Alex Schultz: APIs

Google Analytics Regular Expressions

I was using Google analytics regular expressions on Saturday to try and understand how my cocktail making relationship engine had worked out. As I was using the regular expressions I noticed that there were very few resources to help you get them right for Google Analytics so in case you are interested here are my tips.

First the regular expression variables supported by google analytics:

.  match any single character

*  match zero or more of the previous items

+  match one or more of the previous items

?  match zero or one of the previous items

()  remember contents of parenthesis as item

[]  match one item in this list

-  create a range in a list

|  or  ^ match to the beginning of the field

$ match to the end of the field

\  escape any of the above

Some real examples:

If you are looking for the page index2.php then your regular expression should be "index2\.php" you want to escape the "." with the / since that will make the regular expression run faster as Google will now only look for the "." character and not "any character" which is the special meaning of ".".

I have a regular expression "displaycocktail.php" within all my cocktail recipe pages. For the test group I was passing ?test=test on the end of that URL to google analytics and for the control group ?test=control. A couple of examples of urls showing up would be:

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=control

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=control

If I wanted to see just the control group I would use the reg exp "displaycocktail\.php/.*test=control" where the ".*" means match any number of characters at this point in the regexp.

Hopefully this (esp. the working examples) are useful for you to get started.

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.

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 :)

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...

AdSense Dependant and Independant Variables

Oh man this is a head screwer!

For a while now I have been tracking two things which have a strong impact on my adsense earnings for any given adsense impression: How many pages a visitor has seen on my site and what site referred them to my site.

Now I've been treating these variables as independant which means I have tracked them seperately assuming no interplay between the way these two variables impact my adsense clicks. This is moronic the variables couldn't be more strongly tied together if the hypothesis I have for "why" google referred visitors have higher CTRs than non Google:

A google visitor sees adsense ads relevant to the search term they typed in google hence is more likely to click

If the first reason holds true then browsing through my site it is clear that the ads on the "paper blimp" page are v. different from the ads on the paper airplanes homepage. It would then also hold true that:

The further a Google visitor is from their page of entry the less correlated the adsense ads are to their keyword of entry

If this holds true you would expect the drop off in the ctr for a google user to be far greater from the first page viewed to 4th page viewed than for a non google user. The good news is I can test this and see if these variables are independant and whether I should treat them as such but the bad news is I can't kick this off until after eBay Live due to my commitments over the next month.

Does mybloglog reduce adsense earnings?

I have grown to really appreciate mybloglog, I think it's a totally awesome tool. Also as an internet marketing professional I think that Yahoo! got mybloglog for a song. With the distribution this widget gets I am sure there are some quite incredible opportunities for mybloglog to earn millions a year in revenue. However 2wks ago I added mybloglog to my paper airplanes site to see if I could create a community around that site which would be totally awesome. With c. 150 000 unique visitors a month it seemed like a good idea.

The above graph shows my daily CPM for my left hand adsense skyscraper since the start of 2007 (although I have removed the absolute amounts from the left axis). On adding the my blog log widget (directly below the adsense ad) the CPM dropped dramatically and interestingly as the below graph shows the CTR % stayed the same through that period so effectively for some reason my average CPC dropped.

I don't know if it is google detecting there are images close to the adsense ad, I don't know if it's mybloglog changing Google's opinion of my page quality for the adsense crawl or what (it certainly isn't people clicking on mybloglog and joining my community :( - it didn't work for paper airplanes, that's why I took it off) but somehow there was a directly correlated change both when I added my blog log and when I removed it on my CPMs through adsense. I'd love to hear if anyone else has seen the same or if I am just a screw up :)

Give up completely on CPM ad networks... NOW

On my sites video advertising revenue is the big growth area. The following graph shows how my advertising revenue sources (% wise) have changed over the past two years (yellow - video, reddish purple - adsense, blue - cpm ads). I have made no changes to my use of "display" or CPM advertising (the blue area) but I have added adsense and video in completely new placements on my sites.

You can see an almost perfect inverted 'S' curve as the revenue driven by display advertising has fallen as a proportion of my site revenue to only 20% from 100% in under a year. Video is now showing similar growth to Adsense and the overall pie is continuing to grow very nicely (up ~300% since Jan '05). The question that comes to me now is... how worthwhile is it to show video ads, contextual ads AND banner ads?

Digging a little deeper the average click on a CPM banner effectively earns me 1/3 of the average click on a contextual ad and something like 1/30 of a video ad plus I get approx 50% of the clicks I get on contextual ads on my CPM ads (interestingly enough CPM ads have exactly 1/2 the CTR based on >10million impressions on both). So if these users were to click on adsense (at only the CPM click through rate) instead I could make 3x more revenue from those same impressions (or potentially 6x if they hit the adsense CTR). It isn't likely to be that great but even if they were 1/2 as likely to click on the adsense ads as the CPM ads the revenue would be 50% higher for those same visitors. So I think by replacing these last, lingering CPM ads with adsense I have a 50%-500% upside potential (10%-100% of my existing earnings) and my worst downside is 20% of earnings, that's worth a test.

A final point is this. Taxes are getting very important to my little business now that it's getting to be a large chunk of my income and having a multitude of advertising partners is becoming painful on my tax returns so I want to consolidate my revenue streams and hence minimize my accounting costs. Things are looking bad for the lifespan of CPM ads on my site (and I've already given up on pop unders this week). With a bit of luck they will be gone completely by April and I will let you know the results of banishing them.

YouTube vs Revver the fight is on

I am very excited about this recent post on bbc news stating YouTube is intending to start sharing it's revenue with it's users!

Since revver is now making a good 10-20% of the revenue I get on my paper airplanes website. I started off using YouTube for the videos on my site and now have c. 300k views on my YouTube videos but just a 3 short months later shifted to revver since they paid me for my videos and I have now earned just shy of $1000 from them and been paid $700 of that through paypal (quality service doubt youtube will do that :( ).

The questions I have outstanding are:

1. Will YouTube allow you to earn money from embedded videos or just on YouTube?
2. How will the ads work, are they inline or are they the ones surrounding the videos?
3. How can YouTube pay kids?
4. Did the you tube founder just tread on his tongue by saying this in the quiet period pre earnings :s ?

Overall this is a great shift and one I have been hoping for for a while. It opens up a whole new territory on the web for people like me who create how to sites and have skills to share (as well as kids who set themselves on fire and steal copyrighted material ;) ) and with a big power in advertising behind it (Google) I am totally stoked.

eBay Related Searches through Get Search Results

Ok I am simply blown away by the latest offering from the eBay API as an awesome way to make a bunch of money. eBay is now revealing (without the data + formula behind it of course) the results of their related searches algorithm. When you search on eBay for "tmx" on eBay at the moment it will give you 937 items but just above that it will give you the following related searches: ps3,   wii,   tmx elmo,   tickle me elmo,   playstation 3

This is really useful information you can use to determine (as a paid search advertiser for example) hey I don't want to buy keyword "tmx" it's too pricey but keyword "tickle me elmo" is closely related... I will buy that instead and send the clicks to the same page as TMX. This data is quite simply awesome and exposed world wide for free. Make use of it and you'll do great, esp. as an ebay affiliate and you can access it via the REST API, I am playing with this and a little bit of MAA right now :)

Using Revver For Videos Instead of YouTube

A while back I wrote a post about paying for user generated content. As someone who generates a lot of content on the web and knows the value it can bring I believe very passionately in this topic.

For almost two months now I have been recording videos of folding paper airplanes and posting them to my YouTube account but also linking them from my paper airplane website. The videos have been seen 150 000 times in under two months... pretty good going in my mind. Every time the video is shown YouTube gets free advertising and free promotion on my site. I help increase awareness and consideration of YouTube outside the usual web2.0 style audiences who already know about their product.

In return the pay a lot of money for bandwidth which I couldn't afford and that is cool. I still however feel they are earning more from me than I am from them. This is where revver comes in. Revver pays me to show people videos on my site in a revenue share stylee. When someone views a video on my site to the very end they see an advert. If they click on that advert I get a 50% revenue share.

I am already earning $6 a day with less than 1/5 of the potential exposure I could give these videos and only 1/2 of the exposure YouTube is currently getting on my site. I will continue to add videos to revver and see what money I can make from improving my user experience.

I am even on the verge of finally giving up the crack that is pop unders.