Alex Schultz: APIs

Context matters when thinking about mobile growth

I have written here plenty of times about my cocktail making and paper airplanes sites. I have also written in the past about the depressing truth of shrinking markets and about finally getting to the year of mobile in 2010. This is really important when I look at the growth of both of my websites.

Specifically the mobile internet is growing really, really fast but the desktop internet is slowing down and usage is transitioning to mobile. The interesting thing is that different topics lend themselves to mobile and to the web today. Paper airplanes and cocktail recipes make a really nice pair of examples for that:

When you look at paperairplanes.co.uk the mobile web is still a very small percentage (you probably want to sit at a computer screen/desk making these):

 

Whereas with cocktailmaking.co.uk the mobile web is already at 50% (you are probably in a bar or at a friend’s house and trying to figure out what to drink/how to make your favorite drink):

The same holds true when you think about what mobile OS you are optimizing for. In India it seems you’d be an idiot to spend a minute thinking about iOS whereas in the USA you’d be crazy not to have iOS as a top priority. Mobile is the future, it’s on a clear track to be the majority of all traffic to my websites but I should be focusing on mobile for cocktails whereas maybe, long term, paper airplanes is a dying business (perhaps I could fight off the increasing number of competitors in web SEO but I am not sure it’s worth it).

Great onsite merchandising by google

For another article I wrote on some deceptive content in my adsense units I took the following screen dump

I think this is great work by someone at Google and would love to meet whoever is responsible and learn from them. This ad is perfectly contextual and in the moment. I bet it has amazing response rates and probably drove a lot of growth for their webmaster tools. Also in general it reminds me of a great point from Andy Beal… people who visit your site via “allinurl:” or “site:” are probably webmasters and most likely competitors.

That data is useful :)

This disgusts me or maybe it just makes me sad

I am always looking for new ways to monetize my sites. I have 0.5MM users visiting monthly (give or take) but only make $10k’s a year. Not really a great ratio (according to my friends). As such I was interested to see what the following company was doing by buying adsense on my site.

I clicked through and got the following landing page with modal overlay.

For those of you who can’t see the text says “I accept the Terms & Conditions for $9.99/mo billed to my cell until I cancel for Access to How To Guides” and is clearly placed in a very hard to read font over an orange background. This sucks. They also do a really good job of retargeting you back to the article you were interested in if you close the browser and navigate to their homepage. The form too is super well optimized (in my opinion). Whoever does this is very good at what they do. Interestingly it seems the Google search index considers them spam, they are barely in it at all:

I can totally see how (were I to do this on paper airplanes and cocktail recipes how I could get rich quick. There is no question I could game this to get a few % conversion and even if everyone cancelled after one month I’d make 10ks a month. I just feel it’s pretty immoral and now I am making money off this and my users are getting deceived through adsense. This isn’t adsense’s fault, how are they supposed to police this and even then it’s borderline whether this is illegal/in violation of their terms or not.

Last year I deselected all deceptive ads from adsense and I recently ran the numbers on those. I think I cost myself $20k in the last 12months. That being said even with the following settings I couldn’t block the above ad:

I have now made “howtotutorials.net” a blocked site for my ads and I don’t blame adsense at all. To be clear it’s the recurring billing and minimized terms I dislike. I think it’s ok to say “pay me XX through your cell to view your content”, that’s a pay wall and raising one of those is your decision as a webmaster. I just feel sad that so much of advertising on the internet is like this. We should be better. I need a new business model.

Facebook ads Affiliate Summit 2010

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:

• http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/ - markus
• http://www.shoemoney.com/ - shoemoney
• http://www.purposeinc.com/ - dk
• http://globalizer.com/ - mark
• http://www.jimkukral.com/ – jim (our moderator)

Here are some totally self interested positive twitter comments a friend sent to me which I wanted to share:

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!

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.

Hope you found this interesting and if you did feel free to RETWEET THIS BY CLICKING HERE

The rise then fall and maybe rise again of my tattoo empire ;)

You have heard a lot on this blog about my cocktail making and paper airplanes websites. I also created a site on butterfly tattoos in 2003 after a friend at university said it was really hard to find ideas for tattoos. I set up the site as a sub directory on cocktailmaking.co.uk/butterflytattoos. It was a typical site for me, a seed of content from me and then all user generated content with users uploading their own photos of Tattoos. Of course now I see how small I was thinking back when I launched this since less than a year later Zuck, Dustin, Chris et. al. launched facebook ;) but I was proud of it and still am.

I rapidly optimized the site into the top 10 results for “butterfly tattoos” and then to #1 in UK and #3 in US. As you can see from this graph comparing butterfly tattoo search volume to cocktail recipes search volume it’s a reasonably big term.

The traffic also was really promising. The below graph shows the traffic on this site over time reaching a peak (and looking like it was still growing rapidly) in January-February 2006.

At that time I had just left the UK and started my first job in silicon valley and I took my eye off the ball. Universal search became more and more important so all the traffic that was coming from a raw ranking started to leach to images.google.com results and the traffic collapsed. At the end of 2007 (just before I started at Facebook) I decided to revive the site again. It has a lot of links and as you can see a little traffic too so I did a bit of work and started to revive it but then I joined Facebook and the impact of having a really hard job with high focus long hours and no days off in a week was pretty clear:

So zoom forward to today. My weekends are gradually becoming my own again (although I was still in the office all day Saturday) and I am playing around with my sites (as you can probably tell from reading this). So I am going to give it another try. I have migrated the site to onlinetattoodesigns.co.uk (so that if it recovers I can give it a broader scope) and create a sitemap, google verified, 301’d everything across and so on… initially I lost all my google rankings and traffic dropped still further but in the last week traffic has been growing. Maybe I have found a way to finally turn that corner and I’ll have a third great site on my list. Here’s hoping and below is the daily page views for the last month and a bit:

Bloat vs Lite

A few colleagues here at Facebook put together a product called facebook lite. It launched last week to great acclaim (so well done to them) and really set me thinking about bloat on my sites (clearly pretty irrelevant sites to compare to Facebook but bear with me).

My paper airplanes site is where I have focused so far. All the site does is show you how to make 27 paper airplanes. There are video and diagram instructions and you can vote on something as your favorite plane. That’s it. Somehow I bloated this into 90 different php scripts to run the site ignoring include files and so on. No wonder I got hacked (it happened again in February and I failed to notice) and always felt sick when it came to planning to update the site.

I dug in a bit deeper since a lot of the components had a tonne of emotional value to me as every single bit of the site was built by me from scratch and really it was this site and each of those features that helped me get into being an internet marketer.

Videos

I specifically created a section to make my users view more pages using video: for each paper airplane on the site I created a second page that contained an embedded video from YouTube rather than just including the video at the top of each paper airplane. I have reversed this decision now making it better for the users even if less page views for me. At this stage with all this burying still 3000 people a day are viewing these videos, they are better than the diagrams. This is my most compelling feature and is buried.

Unusual/Fast/Alex’s Favorites/Gliders

Together these made up <10% of my page views and yet were linked from the main pages. They initiated <5% of my visits and when I dug in it was just because from time to time they got ranked for the word “paper airplanes” instead of planes.php as the second, indented result from my site. With all the link love and real estate they get on my site if they can’t do better they are gone.

search

On every page on my site I link to a search product from atomz. wtf?! Initially I thought I had better install Google co-op then I thought I’d look at the data first. In the last year this page was viewed a total of 1000 times. What a waste of valuable real estate. On cocktailmaking.co.uk everyone needs to search and with a similar link 30-40% of my visitors use the feature. On paper airplanes with a total of 27 pages browse is easier and when presented with the option, no one uses it. Gone.

index.php

This had 20 links to different sections to browse paper airplanes as navigation, most of these sections are now gone. Now it has one large link to browse more planes and an embedded video to start viewing the planes on the homepage itself without going any deeper. I tried replacing it with the planes index itself and decided I didn’t like how it looked. I will ab test this in the coming weeks and share the results here.

paperairplanes.co.uk does one thing and does it well: show you how to make a paper airplane. It doesn’t take 90 php scripts to do that. It takes one page for each paper airplane and a couple of navigation pages. That is it.

Getting YouTube Videos Up Again

My parents bought me a flip mino camera for my birthday this year specifically so I could start filming and uploading YouTube videos again. My paper airplanes youtube channel gets around 1-2Million views a year growing at 50% year on year and has 500 subscribers. Yesterday I uploaded 3 new videos which within 7hours had 200views 15 ratings and 5comments, including this awesome comment

Whoa! Finally a new video! Nice. You were my first subscription ever. And sometimes I thought of unsubscribing. Recently actually. But I thought... what if he makes a new video. But I also thought it was 2 years since you did. But you did make a new video. It's awesome btw.

My goal is to build this video channel further. I have never done a minute of work to optimize it and have just used it as a vehicle to store videos for my website. I am going to turn every plane page on my site into a video page primarily and probably add more planes and then start to upload videos of me creating and flying stunt planes since those are pretty easy to do then see how far it is possible to get with a video channel and I will keep you all up to date. 10MM views a year takes 27k views a day or a little under 10x where I am today. Maybe I can do that, we’ll see.

Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits are very different. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)

I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

• Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
• When you address a whole market like a category of e-commerce it’s hard to figure out what  the total volume of searches truly are to get the potential addressable market. Sometimes it’s hard to even find all the keywords (esp. if you don’t own your own search)
• Even when you know what the market size is it’s hard to know what % of the potential listings you have if you are looking across a million or more keywords. What sample size should you look at to understand your total market for example?
• Duplicate content issues
• Every large company I know has or has had huge duplicate content issues either with ?ref=’s and ?src=’s etc… etc… and often for valid reasons where folks want to track things properly or change the ordering of a search result.
• Getting deep links at scale to 100MM's of pages
• Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
• Again sites like Yahoo or Craigslist or others have such traffic volumes they can’t really afford existing web tracking products and the free versions don’t scale well plus often you want custom views to understand demographic of traffic by keyword and cross multiple visits etc… this seems inevitably to lead to some kind of in house processing of huge data files.
• optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
• calculating the value of a given potential seo change
• often it’s a trade off of resources to make SEO changes but even the best SEO experts find it hard to put a precise value on kws in the URL vs the difference between 5 and 10% kw density and so on.
• The benefit of owning a huge media vehicle is you can calculate some of this… the detriment is you don’t have full control of the resources so may not get the chance to use them without a clear value of any change
• dealing with international
• wow, content localization especially around navigational terms like “shopping” when you even want to localize the URL can be tricky

So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.