All posts in Trackers

TapeFailure discontinues operations

by Ades on December 19, 2007 in Online Tools, Trackers with 1 Comment

TapeFailure.com that I blogged here is shutting down it’s operations. It was a nice online tool for usability and UI design testing. With this tool you could also track the behaviors of the users on your blog, since it can record people’s mouse movements and clicks in a video.

Email said:

Unfortunately, at the end of this month Tapefailure will be closing its doors. Why? Due to both lack of funding and a need to rebuild the system in a more stable manner.

The technology is definitely viable, but the current function of the Tapefailure system isn’t quite there yet. There are a number of things that need to be redeveloped and redesigned from the bottom-up.

During 2008, I will be working to rebuild Tapefailure with a stronger set of features, a new look, and a new name. I will also be looking to introduce even more innovative analytics methods in the new service.

I would like to thank all my customers for their continued support and patronage and I can only hope that you will join me again when the new service is launched.

Thank you,
Joshua Gross
Tapefailure Founder

Well, let’s hope Joshua comes up with an improved version of this service soon. Good luck Josh!

WP Plugin: BlogMetrics, stats snapshot on your dashboard

by Ades on December 17, 2007 in Trackers, WordPress with 5 Comments

BlogMetrics is a WP Plugin that displays a summary of your blog’s stats. Once installed it creates a submenu called Blog Metrics under your Dashboard.

It displays average number of posts per month, average number of words per post, average number of comments per post (without your own comments) and average number of words used in comments to posts.

The plugin also shows separate stats for different authors (if the blog has more than one author). I think that’s a great feature, it allows you to see the performance of each author (in terms of post length, comments, # of posts per month…etc). This could be useful to blogs like http://www.bloggingtips.com where there are many authors contributing to the blog.

Here is my stats

As you can see below, now I am writing longer posts than before 534 words per post, compared to 203 words per post before (stats goes back to 2005, I used to write short posts then). Readers are also writing longer comments now, average 177 words per comment compared to 73 words per comment before.

The stats shows 2 authors (above) because in the middle of this year when I went for a holiday, the blog was guest-blogged by one of the users (his status was set to author during this time).

Plugin page: http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/blog-metrics/

BlogRush bans 10,000 blogs from its system

by Ades on October 24, 2007 in Online Tools, SEO & Promotion, Trackers with 7 Comments

BlogRush had removed over 10,000 blogs from its system. This is one of the many measures that has been taken by Reese to make this struggling but promising project into success.

Previously it has been suffering very low click-through rates. People were reporting some 0.0XX click-through rates. (and some even 0.00917).

From Reese’s last post, this move should reflect in better click-through rates for all the blogs in the network in general, and it will also improve the quality of the blogs in the network. Because you won’t be seeing any posts from these 10,000 blogs anymore… and that means (hopefully) you will only see better posts in the widget (see top-left widget – are the posts good enough in the widget?).

Did you receive this email?

If you have received the following email, then your blog is one of the blogs that was not banned.

But if you didn’t… or if you got a different email, then don’t be upset. The good thing is that, you can re-apply for inclusion. Just login to your account and follow the instructions provided.

If your blog is banned then you will also notice that the widget won’t show on your blog anymore.

Will I be using the Widget?

I do not think I will be using the BlogRush widget just yet. Because some of the things I would like to see changed in BlogRush widgets have not been incorporated yet. Particularly, the look and feel customization and size customization options.

BlogRush ‘n’ you… so far

What is your opinion on BlogRush? Have you signed up for it? Have you passed the latest quality audit? If yes, are you more optimistic that you will get more clicks now? How BlogRush has been performing in general for your blog? Has your blog been banned? If yes, are you angry, upset…? Please share your thoughts…

45n5′s Top100, will it become the next ranking system?

by Ades on October 20, 2007 in Advice to Businesses, Trackers with 3 Comments

Mark Wielgus of 45n5.com had made a Top100 List of Making Money Online blogs few weeks ago. His list easily became very popular, it was a perfect linkbait. Next thing you know, it is hosting some 200+ blogs in his list.

I do get quite a number of visitors from his list, 413 to be exact, to this day since he launched his toplist.

Visiting his toplist today, I noticed that he had made some changes (improvements) to his toplist. He added a screenshot of each blog beside the blog name.

And he also added few widgets that show your 45n5 rank (3 widgets). Here is one of the widgets (see left) for my blog. While the widget designs could be greatly improved, I think they are great ideas. Unfortunately I don’t think I will be displaying them on this blog, there are too many things on the blog already ;)

45n5 as an independent rank system in the future

I would like to see Mark add more features to his toplist and make it as an independent rank system in the future. Just like LinkWorth’s LinkRank, it could come up with its own ranking system. (45n5 %, maybe?) Which could rank blogs based on their Technorati, PageRank, RSS Subscribers, Compete …etc data.

Who knows maybe it would become one of the reliable ranking systems for both advertisers and bloggers in the future. Since everybody seem to get their PageRanks demoted these days, it will be a lot easier for them to adopt a new system. And it is also a right time for Mark to promote his toplist as an alternative, full fledged ranking system for not only “Make Money Online” blogs but for all blogs in the blogosphere.

What do you think?

RankWidget – Alexa, PR, Technorati and Yahoo backlinks widget

by Ades on October 9, 2007 in Trackers, WordPress with 6 Comments

RankWidget.com will create dynamic buttons as shown to the above. You can create PageRank, Alexa, Technorati and Yahoo backlink buttons. There are many different designs of buttons for each category.

I used to use Jon’s Showoff Rankings plugin for WordPress, but lately it was having problems, so I removed it until it gets fixed. Jon said he is already working on it. Currently I see that Alexa stats is still showing zero, you can see the plugin on his blog.

Increase your AdSense earnings by 200% with MyBlogLog.com

by Ades on September 29, 2007 in Articles, Blogging Tips, Make Money, Trackers with 24 Comments

Talking about the catchy titles… doesn’t 200% sound catchy enough? Now that I have your attention, let me promote some affiliate program instead. ;) Just kidding, the fact is, my earnings did increase by more than 200%, hear me out.

MyBlogLog is a great service to see your daily traffic summary. It displays three crucial information:

Where did people come from? (Displays 10 highest traffic-source to your blog)
What pages they viewed? (Displays 10 most viewed pages of your blog)
What links they clicked? (Displays 10 most clicked links for the day)

These information is displayed every day, and the stats are available for the past 7 days. By regularly looking at them, you will notice that there is a trend in your stats. That is – some pages appear every day among the most viewed top 10 pages. In my case, 7 out of 10 are the same pages that appear as the most viewed pages every day.

What does that mean?

That means, MyBlogLog is begging you to make some changes to those pages. It’s asking you to optimize them for AdSense (or any other publisher program that you use). It’s saying “these pages have the highest traffic, but you are not making use of it”.

How to make use of these pages?

I don’t really use AdSense that much on this blog, most of the time it’s just one image ad (200×200) at the right column. But after I noticed these stats, I had to include few ad-units on those popular pages. And the result? Earnings increased by more than 200%. See the screenshot below:

I know the figures are not much, that’s because I am not really monetizing this blog with AdSense. But earning more than $10/day from 10 blog posts is definitely better than earning $2.94/day from the whole blog.

What pages are they?

One of them is this post “Earning 70K by 17 years of age, whateverlife.com”, it’s getting around 200 views every day. Most of the traffic comes from Google when people search for whateverlife. My page comes on No.3 spot at the moment.

Previously this page didn’t have any AdSense ads. There was only one Google image ad, on the right column. If you look now, it has 2 ad-units inside the content, and 1 link-ad unit at the end of the content. Also whateverlife’s url has been changed to normal text, and that increased clicks on the ads.

By the way, inserting link-ad at the end of the post, did increase the earnings by 100%. So the lesson here is, mix and match. And test, test and test!

Why MyBlogLog?

Simply because I check MyBlogLog community very often, and while I am at it, I can quickly scan my stats.

Yes, there are many other very sophisticated tracking tools that I use, but I simply do not check them everyday. Maybe once or twice a month only. And that makes it difficult to detect most viewed pages, and most clicked links for day, as well as for the last 7 days.

Most Popular Posts â‰ Most Viewed Posts for the day

Please note that, most viewed pages are different from most popular posts. Most popular posts are not necessarily the pages that are getting the highest pageviews at the moment. They might have the highest total pageviews (since you started your blog), but in order to find the highest viewed pages for today and yesterday, you should use MyBlogLog or check your other stats tool daily.

But obviously, you should monetize your most popular posts too. No doubt about it. What I want to point out here is that, daily most popular pages might change from week to week. Since you will be posting different topics every day. Therefore, it’s important to know and detect these pages. And while they are popular, you should seize the opportunity and monetize them!

P.S If you haven’t subscribed to my RSS, you really should! subscribe here.

BuiltWith.com – find out what technologies the site uses

by Ades on August 17, 2007 in Online Tools, Trackers with 1 Comment

Do you want to know what technologies particular blog/site is using? If yes you should try BuiltWith.com, it gives you all the details. Here is the result for my blog, click here.

In their own words:

BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool. Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can find on the page. BuiltWithâ€™s goal is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using which may help them to decide what technologies to implement themselves.

BuiltWith technology tracking includes widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress, Blogger), advertising (DoubleClick, AdSense), CDNs (Amazon S3, Limelight), standards (XHTML,RSS), hosting software (Apache, IIS, CentOS, Debian) .

Thanks to Arstan for sending in this url.

Check your blog stats and comments offline

by Ades on June 14, 2007 in Trackers with 1 Comment

Snoop is a stand-alone application that is developed by Sean of reinvigorate.net. Reinvigorate is a web tracking service that is currently in free and in beta, I had blogged about it here.

So Snoop is like an add-on to your reinvigorate account. Since it’s a software, it sits on your desktop and tracks referrers to your blog, tracks comments, and it can also track purchases. To use this software you need to register account with reinvigorate first.

I like the idea of tracking comments with an application, in one place. This is especially useful if you are running more than one blog or site.

However, Snoop is very new and it has few features. I am sure Sean will add more features in the future. http://www.reinvigorate.net

Pingdom.com – Free website loading-time test tool

by Ades on June 12, 2007 in Online Tools, Trackers with 14 Comments

Pingdom is a nice tool to test your website’s loading-time. In reference to the post below, I have tested the blog with and without Nuffnang scripts. And guess what, Nuffnang scripts increased the loading time more than 100%.

From the test results I saw that Nuffnang for some reason kept referring back to their server, with multiple connections. Whereas advertlets’ script had only one connection and loaded pretty fast. See below:

If you are using Nuffnang script on your blog, you might want to check it too.

Get your own heatmaps for your sites

by Ades on May 20, 2007 in Screenshot Takers, Trackers with 5 Comments

This heatmap to the left was generated from 2,228 visits and 1,263 clicks from my site at adesdesign.net. I have used CrazyEgg’s free service.

With the free plan you can track up to 5,000 visitors and have 4 different URLs or sessions. The basic plan costs you $9/month, you can track 10,000 visitors and have 10 different URLs or sessions. If you have only one site, free plan should be enough to get the idea about your visitors and where they are clicking on your site.

Heatmaps are a great way to visualize the clicks, you can track them on your own by other scripts or counters but you won’t get this kind of information. With heatmaps you know exactly (you can see it) which part of your website is working and which ones are not. In my case here, I was glad to know that my promotional banner is working great.

Making Money

Once you get your heatmap, you can see where the users are clicking the most. And this information is vital for publishers who are serving ads from GoogleAdsense, because you want to place your publisher ads near to this (hot) region. This region gets the most attention, therefore placing your ads near to it will get better visibility for them, and hopefully that will generate into more clicks. (Please make sure that you do not violate the Google program policy when placing your ads, otherwise that check might stop coming).

http://crazyegg.com

Testing User Interface of a site with TapeFailure.com

by Ades on May 18, 2007 in Trackers, Usability with 1 Comment

For a normal webdesigner testing the user interface (UI) of the website or the usability of the site is very difficult. Because it costs a lot. First of all you need a lab with at least few PCs, and then you need to find people to test your newly designed site. And you need additional people to observe/record every user’s mouse movements and eye tracking. All these will cost you money.

Fortunately, there is a tool that can do this for free (at least for 7 days). After which the basic account will cost you $8/month. It can’t do the eye tracking, but it can record the users mouse movements while he/she is on your site. It will also show (ripple effects) when the mouse is clicked.

Yesterday I signed up and installed it in my blog, tracked for one day and went through few of the recorded sessions. I should say, it was pretty boring. ;) Since it’s a blog, there is nothing much going on. People are just reading and scrolling the page – not much of clicking or mouse activity is going on.

This will be good to implement in websites (not blogs), and especially eCommerce sites. Because you want to see where the users will click first (you want to test if your promo banner is attracting users attention or not). You want to test the User Interface – to test if the users are clicking on where you want them to click (intended design).

TapeFailure will allow you to record 1 out of every 2, 3, 4 and 10 users. This will allow you to get sampled data, if you have a high traffic site.

You can play the recorded sessions directly inside your account or download them for later viewing. Player allows you to speed up or slow down the viewing. You can also specify your own (or other) IPs from being tracked in the members area.

This was not a paid review. I just thought it could be useful to many of you out there, so I reviewed it. I am sure it will be useful for myself on my other projects.

Clicky – Web2.0 stats service for your blog or site

by Ades on May 17, 2007 in Trackers with 10 Comments

If your blog or site receives less than 1,000 page views a day, then you can use this service (GetClicky) for free. If you have a high traffic site, then the monthly price for the service is about $2.00/month (which is I think very very reasonable).

Before you sign up for the service you can see it in action at the demo site here. I think overall it’s a pretty good service. I am sure they will be adding more features as the time passes.

However if you want a more detailed pro stats service you should check xtreme tracking. It’s also free, but if you want to have a non-public account then it will cost you $4.50 a month. I have been using xtreme tracking for years now. And I should say it’s one of the best.