This is a really fascinating blog post from dolores labs that I'd suggest you dig into and read. Specifically across the board the internet doesn't really capitalize on these natural human behaviors in a way that I think would benefit everyone. The internet changes everything and understanding data like this (and also stats data so folks aren't surprised bythe birthday paradox) will change the game.
Enjoy.
On the margin optimizing to make your experience (yes you, the person reading this now) better is not a good idea for most of the advertising supported websites you use (the one notable exception is Google). I say this because if you are reading this post you must be a web power user 🙂 so view a lot of page views. Their time is better spent working on their least loyal users.
Here is why (using data from my sites).
The deeper a user is into a site the less likely they are to click. The following graph shows CTR by depth (in page views) into my site for a user on ads. For a CPC driven advertising marketplace getting someone with 5 page views to view 6 is half as valuable for me as getting someone with 2 page views to view 3.
This following graph shows the relative value (for me) of getting you from 0-1 impressions on my site, 1-2, 2-3, etc… As you can see the value added is rising to 4 page views and then starts to decline after 4 page views. A while ago I did another post on this showing the double impact of google adsense sell through rate https://www.alexschultz.co.uk/google-adsense-/ as you increase page views per user.
Now don’t get me wrong you are probably a massively valuable user to all the content sites you regularly consume. Below is the revenue per user curve for my sites based on how many page views you have viewed. The last bucket is 6+ (not just 6) so you can see someone who views 6+ pages is 5 times as valuable to me as someone who views one.
That being said my biggest return is by getting all the folks who view 1 page to view 2 and that’s pretty much true for every content publisher I have ever seen (have done a little side consulting for a few companies).
I guess the big question I don’t answer here is how much investment does it take to get a power user to view one more page than getting a low use user to view 2 pages rather than 1 🙂 Perhaps my note on reducing bounce rate via recommendation engines gives some answer to that.
I hope you stay with me and read them all 🙂
I just completed a panel on facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit West.
I always enjoy affiliate summit because it is full of people who really understand internet marketing. It’s always good to talk to people here because their entire livelihood is based on how good at internet marketing they are. I find that when someone is using their skills to put food on their table that a lot of the theoretical rubbish is thrown out and folks really really focus on doing what works. Often in a big company people get very cerebral and theoretical and engage in plumping their egos about how clever they are rather than focusing on what works. For all the well publicized negatives about the affiliate industry that is a huge positive for me. This industry really knows it’s stuff.
The single most interesting thing about the panel today for me was Markus’ point about how plenty of fish see huge branding impact from Facebook ads. He called out that when they run an ad campaign they see an up tick in total traffic well beyond the direct clicks and when they stop that campaign often a chunk of that uptick continues afterwards. This is I believe the crux to where internet marketing is going in the near term. More focus on the harder to measure branding values online… if TV can do it, so can the internet!
Anyway thank you to my fellow panelists for stepping up to talk about fb ads:
Here are some totally self interested positive twitter comments a friend sent to me which I wanted to share:
![clip_image002[4]](https://www.alexschultz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/6a00d8345161cc69e20120a7ea05ba970b-pi.png "clip_image002[4]")
![clip_image002[6]](https://www.alexschultz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/6a00d8345161cc69e20120a7ea0607970b-pi.png "clip_image002[6]")
![clip_image002[8]](https://www.alexschultz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/6a00d8345161cc69e20120a7ea062e970b-pi.png "clip_image002[8]")
The Haiti earthquake generated an incredible response on Facebook. People were sharing information, organizing relief efforts, and donating money at an unprecedented scale. It was one of the first major natural disasters where social media played such a central role in the response. The speed at which information and aid coordination happened through Facebook was remarkable.
I came across this fantastic infographic showing how browser market share has changed over time. The rise and fall of Internet Explorer is really dramatic when you see it visualized this way. Chrome’s growth trajectory is particularly impressive. It’s a great reminder of how quickly technology landscapes can shift.
Looking at the Japanese search market is always interesting. In Japan, Google’s search results pages are notably more ad-heavy than in other markets, while Yahoo Japan takes a more minimalist approach. This is the opposite of what you might expect given the global perception of these brands. It’s a great example of how local market dynamics can create very different user experiences.
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.
Given google’s recently announced plan to factor site speed into it’s search algorithm in Q1 I decided to take a look at their new site speed tool in the Google labs section of the webmaster tools interface. The results are below.
Bottom line some really quick wins, kill the delicious button on every page of my paper airplane site that is harming my load time. Replace the old google analytics code with the new google analytics asynchronous snippet and get the whole site gzip compressed (am really bummed my shared hosting doesn’t do this already, seems an easy win).
Nice tool released by Google so you should all take a look at it and at least nail the quick wins. This will be a big deal in Q1 I am sure (although that being said caffeine as a whole is gonna be interesting).
The other interesting note today is here from search engine land google is now personalizing results for everyone with a google cookie. My search has gotten better and better thanks to this but as someone who worries about SEO I often look at the non-personalized results too. Personalized and non-personalized are diverging rapidly so really understanding user behavior and making your site compelling is growing more and more important.
Long term optimizing for user experience is key to maximize success in Google (site speed, low bounce rate etc…) and social media. I think it’s great that generating traffic and user satisfaction are coming closer and closer together.
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.
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.
