SEM
Make Money With Twitter (And Other Social Media)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 | Affiliate, Business, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter, Utilities | 3 Comments
Interested in making money on twitter.com & other social media sites? Here’s something I was recently sent:
There’s a new CPC Advertising site called adjix. Available for both advertisers and publishers, it takes long URLs and converts them into a shorter format similar to tinyurl or shorl. The only catch is when a user clicks on the link, they’ll see an advertisement in the top of their screen. The best news is, you decide what category of advertisement it shows. You’re also provided two separate types of short-urls:
Here’s an example link (in the technology category):
One of the great things about this service that sets it a part from all the other URL-Shortening services is that it provides you with user information on anyone that follows your link. It even shows the IP & hostname of the user!
Another key feature of adjix is that they give you the ability to use your own domain instead of theirs!
What does that mean? Say goodbye to http://adjix.com/fp9p and hello to http://links.brentter.com/fp9p! All it took was an easy DNS change and voila, the affiliate link no longer looks like an affiliate link.
Also, if you just wanted to use this URL-Shortening service but did NOT want to display any ads, they have recently launched a no-ad version of adjix! You can find more information about that here.
There’s a long list of categories available for you to choose from as well.
Here’s a sample:
This is the start of a whole new breed of CPC advertising opportunities. Should be interesting to see what comes out next!
Free Website-Blog Analytics - What should you use? Google Analytics vs. Clicky
Monday, August 25th, 2008 | Marketing, SEM, Site Information, Tools, Utilities, google | 1 Comment
Website analytics are key to any successful website. If you are trying to increase traffic to your blog or website then you’re probably using some form of tracking software. Now in the free/cheap market there are a lot of choices. Over the years I’ve used a variety of different services and/or software to track visitors to my websites however I always tend to gravitate back to two specific programs - Google Analytics and Clicky.
Every now and then I get an email asking me what analytics service is “better” or which I’d recommend for their website. This post should answer those questions as I try to compare key features of the two services in a head-to-head matchup. Let’s get it on!
Google Analytics vs. Clicky:
(Disclaimer: I’ve only reported on features that make the two services unique from each other, each service has a lot of shared functionality)
Google Analytics
Cost: FREE
Users: Unlimited
Websites: Unlimited
Traffic Limitations: 5 Million Pageviews/Month (Removed if you’re an active AdWords customer)
Works without Javascript? NO
Affiliate Program: No
Reports: PDF, XML, CSV, TSV
Latency (How often is it updated): 1-24 hours
Goal/Conversion Reporting - The ability to setup goals/conversions to record specific visitor actions (i.e. filling out a form). You can then segment your conversion goals based on any number of variables including Geography (i.e. how many people from Pasadena filled out the form).
Adwords Integration - Yes. You can link-up your AdWords account to any website for automated integration. The non-adwords PPC tracking is great although sometimes it can be unreliable.
Email Reports: Custom reports that will trigger at specific time/days (i.e once a month).
Visitor Data - You can see the connection speeds of your visitors, this can help you determine what type of content you can display without increasing load-times for your users.
Clicky Web Analytics
Cost ($ is per month): FREE (3 sites/1k daily pageviews), $4 (3 sites/10k daily pageviews), $9.99 (10 sites/30k daily pageviews), $16.99 (20 sites/50k daily pageviews)
Users: Unlimited (by enabling “Public Access”)
Websites: Depends on plan, see above
Traffic Limitations: Depends on plan, see above
Reports: CSV, XML and JSON
Latency (How often is it updated): Real-time
Email Reports: Yes. Sent at a user-defined action (date/time, # of visits, etc..)
Works without Javascript: YES
Affiliate Program: Yes
Custom User Tracking - Yes. Clicky lets you give your users custom names, tracking their every visit to your website in an easy to review “User” page.
Real-Time Statistics - Yes. Spy lets you view real-time statistics of visitors currently on your website.
Traffic Sources - Segments out social media and email sources - View all visitors who came from a social media website (twitter, Stumbledupon, Facebook, etc..) or from a link found in an email.
Visitor Information - Clicky can automatically convert visitor IP’s into hostnames (e.g. comcast.net) and Organizations (e.g. Microsoft Corp).
Whitelabel: YES (You can setup your own white-label version of the tracking software to sell to clients)
Developer API: Yes. You can pull just about any data/statistics from your account via their API.
Extras: Clicky sponsored widgets (for your own tracking and for public bragging rights), official WordPress plugin, integrated with FeedBurner RSS stats and the ability to get any statistics via a customized RSS feed.
Things both Google Analytics and Clicky share:
Which should I choose for my website or blog?
- Small blog with no affiliate or PPC marketing: Clicky
The free version of Clicky is a lot easier to use for small website publishers. If you don’t have a need for advanced user or source segmentation, then there’s no real need to use Google Analytics. You can also use the SPY feature to view real-time visitors on your site.
- Medium-Large website or blog with PPC or other marketing campaigns (visitor generating): Google Analytics
Until Clicky implements campaign tracking, Google Analytics will win if you’re trying to track multiple PPC campaigns.
- Medium size website or blog with affiliate or other 3rd party advertising (revenue generating): Clicky
This was a tough choice. They both are great in tracking the path that users take on your website, which is useful in seeing at what point in the visit are they clicking on your advertising/affiliate links. While Google may give you the ability to track specific actions as Goals, it only allows for 5 and because of its reporting latency, makes it not a viable source for account purposes. Clicky won because of its ability to track and tag visitors. You can take the users who clicked on your advertising and put them in a custom group, giving you detailed analytics on their demographic.
- Large website or blog (regardless of whether or not it has advertising): Google Analytics
Clicky’s Professional service can be expanded to work on websites that get up to 300,000 daily page views, however by then you’re paying enough to go with a more detailed reporting service like WebTrends, ClickTracks or Urchin 6 (There’s also Omniture, who makes a variety of different tools but is also very expensive!). Google Analytics also offer a more robust campaign segmentation compared to Clicky.
To note: Both of these programs use either Javascript and/or image tracking to report website traffic. There are a lot of free log analyzers available that can give you a different view on your website visitors. It’s always a good idea to use both a back-end log analyzer, like Awstats or Webalizer, in conjunction with one of these services. A log analyzer won’t give you as much information as products like Google Analytics or Clicky can, but it will report on ALL the visitors to your site, regardless of whether or not they have javascript enabled.
Flash Files (.swf) Now Searchable!
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Adobe, Business, News, SEM, Yahoo, google | No Comments
Adobe has just announced that they have teamed up with Google and Yahoo! to help improve the way in which search engines catalogue .swf files.
According to their press release:
Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what’s inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.
Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are possible only with Adobe Flash technology without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community, which will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.
This is BIG news to put it lightly. Flash files have always been partially searchable via Google, but now there is no doubt as to what content is picked up by the spider. This was a great move on Adobe’s part, most likely fueled by growing competition in the form of Microsoft’s Silverlight. See, working in an open-market does have it’s benefits!
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