 2009 but in 2010 eBay really seems to have stopped the rot and it’s great to see. This data (I believe) is a great guide to people’s intentions and interest and it just shows eBay is winning back attention (and of course the red line shows amazon’s growth and momentum just keeps on growing).

Another interesting point that people miss is the geographic spread of eBay:

Look at how powerful eBay really is in Europe. 3 years ago when I left eBay was #1 brand in Germany and was 45% of ecommerce in Italy. Come on eBay, you can grow back :) just like this guy says:

Two nations seperated by a common language in search

“Two nations divided by a common language” is a quote often attributed to George Bernard Shaw and I think it’s a pretty good one. In general going global for websites is pretty easy and I have been lucky enough to get lots of traffic for my websites from all the english language speakers around the world. That being said even with english language sites there are super interesting differences. I have spent my time on cocktailmaking.co.uk optimizing for the word cocktails and phrases like cocktail recipes (which I am lucky enough to own in the UK) and “vodka cocktail recipes” etc… Globally this doesn’t look sensible:

Zooming in on UK only data a different result comes out:

The US data completes this picture:

In general I strongly believe that users from different countries are more similar that different. They all want great service, the web is better for all of them when experienced with their friends and a big red button will get anyone to click :). That being said you have to be careful about the details of how you approach things. When british people are looking for a cocktail they search for “cocktail recipes”, “vodka cocktail recipes”, etc… 5x more than “drink recipes” When Americans are doing the same they search for “drink recipes” 3x more than “cocktail recipes”. My british bias made me optimize for the wrong words on total volume.

Crowdsourcing rudeness ratings in cocktailmaking.co.uk

One big issue I had last year is that I was thrown out of adsense for my cocktail site because of rude content. It turns out a lot of cocktails have rude names. As far as adsense is concerned “Sex On The Beach” is ok but some cocktail names are really not ok. That makes sense and I can understand advertisers not wanting to appear next to rude content. The issue for me is I have 10k user submitted cocktails and I am 5k behind in terms of reviewing and rating them.

In order to solve this I defined all new cocktails as “rude” (rudenessid == 3 in my database) and then added a section at the top of each new cocktail asking users to review them. Then once a week I send myself a summary of the “unacceptable” and “rude” cocktails via email for me to go in and clean them up.

The below gives an idea of how much data and how many reports are flooding in to help me fix this :)

Users are super helpful and I have found overall that the crowd comes up with great accuracy each week. Especially when one of my facebook connected users review the content I can really trust user feedback on this front. I am still tuning the system but suddenly users are reviewing more cocktails each week than I have added AND the reviews concentrate in on the cocktails that are getting the most traffic. This really helps me keep the site clean in a crowd sourced manner. My friend Javi has an expression “work to not work” and this is a great example (in my opinion) of that!

Great onsite merchandising by google

For another article I wrote on some deceptive content in my adsense units I took the following screen dump

I think this is great work by someone at Google and would love to meet whoever is responsible and learn from them. This ad is perfectly contextual and in the moment. I bet it has amazing response rates and probably drove a lot of growth for their webmaster tools. Also in general it reminds me of a great point from Andy Beal… people who visit your site via “allinurl:” or “site:” are probably webmasters and most likely competitors.

That data is useful :)

This disgusts me or maybe it just makes me sad

I am always looking for new ways to monetize my sites. I have 0.5MM users visiting monthly (give or take) but only make $10k’s a year. Not really a great ratio (according to my friends). As such I was interested to see what the following company was doing by buying adsense on my site.

I clicked through and got the following landing page with modal overlay.

For those of you who can’t see the text says “I accept the Terms & Conditions for $9.99/mo billed to my cell until I cancel for Access to How To Guides” and is clearly placed in a very hard to read font over an orange background. This sucks. They also do a really good job of retargeting you back to the article you were interested in if you close the browser and navigate to their homepage. The form too is super well optimized (in my opinion). Whoever does this is very good at what they do. Interestingly it seems the Google search index considers them spam, they are barely in it at all:

I can totally see how (were I to do this on paper airplanes and cocktail recipes how I could get rich quick. There is no question I could game this to get a few % conversion and even if everyone cancelled after one month I’d make 10ks a month. I just feel it’s pretty immoral and now I am making money off this and my users are getting deceived through adsense. This isn’t adsense’s fault, how are they supposed to police this and even then it’s borderline whether this is illegal/in violation of their terms or not.

Last year I deselected all deceptive ads from adsense and I recently ran the numbers on those. I think I cost myself $20k in the last 12months. That being said even with the following settings I couldn’t block the above ad:

I have now made “howtotutorials.net” a blocked site for my ads and I don’t blame adsense at all. To be clear it’s the recurring billing and minimized terms I dislike. I think it’s ok to say “pay me XX through your cell to view your content”, that’s a pay wall and raising one of those is your decision as a webmaster. I just feel sad that so much of advertising on the internet is like this. We should be better. I need a new business model.