Alex Schultz: APIs

A little bit of an update on the Stumble Testing

Using Stumbleupon buttons on my paper airplanes site was an interesting idea that I tried a few weeks back. It seems to be working pretty well. Below you see the graph of traffic I am getting from Stumble over time from the last big stumble spike (following which I added the stumble button).

For November (i.e. not including the spike in october) Stumbleupon now makes up 10% of my site growth and approx. 1% of all site traffic. I have a fair few ideas for how to boost this source of traffic even more and am really keen to give it a go soon!!!

Affiliates more Profitable than Malware

Sunbelt Blog is a really fascinating blog for anyone who works in the internet industry. As an affiliate I find it a really fascinating blog since the kind of people who produce malware and so on also are often affiliates. In the early days of running my own site I promoted a company who produced a software that when installed on someone's computer replaced ads on any site with their own ads. If someone came to my site, used my bandwidth, read my content they wouldn't see my adverts and wouldn't earn me a penny if they had installed any of this company's software. The company was called Gator and is now called Claria and have been through a number of legal cases on this which means what they do is legal although distasteful to me.

Anyway something that is very common in the malware industry is to get someone to install a piece of software that does something to your PC in order to get hold of a pornographic video or some other slightly illicit goody. They may hide the fact this download is making you part of a botnet but in the latest example shown on the sunbelt blog they get you to download google pack. The 2 incredible parts of this is that the Google affiliate program is paying more than malware pays and that what appears to be a relatively experienced naughty group would risk attacking an affiliate program. Usually these programs are on top of their affiliates enough that they would catch this, stop it and would simply not pay the affiliate. I wonder why Google appeared an easy target. Was the payout big enough to be interesting, the conversion to Google pack so great that it was worth doing or does Google not have a great affiliate fraud monitoring system in place yet?

Stumbleupon Traffic Source

As many people have noticed stumbleupon has become a pretty good source of organic traffic. For me stumbleupon is 10-20% of the growth of my paper airplanes site at the moment and I know I am by no means the most popular paper airplanes site on stumbleupon right now (btw that wireframe rocks... a future project for me too I think).

I may not be the top paper airplanes site in stumbleupon and it certainly isn't my biggest source of traffic but it is now a significant enough contributor with lots of potential that I want to spend some time on it. The main issue as many people have seen is that traffic from stumbleupon is very bumpy indeed:

What is interesting though is though each bump is adding up to hundreds of visitors (sometimes near 1000) they are interspersed with long periods of zero (or v. low) traffic. The last spike you can see was followed by some level of sustained traffic, not huge but a significant part of my daily unique visitor growth. The main reason for this growth seems to have been adding a stumbleupon button to every page of my site.

I guess I will see how this sustains but for now things are looking pretty good for a new sustained source of traffic to paperairplanes.co.uk. Why don't you give it a go too?

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.

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 :)

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...

Facebook Application Customer Support

"Err whoops" is probably the best way to start this off. My websites have essentially no customer support, it is not a fact I am proud of but it is true. I don't make enough money to quit my day job and work full time on the site, let alone employ a CS team. That being said I do get about one enquiry a week which generally I reply to and I have a few processes built to help me run through all the cocktails added and vet them. I kinda expected the same level of support would be needed for my facebook application. Boy was I wrong:

I am daily receiving about 10-20 enquiries/feedback points/general CS issues for my app (and this is with only 1week of signed up users - 7000). This is great and I want it to continue. It means my app will be better and better as I implement what is asked for enough (and do so thoughtfully and well). Heck I use my own app a lot so it'd be nice to make it better. I do however have a day job and keeping on top of this as well as a HUGELY busy week at work leading up to eBay Dev Con and eBay Live 07 is pretty tough. Those of you looking for application improvements trust me they are coming but bear with me while I get over the hump of the next week!

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.