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!!!

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.

Cocktail Recommendation: Part 4 - the results

Wow did it work or what! The cocktail recommendation engine I produced earlier this year has been a fabulous success. I set up an AB test of the cocktail recommendation by randomly assigning my visitors to either see the cocktail recommendation engine or not and the main target was to reduce the bounce rates of visitors to my cocktail recipe pages (both buckets contain c. 1million page views).

The above graph shows you the overall impact of the test across all my cocktails with 100days of data. This impact is diluted because of the volume of cocktails for which I don't have enough data to produce cocktail recommendations so below is a list broken out by cocktail id (I have removed the names since work people see this blog and some are naughty). The cocktails in the list below are essentially the cocktails found as the first 10 here (you are warned... that page contains rude words) under the tab "Graph of cocktail recipes in order".

On average for the top 10 cocktails the recommendation engine reduced the bounce rate by 16% with some cases (esp. slippery nipple) having an impact as high as a 31% reduction in bounce rate for the page.

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 :)

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.

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!

The Cocktail Recommendation Engine is Live

Finally with a month of data under my belt I launched an AB test on the cocktail recommendation engine on Friday. The cocktail recipe the test group will see is shown below. Early indications are great with initiall navigation for visitors entering the site on these pages clearly influenced by the cocktail relationships shown. I will give more details of how to produce an accurate AB test via Google Analytics in another post (cos I am still figuring out a few of the kinks).

% Returning Visitors

This is such a cool metric and one which I truly love. How many of the visitors to my site are returning and how many are new visitors. Ideally I love to see the absolute number of returning visitors growing faster than the new visitors to the site simply because that shows the site is getting more sticky and people are enjoying it so much they are coming back of their own volition. As a site owner I feel this is a metric you should keep a close eye on.

The left image shows 2006 April returning visitor rates for my cocktail making site and the right image shows 2007 April returning visitor rates for the same site. In that time I have tripled the site traffic but grown the returning visitor rates 50% faster. This is awesome news and I am really excited to see that the site is getting better and more sticky.

The whole question is how to make that EVEN better and draw more people back to my site. Returning visitors are hugely valuable since they are free traffic and engaged. It's worth investing time and money in increasing this metric even though it's a really hard one to move.

Sometimes I feel unworthy to be on the web

Browsing YouTube and a few of my favorite blogs today I was quite simly blown away by what I was seeing and I wanted to share that experience here, 2 YouTube videos and a blog post. The first YouTube video really started it all off and it is called Web 2.0... The Machine is Us. For someone in the trade that's a pretty obvious statement but I have never seen it expressed this well before... see below:

The second really exciting video for me was a piece I saw in the comments of the previous video called black button. It reminded me a lot of the short plays the drama groups used to put on at school and really engaged me for the full 7minutes of the piece with just two actors talking. It also brought back memories of the play Copenhagen which I saw in london with my Physics class in my final year of school (and feel all scientists and engineers should be forced to see). Powerful moral content, strong acting and a simple set. Sheer brilliance:

The final piece I wanted to share is humourous but simply amazing and that is a post from the blog indexed. On Indexed Jessica Hagy draws little management consultant like graphs to explain everything. She does it with humour and her tongue firmly in cheek but she really often hits the nail BANG on the mark. This post is about the relationship between accessibility and desirability but read the whole blog, go back MONTHS, you will be glad you did.

So these three items... what do they have in common. Two things, 1. I loved them, really truly enjoyed watching them and thinking about them. 2. My web offerings don't equal the talent of these individuals and yet I am positive earn me more money. That's totally not fair and I hope that YouTube paying users a share of their revenue will rectify that, cos these guys deserve it!