Alex Schultz

Category: general comments

  • % 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.

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  • Cocktail Recommentation Engine: Part 3 – The First Results

    The following table is a subset of the output results from the cocktail recommendation engine (be warned some rude words in some of the cocktail names). I have tried to drill the list down to just the best matches so bear in mind there are probably 30% more matches thrown out which appear to have statistical significance but I can find no reason for the relationship (beyond sometimes they are next to each other in the large cocktail A-Z list).

    Cocktail One – the cocktail someone is on, Cocktail Two – the cocktail I recommend, Probability – the probability that if someone is on cocktail one and visits another cocktail two will be that cocktail. There had to be at least 10 relationships in total recorded between cocktail one and another cocktail in my db for a cocktail to make this table.

    I am hoping that as I get more data this table will grow more accurate and I will have fewer “wtf?” moments looking at the list. I also want to add two more probabilities to the calculation:

    1. Probability if they visit 1 they will like 2
    2. Probability if I display 2 on 1 they will click on it

    Anyway for now enjoy looking at the cocktail relationships and expect more data soon.

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  • Huge steaming piles of data (Project Cocktail Part 2)

    Today has been quite challenging in project cocktail. The main issue is working out how much information to store and what granularity to summarize it on. Data is pouring in rapidly, I have defined over 5000 directional cocktail relationships and probably 10% of my cocktails within one day have at least one relationship I would define as relevant (I shall work on statistical significance fairly heavily later on).

    The issue is that every row in my database is currently taking up 46bytes and I am adding c. 7.5k rows a day. The index on the database is then adding another 25% to this and there is little I can do here since I am required to create a primary key. Therefore daily I am creating 0.4MB of data in unsummarized form. The machine I am using has 100MB of storage and so I could store up to 250 days of raw (unsummarized) data or 2.17million rows (handy cos right now my cocktail DB could theoretically create 2.17million different directional relationships with different likelihood factors).

    In the short term I am going to do nothing more than summarize on a month basis and depreciate the value of prior months over time but in the long term I want to know if recommendations should differ significantly by various user related variables and hence I want to store those variables so that in the future I can have a significant dataset to query and work out the impact of those variables. My target is to make this engine slightly scary at predicting what cocktail you might want to see next and to hit the scary threshold will take a little more than the #1 most likely relationship to deliver. So all things considered I have 0.5TB of data storage going spare right now in 5 mySQL databases… let’s go for the big data 🙂 and see what comes out!!!

    Tomorrow I will be helping move 100 rowing boats so that my new boatclub can undergo an awesome renovation over the next 3wks which means I will have to take a break (and let the data gather into an even higher volume). Hopefully Sunday I will be able to do some analysis and maybe even build a mock up that shows what the output could start to look like. For now goodnight!

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  • Recommendation Engine: Project Cocktail Part 1

    Ok so how does one build a recommendation engine?

    For the last year I have been tweaking improving and revising my cocktail recipes website with the prime goal of driving more traffic to the site. I have certainly acheived some of that with >1500 visitors daily on most days at the moment (still not huge but really massive growth). What is noticeable though compared to my paper airplanes site is a distinct lack of loyalty in my user base. With paperairplanes.co.uk ~32% of the visits daily are from returning users but with cocktailmaking.co.uk only ~9% are.

    I need to make the site better and so my first attempt is to produce a cocktail recommendation engine. Phase one of the project just released to the site and I wanted to chat about that a little bit here.

    I am logging every chain of two cocktails viewed by a visitor to my site within 2hrs. My thinking is that time spent and number of clicks browsing both degrade the correlation between cocktails in a user’s browse path and so two cocktails viewed back to back in a short time period are likely to be very closely related. If I observe this interaction over millions of such pairs (data I can gather in just a few months) the most correlated cocktail combos should stand out from the mix at least for the top 10% of cocktails viewed on my site. That is my thinking and I will start to share the results on here as the data gathering proceeds.

    The wonders of having a website with enough traffic to make analysis interesting 🙂

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  • Make Your Users Feel Awesome by Looking Good

    The last month for me has been heaven and hell. I have seen my mum and dad, seen a couple of friends from home, visited a geek fest in Austin, raced in San Diego, seen all my eBay friends and even been whale watching in Big Sur having driven the highway 1 down from Santa Cruz. On the other hand my workload has been high (by my standards), I have been on at least 7 flights in 3wks – 4 of them long haul and am entering a huge, high stress period of uncertainty at work. All of this has led me to

    For me it’s really clear that the experiences that make me feel awesome are those that either make me look good or do something that really pleases me and makes me feel good. For this post I am gonna focus on the looking good!

    Google maps is the example I want to use for looking good. Just a few weeks ago I installed it on my blackberry, I use it rarely due to the high bandwidth costs but on two occassions it has been awesome! The most recent occassion was while at a regatta and searching for a particular mexican restaurant in San Diego called the californian coyote. We knew the name but had no idea where it was and neither did anyone close by. Under a minute later using a combination of searching Google and using Google maps I had the address and a route there. When at the restaurant everyone celebrated the fact I got them there and I felt awesome.

    Google maps made me feel awesome by looking good and I am gonna keep using them because of that! Now how can I take that learning to my websites and quickly!!!

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  • 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. 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. 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.

    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. With a bit of luck they will be gone completely by April and I will let you know the results of banishing them.

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  • 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!

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  • Awesome spoofs of the I’m a PC and I’m a mac adverts

    So I hate how pretentious apple is, I love a lot of what they do and think they are great innovators. I wish that windows already ran as many cool little apps as Mac have and I would adore something like dashboard being integrated by default into all windows systems already… not after vista however despite this Macs are still stuck up. Which makes this esp. funny, enjoy:

    http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/

    Oh yes and I am very geekily enjoying linux again (for the first time since my Physics degree 2yrs ago) so I love the “I’m gonna block access to your gaming servers, dorks…. I AM ROOT!!!” joke in this video of the set: Gaming AWESOME!!!

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  • My First Cron Job with 1and1 hosting

    A cron job is a way in Linux of getting a command to run on a schedule of your choosing. That command can be a script or a basic Linux command string such as copying a file. For me being able to execute cron jobs on my server was a key gap in my arsenal of web development skills that has led to me building all kinds of strange hacks to run timed jobs.

    This weekend I set myself 3 tasks: 1. start my green card application, 2. find somewhere to start taking GMAT lessons and 3. learn how to do a cron job. In order to start this I needed a cheap host which provides linux hosting with cron jobs and the obvious choice seemed to be 1and1 hosting. I have spent much of today reading how terrible 1and1 hosting is and beating myself around the head with trying to get a cron job working on 1and1 shared hosting.

    Firstly you must SSH into your 1and1 hosting, I like to use PuTTY to do this. You then have to log in to the SSH once connected using your FTP username and password from 1and1.

    Having confirmed I could run these commands myself I wanted to create a cron job to execute the command. To edit my cron job I needed to create a crontab. The command to open and edit a crontab is “crontab -e”.

    This is the vi editor which is the editor 1and1 uses on debian linux. I personally was trained on emacs and so it was a bit tricky getting used to this editor.

    Fingers crossed I will be able to do something cleverer with my crontab soon involving scripts and when I can I will share that here because I am suffering extreme frustration finding information on and working out how to do anything with scripts and crontabs on 1and1.

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  • First Payment from Revver $$$

    So I have banged on a little about how good revver is and the fact that they pay me for adding value to them as a user of their video service embedding their videos in my website. From experience of using many advertising networks over time nothing is actually worthwhile until you really get paid. Today I received my first payment from Revver:

    Revver pay me through paypal and although the payment is only $30.38 of the $400 they owe for last month me at least they are paying me. This is a very good sign. I will of course update if they don’t pay me everything they owe me but I am pretty pleased with how it is going. Below are my current Revver standings.

    As I always say… revver is awesome and I am pretty excited I have been paid.

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