Looking back at the revenue data for my sites over the past two years has been really interesting. I can see clear patterns in what drives revenue and what doesn’t. Seasonal trends are huge – cocktail searches spike in summer and around the holidays. Paper airplanes peak during school holidays. Understanding these patterns helps me plan content and optimization work more effectively.
I got annoyed at some of the ads on my site for a long time ago. They were mainly weight loss ads and they just seemed to be everywhere on the internet. I’ve now blocked them across adsense and I think it’s going to cost me a fair amount of money. I’ll report back on the financial implications but for me I just think these ads are misleading and I don’t want them on my sites any more.
My tattoo site has had quite the journey. It started growing really well, then hit some problems and traffic declined. Now I’m seeing signs of recovery. The tattoo niche is super competitive but there’s still good traffic to be had if you can differentiate yourself. I’m experimenting with some new approaches to content and monetization.
I recently migrated my paper airplanes site to a new domain and was worried about the SEO impact. The good news is that it looks like the migration is working. Google has started indexing the new domain and my rankings are slowly recovering. The 301 redirects seem to be passing authority properly. It’s still early days but the signs are positive.
YouTube has made some great enhancements to their Insights analytics tool. The data available to content creators is getting better and better. You can now see much more granular data about your viewers, where they come from, and how they engage with your content. This is really useful for optimizing video content strategy.
Chrome launched in 2008. 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.
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 and this growth is linear. This is a marketing driven product leveraged out of Google’s huge web audience promoting the browser.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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 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!
I was taking a little look at the top 100 sites on Quantcast yesterday.
One thing that really excited me was to see zynga.com and causes.com in the top 100.
The reason I was so stoked is that I think it’s an awesome sign for the power of Facebook that sites basically driven by Facebook can bust into the top 100. In many ways up until now you had to be driven by Google or entirely your own steam to get there. Now there is another awesome source of traffic on which to build a business.
Really nice to see.
This Friday I saw a nice spike in my Friday traffic to cocktailmaking.co.uk, the highest since Halloween and beyond that best since the summer cocktail period. I am excited the holiday cocktail season has begun.
I have included the traffic graph for my US traffic over the last two months. One really fascinating thing for me is that Halloween is now a really big cocktail period and the fun co-incides with the weekend due to the holiday. You can also see that Thanksgiving is great for cocktails, there is a really clear midweek spike for thanksgiving which doesn’t fit the normal periodicity of my traffic (saturday and sunday high, mid-week low).
When you compare that to the UK traffic you can clearly see no double spike around thanksgiving but everything else looking really similar (halloween is a little less pronounced).
I love looking at different countries and seeing how they vary and more importantly how similar they are. Much of my career I have talked to people who expound the differences between markets but so often with internet marketing countries are more similar than different.
I don’t think I am giving anything away when I say the facebook stats page at the start of 2009 said: 150MM users 50% of whom log in daily i.e. 75MM daily users and today says 300MM 50% of which log in daily i.e. 150MM daily visitors. Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Nielsen etc… tend to back this up. However Google trends for websites not so much.
I think there is some more work to be done here esp. since one of the largest sites on the web can have such inaccurate data on Google trends. This is a shame since I really think google trends for websites and adplanner are awesome tools and this makes me lose a little faith in them 🙁 That being said plain old Google trends data looks fine.
