Quantcast

StatCounter Adds IP Labeling


StatCounter has made yet another addition to their web analytics framework by adding the ability to label IP addresses that visit your site.

Here’s the offical post from the StatCounter Forum:


How this gives value to users:

- Help you identify click fraudsters
- Make it easier to see when “the competition” has visited your site
- Identify recurring visitors
- Let you see just how many times your mom has been admiring your site…

So no more spreadsheets, no more post-it notes, now you can name IP addresses which visit your site.

- Login to your account.
- Click the stats for your project.
- Click “Recent Visitor Activity”
- Click the new “Label IP Address”
- Give it a description and you’re DONE!

FeedBurner Adds Headline Animator Stats

FeedBurner has added to their publisher engagement metrics by expanding their Headline Animator service to include Headline Animator Stats


For the tens of thousands of you currently using FeedBurner’s Headline Animator service, you’ll notice a new “Headline Animator Stats” option on your Analyze tab. FeedBurner is reporting “Views,” the number of times your Headline Animator was requested and displayed on a web site, in a feed, in email or anywhere else (for example, in a feed via email that you’re viewing on a web page). This first step on content promotion metrics points out where people are most frequently seeing your content promotion widget. We have several more pieces of work on the Headline Animator front to finish off and then we’re going to start weaving together all of the content measurement pieces we provide into a unified engagement dashboard.

I have been using the headline animator in my email signature so it will interesting to eventually see the level of click throughs back to my blog.

Website Popularity Software

I was recently asked to review a product by Submit Suite called Website Popularity. Website Popularity basically tells a person how they are ranking on various measurements across the Internet. I was impressed with the speed at which it returns the data as well as the amount of metrics it returns. The cost is a one time fee of $50. This tool can be best used for many reasons:

- As a sales person who needs to provide a quick analysis for a prospect regarding their competitive landscape
- A strategist who needs to report on the ongoing performance of their SEO efforts
- A technical strategist who wants to take the exported results in order to create their own formula or performance grade.

Here are the metrics Website Popularity returns:

Pages Indexed

- AllTheWeb
- Altavista
- Google
- Inktomi/Hotbot
- Msn
- Technorati
- Yahoo

Inbound links (IBL)

- AllTheWeb inbound links
- Altavista inbound links
- Google inbound links
- Inktomi/Hotbot inbound links
- Msn inbound links
- Technorati inbound links
- Yahoo inbound links
- Alexa Linking websites

Popularity (PageRanks)

- Alexa rank
- Yahoo rank
- Google page rank
- Netcraft rank

Indexed pages

- Google’s indexed pages
- Yahoo! pages indexed
- MSN pages indexed
- Gigablast pages indexed
- Exalead pages indexed

Social taggings

- Del.icio.us bookmarks
- Digg.com mentions
- Reddit mentions

Important directories and site listings

- DMOZ links
- .EDU links
- .GOV links
- Wikipedia listing
- Yahoo Directory listing
- Google groups listing

Press and media mentions

- Google News
- Yahoo News
- Google blog presence
- IceRocket blog presence

SEO informations

- Domain visibility
- Domain visible from
- Actual IP

SEMPO Election Results

The newly-elected SEMPO Board of Directors for 2007 is:

- Chris Boggs, Avenue A/Razorfish
- Massimo Burgio, Global Search Interactive
- Fionn Downhill, Elixir Systems
- Dave Fall, DoubleClick Inc.
- Duane Forrester, Sports Direct Inc.
- Sara Holoubek, Free Agent Consultant
- Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
- Bill Hunt, Global Strategies International
- Kevin Lee, Did-It
- Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
- Tanya Rietze, Hewlett-Packard
- Dana Todd, SiteLab
- Dave Williams, 360i

Eight of the 13 members are returning as Board members from the 2006 group: Chris Boggs, Sara Holoubek, Gordon Hotchkiss, Bill Hunt, Kevin Lee, Jeffrey Pruitt, Dana Todd, and David Williams. The 13-member board will serve a one-year term. The new board will elect officers in March and have its first meeting during the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York City, April 10-13.

No Budget for Mobile and Video Advertising

SEMPO in conjuction with Radar Research and IntelliSurvey have recently completed a research study (the State of Search Engine Marketing survey) on the topics of Video and Mobile search adverstising. The study concluded that search marketers wanted to pay the same or less for Mobile/Video search advertising than traditional search marketing strategies.

Here are some key points found from the study:

- Two in five respondents say they want to pay the same for video search as they pay for traditional search advertising
- 66% of the respondents say they would be interested in contextually targeted advertising attached to video search results
- 53% say they are interested in video ads compared to 33% who indicated an interest in text only
- SEMPO survey reports that almost half of the respondents will not pay any premium for mobile search
- 60% of the respondents are interested in contextually targeted advertising delivered to mobile search users

Marketers simply don’t have the same comfort level and trust in the ROI with Video and Mobile as they do with traditional PPC advertising. I expect this comfort level to increase as we see more reliable testing with the Mobile and Video platforms.

Web Page Load Time

I have been experiencing slow website load times over the last little while so I thought I’d investigate and find out what the causes were.

The first tool I used was: Web Page Analyzer which has the ability to analyze all the various components and code blocks of a website. The main areas of importance include:

- Page load time at various Internet connection speeds
- The size and number of objects within the specified page
- Detailed Analysis explaining a list of recommendations.

My blog’s recommendations included compressing images, reducing the total number of images, optimizing JavaScript/CSS, reducing the number of scripts and reducing the overall size of the page.

Secondly I used: OctaGate which quickly showed the load times for every widget, script and feed item on the page. From its analysis I was able to determine that one of my alternate feeds coded in the meta tags was taking 4-5 seconds to load.

Both of these tools should be used frequently to monitor website load times because making your content readily available to your visitors is one of the most important things you can do.

Avinash Kaushik Challenges ClickTracks

Avinash Kaushik has challenged Web Analytics vendor ClickTracks to release more advanced features of their free analytics product: ClickTracks Appetizer. In exchange Avinash will be teaching next week’s ClickTracks Seminar: online marketing and web analytics techniques

Here is some background on the ClickTracks/Kaushik Challenge:

The Challenge
We were recently challenged by the author of Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik, to enable more features in Appetizer. The short story is that we agreed, but you might find the ‘why’ and ‘how’ to be interesting—and get a little view of the less-conformist thinking of ClickTracks’ marketing department.

The Dilemma
We’ve never hid the fact that Appetizer is primarily a learning tool and a very useful ‘taste’ rather than a comprehensive web analytics solution. We measure the success of Appetizer by how many people attend our free classes each month. It’s true. Folks who learn good web analytics practices tend to favor (or buy) ClickTracks’ more powerful products. However, if we enable too many features, Appetizer could conceivably eat into sales of our $19/month Analyzer service or our $295 Analyzer software product.

The Answer
So, like a good web analytics team, we decided to do a test. We’d enable the Site Overview in Appetizer for 90 days. After 90 days we’ll measure. If the growth rate of Analyzer continues uninhibited, and we see a spike in attendance in the online classes (in theory, more future buyers), then the Site Overview remains enabled. We also asked Avinash to teach one of the classes.

Personally I think this is a win/win situation. ClickTracks gets an expert Analyst to teach a class in exchange for the enabling of some extra features in ClickTracks appetizer (which is a bonus for end users).