Alex Schultz: APIs

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.

Fire the AT&T Internet Marketing team

Today I was on my site when I saw the following ad:

It says get "AT&T Yahoo! High speed internet pro" and the animation leading up to this was about digital music streaming and noted that AT&T Yahoo! was the fastest broadband you could get at that price.

The ad took 20secs to load which doesn't really convey that message and on checking the file it was a poorly optimized banner which was hugely bloated and it could have done the same job faster in gif (but it was in flash... which is usually better for this stuff). On watching the loading I noted the URL it was coming from was an AT&T url (not Burstmedia *hug*) and this was where the delay was.

I decided to dig into burstmedia (who served this particular campaign to my site) and take a look at how I was being paid on the ad. I found the stats pretty quickly (Burst have a great interface) and I have shown this advert 71,017 times for which AT&T have paid me $117.89 (thank you very much lol) and it has been clicked on 51 times a 0.07% CTR when banner ads in this placement on my site average 1.52% CTR... (that means my average earning per click on this campaign is >$2, LOVE IT). I wonder if there is someone in the marketing team at AT&T wondering why the CTR is so low or the performance of internet marketing so bad??? I think the total kicker on this one for me is that the campaign has been running for 51days!!!

I hope whoever is running this campaign learns something and if they don't that they never, ever work for me.