Alex Schultz: APIs

Part 1: Median vs Mean – the key to understanding your website

My latest hobby horse is focusing on the basic difference of median vs mean. My belief is that for content based sites who make their revenue from ad sales (like YouTube, Yahoo, Gawker, Newpapers etc…) a focus on optimizing the median page views per user is far more important than optimizing to increase the mean. It is worth noting that sites like Google (where the goal is to get you to leave the site by clicking on a demand fulfillment ad), eBay or Amazon this is not true.

I am going to try and post a number of articles with data from my own sites that show this but I am going to start with one simple post that quickly gives two examples of median vs mean page views per user and resulting revenue per user.

PaperAirplanes.co.uk

My AVERAGE (mean) page views per user on paperairplanes.co.uk is 4 (it’s gone down a bit since I’ve focussed a lot on videos) and it’s pretty stable.

My median page views per user is only 2, half the mean:

CocktailMaking.co.uk

My AVERAGE (mean) page views per user on cocktailmaking.co.uk is 8 (it’s gone down a bit since I’ve focussed a lot on traffic generation in the “cocktail name” space where people come in, view the cocktail then leave) and it’s pretty stable.

My median page views per user is only 1, 1/10th the mean:

Revenue per visitor

Paper airplanes has a revenue per visitor of 2.1x Cocktail Making and hopefully through the coming posts I will be able to prove to you that this is due to the fact cocktail making has a lower median page views per visitor than paper airplanes even though it’s mean page views per visitor is 2.5x that of cocktail making.

Perhaps this is all very obvious to you and if so I apologize… don’t read the series but if this is all so obvious why do none of the big analytics providers include median by default into all their metrics?

Planned posts:

• The key to understanding your website
• Diminishing return on user value against page views per user
• Cume vs GRP in offline media and what it means for internet marketing
• How to optimize for the median

I hope you stay with me and read them all :)

Earthquakes on Facebook

Had to post this… so cool to see so many people updating facebook about the earthquake so fast

It’s actually pretty fun to search for “earthquake facebook” and see what people are thinking about regarding Facebook and the earthquake updates!

Upshot of blocking weight loss ads – 50% of revenue

I made the decision a couple of days ago to remove weight loss (and a bunch of other low quality) ads from my site having been told by a friend that google gives that option.

As you can see from the below image that should have cost me 20% of my revenue (stretching to around 25-30% with everything else I blocked) and with even backfill (as another friend pointed out on my Facebook note) I should really have only lost 10-15% of my revenue. No biggy and a warm feeling at that.

It turns out that isn’t what happened.

So I essentially halved my cocktailmaking.co.uk revenue which definitely cost me $1000s (I am hoping for a rebound in revenue next year as adsense retrains to the new ad selection otherwise this will have cost me more than $1000s :( ).

I still feel good about the decision though. When I was describing the change to my mum she told me about clicking on one of the ads on my site herself and she was smart enough to see it as a scam and pull out.

There is a lot more to be said on this subject. The most important point is that it’s hard for small publishers like me to keep on top of stuff like this but the remnant inventory ad networks can only make decent money by running these scam ads. This creates a very difficult situation.

We really need the brand building $$$ to start flowing online. I have an audience of 400k people this month with the vast majority in the US and UK. A magazine or newspaper with that circulation can command far higher revenue for that. Some day I hope the web will be able to do so as well.

I just cost myself $1000s – blocking weight loss ads from adsense

Google has this handy feature (which is certainly new from when I started using adsense) that allows you to block weight loss ads. You can find it at this url: https://www.google.com/adsense/site-targeted-ad-review

Mr Mander argued that my last post was unfair and that Google offers me the option to block these ads and that was a fair argument so I have gone ahead and done it. In general I agree with him but given I am a professional in this industry and wasn’t aware of this page (whereas he actually worked on adsense for 2years :)) it certainly suggests it wasn’t very well promoted vs the optimization reports on my homepage that tell me to add multiple ad units per page.

Anyway decision is made. Scammy weight loss ads removed from my site and I hope my users will benefit from a higher quality of ad on my site.

I then went on to block the rest of the exploitative ads on my site (I don’t in general think politics is exploitative although I realize it offends some folks) and I find Google only allows me to block 8 of their 11 categories. Why? This just seems like a silly decision given together they only make around 25% of my revenue.

Ah well. I feel a lot better for blocking these evil ads. You should consider doing it too: https://www.google.com/adsense/save-excluded-ad-categories.do

Google: we’ll serve scam ads but won’t put our logo on them

Here are two ads served consecutively on my site by Google adsense both are graphical ads. Google branding is very clear on the second ad but not the first.

 

website gzip compression – making your site faster for google site performance and seo

The latest google changes suggest it’s really important for a webmaster that their site is fast to perform in SEO after Q1. As such I’ve been cranking on a few things I outlined in my previous note. Here are my site speed results. Yay it’s getting faster!

Firstly removing the yahoo includes gained me about 50% (and didn’t lose me any of my non existent delicious traffic). This gained the site almost a full quartile in terms of site speed.

Secondly I decided to get to work on the gzip compression they called out since I thought my site already had gzip compression it was a surprise to me that this was an issue.

Gzip compression is a best practice for speeding up your site according to pretty much everyone out there. It sounds hard but is actually stupidly easy and around 90% of web traffic accepts gzip today (according to yahoo).

If the header request contains:

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Then Gzip is supported. In apache you just have to turn on mod_gzip for Apache 1.3 whereas Apache 2.x is mod_deflate

Anyway it all becomes a lot easier if you have cpanel installed on your hosting since it short cuts having to do the sysadmin changes yourself. Under cpanel find the following section

Click on optimize website then select optimize all content.

 

This works perfectly on a small orange and other hosts who give you cpanel.

To check if gzip is working here is the header my site sent before I turned it on:

And here it is after:

You can see in the second header from the site it contains the line “Content-Encoding: gzip” which makes clear gzip is on.

Good luck making your site faster. I’ll keep you up to speed on my results.

YouTube insights – further enhancements

A recent update from the youtube insights team that (it seems) didn’t even merit a blog post has made the youtube insights even better which is awesome.

Below you can see the data on my paper airplane video views for just the UK traffic. The way the new stats work you can select a region or country you want to dive into and the whole of the rest of the page will update to show you the insights for just that country: demographic, top videos, daily views vs time and in the US even state level data (TX and CA love my site ;)!

Hats off to the youtube insights team for another nice advance… I loved checking out my youtube dashboard before and will now enjoy it even more.

One practical thing which would be awesome is to make the discovery section below a little bit better:

I would love to understand which videos dominate where my key related video referrals come from (are my own videos referring other videos or is it other people’s) and then which related videos are actually being referred to. I would also love to understand what “featured video” really means in more depth and so on. I could then create more content tailored to appeal to those videos/channels.

Either way things keep getting better with youtube insights. Nice job team!

The domain migration may be working

So a few days I talked about the fall and then rise again of my online tattoo design websites: Keeping on rising

As you can see the recovery seems to be getting together. Lots of work still to do.

All the traffic seems to be coming from Google image search so I am still not getting back the main keyword rankings. We will see how that happens over time:

Chrome share up 200% year on year now 1 in 20 visits

Chrome launched in 2008: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

I am lucky enough to have 300k visitors a month to my sites which is a decent sample size to get a read on a lot of things including browser market share. A while ago I did a post on browser market share over the last 4 years but now I just want to focus on Chrome.

Chrome share over time

The above graph shows chrome usage as a percentage of my site visitors over time. It is smoothed using a 7 day moving average.

The most interesting thing for me as an internet marketer is that this growth is not organic. Organic growth tends to look exponential… a great product spreads virally where the rate of growth grows exponentially (see the trends data for twitter, youtube, facebook or any number of other recent web companies) and this growth is linear. This is a marketing driven product leveraged out of Google’s huge web audience promoting the browser.

Chrome is a home (not office) Software

The below graph shows (in PST) percentage of visits using chrome and internet explorer against time of day. You can see the % of us visits that are from IE is almost perfectly inverse to Chrome.

Chrome’s lowest % use is the start of the business day on the east coast (6am PST 9am EST) and it’s peak use is overnight in the US when (most) people are at home with internet explorer the inverse.

IE just won’t die as long as IT departments rely on it so much but it is really getting crushed in the home market by chrome and everyone else. Outside of work hours there are now a few hours a day where internet explorer isn’t even the majority of visits anymore. That’s a huge shift.

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Great social media analysis from Alan Long in Oz and NZ

One of the biggest mistakes folks in silicon valley make is starting too much at what goes on out here and ignoring the rest of the world. That is not to say of course that there is always something better somewhere else in the world (since often the best companies move here – e.g. Facebook from Harvard) but it is true that there are lots of interesting things outside of the bubble.

One of the more interesting people I follow in the web analytics space is Alan Long at Hitwise in Asia Pacific. His latest two articles on social media are definitely worth a read.

• Social networks and forums take over search engines in NZ
• Facebook driving industry growth

The highlights are pretty obvious but firstly social networking is growing very fast in Asia Pacific and much of that growth is being driven by Facebook. Here is the NZ example:

Secondly in New Zealand (and very shortly in Australia) social networking has overtaken search as the most visited industry segment online.

I really believe the Marshal McLuhan “the medium is the message” idea that is very popular in the valley right now. If we truly believe the internet is the dominant media vehicle of our time and social networking is becoming the #1 activity on the internet very rapidly (already the majority of page views and time spent in Russia) then we have to accept that the world is going to become more and more driven by conversation and participation again and less driven by just sitting in front of the goggle box and passively consuming.

I think this is a good thing. The next century is going to be amazing!