Alex Schultz: APIs

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 :)