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2005-2010 Historical YouTube Infographic

May 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Thanks to Website Monitoring for compiling all the data and then designing this very interesting YouTube infographic. Here are some of the highlights from the graphic:
  • YouTube was started by its founders in February 2005
  • Dec 2005 was the official launch date – 8 million videos were watched a day during this time
  • July 2006 – 65,000 Videos were being uploaded per day
  • June 2007 – YouTube launched in 9 countries
  • October 2008 – 15 hours of video uploaded every minute
  • July 2009 – 3D Launched
  • The most popular video on YouTube has been viewed over 185 million times
  • 70% of YouTube’s traffic comes from outside of the US

Filed Under: YouTube

A/B Testing Made Easy with Visual Website Optimizer

May 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you have ever done an A/B testing on your website or landing page, you would know how exciting is the prospect of finding out which variation is going to perform best. It is almost like a football game where you can’t tell until the end which team is going to win. But that excitement soon cools off once you actually get to create and implement an A/B test: creating different pages, fiddling with HTML code, integrating JavaScript page tags. And, finally waiting for developers and IT team to implement your simple A/B test. All the technical hassles associated with A/B testing terribly slow down the process and make it unexciting.

Making A/B testing dead-easy, Visual Website Optimizer is perhaps an answer to all these frustrations. The tool loads your website (or landing page) in a visual designer and then you can use a word-like WYSIWYG editor for creating test variations. Then select conversion goals for your test and you are ready to run an A/B test. The integration part is pretty simple too – all you need to do is to upload a small code snippet in your website once and then you can create unlimited number of tests from the tool without touching your website code ever again. This means that once the code goes into your website, you can create and launch tests in less than 5 minutes. Watch a short video below:


In terms of functionality, Visual Website Optimizer has interesting features for tracking and optimization. For example, you can select multiple conversion goals for your A/B and multivariate test. That is, you can measure how your test affects sales, bounce rate, signups – all goals at once. You can run targeted tests only on a particular visitor segment such as new visitors or visitors coming from a particular referral source. The tool also integrates with Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst and other web analytics platforms so that you can segment test results for deeper insights.

Their pricing plans range from $49/mo to $729/mo which is significantly more affordable than other enterprise testing tools such as SiteSpect, Webtrends Optimize and Omniture Test and Target (costing thousands of dollars per month). Even though it is a recent startup, they claim to have 1000+ users including some well known companies such as Microsoft, Rackspace and 99designs.com. As far as results are concerned, they have a couple of A/B testing case studies on the website where their users have seen 20-90% increase in sales and conversions.

You can sign up for their free 30-day trial to evaluate the tool yourself.

Filed Under: A/B Testing

Buzzom BlogAds – New Ad Platform

May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Sponsored Post
Buzzom BlogAds is a new tool in the online advertising market specifically targeted at bloggers. We find this tool interesting and have five reasons why it should be given a try.

Right place, Right thing: One of the core principles of advertising is to advertise at the right place at the right time. Most online ad tools advertise products on blogs which makes little marketing sense because readers don’t often have buying intentions. However when people visit blogs, they visit with the intention of reading something interesting. Imagine you advertising mashable on your social media blog. It makes sense, doesn’t it? So advertising blogs on blogs seems more logical. Online advertising just not advertising the right thing(using keywords), it’s the right thing at the right place.

Freedom of Choice : While most tools don’t give you choice or little information to help you choose as to who your advertisers are, Buzzom BlogAds gives statistics like Alexa statistics, daily visitors, etc along with the blog content helping you make the right choice. You will also get a preview of the blog along with relevant keywords to know if the blog is worth advertising on your blog.
No More Waiting: With most online advertising tools, publishers waste time waiting for the advertisers to knock their door. But Buzzom BlogAds counters this smartly through a unique offering, though Advertisement Grid Platform where bloggers can get more visitors through free mutual advertising. Using the Advertisement Grid Platform, bloggers can advertise other bloggers, earn impressions and use those impressions to get their own blog advertised. This helps get more readers.


Complete Transparency: One more thing with most advertising tools is how transparent their numbers are. While most online ad solutions give you the cumulative numbers, they rarely break them down to the individual level. However, Buzzom blogads stores a log which gives the details of where each click is coming from giving you a clear picture . So no more mysterious numbers. The picture below shows the log of impressions on Buzzom BlogAds.
Earn Money: And there is good amount of money too. Bloggers can convert their impressions into cash and withdraw once the they accumulate $30 into their paypal accounts.At present bloggers earn a flat rate of $6/1000 impressions while advertisers have different plans with starting from $10/1000 impressions and discounts on higher plans.
Filed Under: Advertising

Advanced Cross Domain Tracking in Google Analytics

May 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The Google Analytics team have released episode 9 of their analytics TV series. This time Nick and Avinash discuss:
  • Cross domain tracking when users right-click and open in a new window
  • How you need to think about Page Speed and Google Analytics
  • Best practices on upgrading to async tracking code
  • Best practices to report on cities in a particular state
  • Sending historical or futuristic data into Google Analytics

Filed Under: Google Analytics

Integrating 4Q and Google Analytics – The "What" and "Why"

May 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you’re looking to get more insight into your visitors’ online satisfaction and have no budget to throw at a full-blown solution, iPerception’s 4Q is a painless way to get started. 4Q also offers the ability to integrate with Google Analytics which helps combine the “What” with the “Why.” Below is a video showing a quick step by step on how to integrate these 2 free solutions.

Filed Under: Google Analytics, voice of customer, Web Analytics

Interview of Google's Maile Ohye – SES Toronto Preview

May 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Last week I caught up with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google (on the Webmaster Tools team). Maile will be keynoting SES Toronto in a couple of weeks with a presentation titled: Inside Google Webmaster Central. I was able to get a sneak peak on some of the topics from that upcoming session in my chat with Maile – read more about it below:

[Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position?

[Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our Webmaster Tools team includes a new release about every two months. Exciting! For site owners, this means new features for you every few months for the past 4+ years.

In each release, you’ve probably noticed that we aim to improve an existing feature (or our backend infrastructure), as well as release an entirely new feature. With DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once.

We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites.

In our improved Search queries feature, we aimed to help all site owners with access to impression and click data. Regardless of whether you’re a webmaster of a large ecommerce site, a cooking blogger, a large AdWords customer, or you’ve never heard of AdWords, every verified site owner has the capability to see data about their current potential visitors (impressions) and their actual visitors (clickthrough).

In terms of how to act on this data, one method is to find the queries where you’re receiving impressions but not getting clickthrough. Run those queries yourself from a searchbox and investigate why you’re not receiving visitors. How does your title and snippet look? Can you make your content more competitive?

With Search queries, you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan.

Features like Search queries’ average position were developed to provide you a quick-glance understanding of the performance of a given keyword. Additionally, if you only want to quickly track a certain set of keywords, go ahead and “star” them for a more simplified display (like you’d see in gmail).

[Manoj]: How has real time search been incorporated?

[Maile Ohye]: Real Time results are triggered in Universal Search from the following:

  1. Threshold queries based on volume and delta: This includes triggering queries like [Lost] to show Real Time results on premier/finale night. We algorithmically notice a large delta for this query compared to perhaps yesterday, or earlier in the week. When [lost] reaches a certain threshold, we understand that Real Time results may be most relevant for the user.
  2. Common queries for Real Time results: This includes political queries and the like — things that are constantly talked about and where freshness and/or a variety of sources may be helpful to the user.

Real Time information on Google is even better searchable. For certain queries, you can actually replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets.

[Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite?

[Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate HTML titles and meta descriptions (which are often used in your snippet).

This is actionable data. In getting a handle on whether your site has duplicate content, I’d first run a few site: queries, like [site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com microformats], to see if Google had serve-time filtered duplicate results. Next, I’d go straight to HTML suggestions. Pages with duplicate titles and snippets are likely complete duplicate content.

At SES New York a few months ago, I gave a more in-depth presentation on duplicate content, multiple sites, and how to address the issues. I’ll try to film that presentation in mid-June (when I’m back from the SES Toronto keynote), and I’ll write a related post on our Webmaster Central Blog just in case people find the information useful.

[Manoj]: For a brand new site, would a site owner see quicker indexation of their site with an XML sitemap vs. without?

[Maile Ohye]: An XML Sitemap is a great way to maximize your site’s exposure to our crawlers. Once crawled, your site can be indexed. Once indexed, your site can be returned to users in search results. So yes, submit a Sitemap if you can.

Furthermore, when you submit a Sitemap, Webmaster Tools then displays the number of URLs from your Sitemap that are indexed. Win-win.

[Manoj]: What types of improvements are you guys hard at work at?

[Maile Ohye]: As for improvements, Webmaster Tools Message Center is only going to get better. If you’re a verified site owner, I’d recommend setting up email forwarding of our messages. We currently notify site owners of certain violations of our webmaster guidelines, or when we crawl infinite spaces, or information about malware on their site.

Having a communication channel between us at Google and the opted-in, verified owner of a site has truly huge potential. Excitement mounts… music quickens… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Google, Search Engine Strategies

AdSense Revenue Share Explained

May 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you’re a publisher using Google AdSense on your website then you might be interested in reading the latest blog post from the AdSense blog which reveals Google’s revenue share model (AdSense for content and AdSense for search).
  • AdSense for content publishers make 68% revenue share worldwide, the rest is kept by Google (part of this share goes to: development of new technologies, products and features). For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40
  • Adsense for search partners receive a 51% share, with Google taking the remaining amount.

Over the next few months Google will begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.

Filed Under: adsense