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4Q iPerceptions

Are visitors to your website completing the tasks they set out to do? Are they leaving happy?

I didn't know the answer to that one either. In general I write stuff in the best way I can and then measure the results using Google Analytics. If a page has a high bounce rate, that may be a Bad Thing, and if the time spent on a page is low, then that may also be Bad.

But traffic statistics don't reveal visitor intent, or satisfaction for that matter. They don't measure emotional response. A particular visitor may have returned 10 times in a week (wow!) but that doesn't mean they love your material. It may mean that they've been struggling to (and failing to) find a certain piece of information numerous times! They may be on the verge of cutting their own throat in frustration. The stats don't always give the full picture.

But visitor feedback does. Or at least a better picture.

4Q provide a means of getting this valuable feedback from your visitors via a free service that delivers visitor surveys. I'm going to show you just how illuminating visitor surveys can be by using one of my sites (not this one) as an example.

Signing up to their service is free, and once membership is sorted out, you get to create your own survey. This survey is shown to only a certain proportion of the visitors to your site and is designed to determine what they came for, whether they got it, and what their overall experience of your site was. Damning stuff!

4Q Survey Questions

It's a simple survey we get to set up with 4Q and it's broken down into four questions:

  1. What was your overall experience of my site (1 - 10)?
  2. What was the purpose of your visit?
  3. Did you get what you wanted?
  4. Open ended question depending on whether the visitor got what they came for:
    • If not - why not?
    • If so - what was the best bit?

As you can see, this is a very simple survey. The results are like platinum plated penguins though. Err.. valuable.

4Q Results

I put a 4Q survey on one of my sites half way through February 2010. In February the site received around 6,000 unique visitors whereas in the last 30 days the site received 15,000. There were 316 respondents, so you can see that it's not every visitor that gets the survey and not everyone responds to it.

The results of the survey reveal some interesting insights. Check this out:

Purpose Of Visit

Wow! This month, 22% of the respondents (note that this may or may not be representative of all my visitors) came to my site to buy something! Woo hoo! You know what that means? Maybe I can sell them something!

This is a valuable insight. This tells me that some visitors arrive with their buying shoes on.

Suddenly, however, the hurtful truth arrives.

Task Completion Over Time

12% of this month's respondents didn't get what they came for. That's a shame. If they had left their contact details, I would send them flowers. Is a 12% failure rate a Bad Thing? I don't know. It's not as good as a 100% success rate, that's for sure, but that's the unobtainable goal. Maybe further investigation of the survey results will shed some light on why those people failed to complete their tasks. Do you see the way that the "NO" rate is decreasing over time? Could this increase in task completion be caused by the increase in articles on this site? In February there were 23 published articles but there are now 35.

Let's move on to task completion by purpose of visit. Up to this point, I had been trusting customer feedback to be an accurate reflection of "what really happened". But just look at this:

Task Completion By Purpose Of Visit

Apparently, 86% of my visitors succeeded in buying a product on my site this month.

Even though I don't sell products on my site...

To me, this can mean one of three things:

  • my respondents are babbling like baboons on the pop
  • they mistakenly think they bought something
  • they misunderstood the question.

I do display Adsense on this site, so maybe they clicked on an ad and bought something that way.

Let's now look at overall satisfaction by purpose of visit:

Satisfaction Over Time

75% of the people who came to my site to buy a product left satisfied! What are these people buying?! This site does generate a lot of Adsense revenue, so maybe these product hungry visitors are clicking on ads and buying things. The lowest satisfaction level is for this month for people who came to read an article or to find a solution to a problem: 57%.

Why is this figure so low, and indeed, is it so low that we need to worry about it? Most of my traffic is from the search engines so this raises some interesting questions about the match between what my visitors searched for and the page that the search engines displayed. If people are searching for green bananas and my page for pink cravats is turning up, I have a problem.  I'll need to check the search terms that bring the most visitors and see what pages get returned. What about the links to my site from other sites: are they setting expectations about my site that aren't met? If the anchor text in those links to my site is "monkey milk", the visitors that arrive via those links won't leave satisfied (my site isn't about monkey milk). So that's another thing I can check.

The last section is very, very useful. Open ended commentary by segment allows visitors to give feedback about what stopped them completing their tasks on the site, or what they valued most about the site if they managed to complete their tasks.

Open Ended Commentary

Many of the comments that were made don't help us. Some of the less useful comments are:

  1. It is easy to follow directions
  2. Good
  3. Very useful
  4. etc

These don't give us actionable insights. We need something that tells us we need to improve the site, and hopefully - how. The 11th comment I read is a revelation:

I was unable to find the xxx tools in xxx. You showed me where they were hiding! Now I'm trying to find how to insert a yyy like the one in the zzz. Still looking. Great site!

This is a really useful comment. I'm not interested in what the visitor liked or what they succeeded in doing (although that does give me a warm glow), I'm interested in what the visitor wants but didn't get! Look - they want to insert a yyy like the one in zzz. This information is like gold dust because in telling me their precise requirements, this visitor makes it easy for me to make them happy. All I need to do now is create a page that explains how to insert a yyy like the one in zzz. And if doing so makes this one visitor happy, the chances are it will make others happy too.

If I had this visitor's postal address, I would leather bind the article and send it by courier to them.

If I had the address of the visitor who left the following comment, however, I'd send my Mum round to box their ears.

Nothing,because you are gays,a gang of bitch,i hate you all pet of your boss GO SHIT RIGHT NOW

No actionable insights there.

Moving down the list, we find that the more useful comments will be left by the people who didn't complete their intended task.

Still not understanding how to use the xxx. just started to use this xxx. not very easy to use for a first time user

This is great. I need to be clearer when I explain how to do xxx.

I want to know how to xxx

Fantastic - a clear instruction about what the visitor wants that is missing from my site.

I have slow internet access, also i was not able to find what i was looking for

Not able to find what they were looking for? Are they saying my navigation sucks?! You know, they've got a point. All I've got at the moment is a dry looking list of links. They're not even categorised! What I will endeavour to do is include links at the bottom of articles that suggest related material. Also, I think I'll provide eye catching signposts to the more important/popular pages on the site. Good comments!

Your xxx instructions are hopelessly wordy and complex. Your "help" searches are incompletely indexed. I have spend a half hour trying to figure out hot to access the yyy, and still have not found an answer. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME FOR YOUR USERS!

Oh dear. My articles are hopelessly wordy and complex. Boo hoo. This is compelling evidence that video is needed to supplement the written articles. I had planned to provide some video content at some point, but it seems the sooner I get round to that, the better.

No information on the xxx features. Even just searching for yyy turns up anything but an overview of that zzz and its xxx.

Estupendo! I have no idea what this visitor is talking about! But give me an hour and I will, and I will then start writing stuff that helps them.

I'm looking for a xxx to make yyy into zzz for quality

I know exactly what this visitor wants and it should be pretty easy to give it to them.

There are many more useful comments like these, but I won't bore you with those. You get the picture. With feedback like this, you can no longer use "writer's block" as an excuse when trying to create new content. Just give 'em what they ask for!

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By admin – May 20, 2010

WebStandards.org Noscript Trickery

Check out this video that details how a 6 month old site achieved a PR8 on its homepage.

Apparently, some hacker added links to their site hidden by <noscript> tags on multiple high PR sites.

Naughty naughty!

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By admin – May 12, 2010

A/B Testing Adsense

Woah! I just picked up a very useful tip to help you A/B test your Adsense performance. Recently, I was invited by the Google Adsense team to attend some webinars for "high performing websites". The fact is, I set up a company to handle my website revenue and transferred my high performing sites to the new company, so it was no surprise that those sites started generating substantial amounts of revenue very quickly. I guess a "new" publisher generating this kind of revenue triggered some kind of alert, and the email arrived.

The webinar tutorial I've just watched has provided some useful tips on how you can test different ad setups. I thought I would share it here so that all you internet entrepreneurs may benefit from the goodness too.

Why Test Your Adsense Setup

Why is it important to test? It's the only way to optimise your revenue. You may have an Adsense setup that performs brilliantly, but how do you know you can't improve your CTR? This is where testing comes in. The following will allow you to test different ad formats to find which one performs the best.

What we are aiming to do is present to your website visitors an equal share of two different Adsense blocks. That means for every 1,000 page impressions, 500 will show Adsense block A and the other 500 will show Adsense block B. Each block might have a different colour scheme, size etc. Whatever property is in your control, you can vary between the two blocks.

There are two requirements. We need to:

  • create two different Adsense blocks with their own unique appearance - and their own channel (important!)
  • figure out a way to present each one only half the time

With a bit of javascript magic, we can achieve this with:


<script type="text/javascript">
var random = Math.random();
if (random < 0.5) {
<!-- put Adsense Block A here --> }
else
{
<!-- put Adsense Block B here --> }
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>

Fantastic! This code will generate a random number between 0 and 1 and if that number is less than 0.5 it will display your first Adsense block, and if it's greater than or equal to 0.5 it will display the second. On average, each block will be displayed for the same number of page impressions i.e. 50% of the time.

After a certain amount of time has elapsed, you can then compare the performance of Adsense unit A with Adsense unit B via their channels.

You don't need me to tell you to stick with the higher performing Adsense unit!

Old School Testing

In the past, the way I'd tested different formats of Adsense was to let one run for a month, then reformat it and let the new ads run for another month. After two months I would have a good idea which one was performing better. The downside to this clumsy method is that you have to wait two months (or whatever arbitrary time period you choose) to elapse before you get your results. The beauty of the above method is that you get realtime results - i.e. you always have a "current" comparison available. And you can let that test run for as long as you want without having to swap the Adsense codes around.

I'm about to implement this on that dead site I bought in December 2009 and then renovated. The current Adsense performance on that site is better than I ever could have hoped for. But beware of complacency! Don't be satisfied with "good" performance. Strive to achieve magnificent performance by testing different Adsense formats!

Give me a month and I'll get back to you with the results.

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By admin – April 13, 2010

Competitive Research

I don't usually do research on my competitors. In fact, I don't usually know who my competitors are. I generally don't care. I simply publish content I'm proud of and try to maximise the things I can, like traffic and the profit that my sites make. However, I'm not one to look a gifthorse in the mouth either. I love free, useful  information, and I'm so very nosy. I don't go looking for competitive research information, but if someone presents it to me, I'll take a look. A good look.

One of my sites is in the same niche as another very popular site run by an "internet marketer". As well as running the site that competes with mine, he also runs an internet marketing blog. I don't often read blogs, but for some strange reason I found myself reading his blog today. In one post he boasts that an article he wrote for That Niche Site (the one that competes with mine), that took a matter of minutes to write, receives a nice round 500 unique visitors a day. Nice!

But hold on. This site is in my niche. What if those tasty 500 uv/month are arriving mostly via the search engines? If I could only figure out what keywords he is targeting with that article, maybe I could get in on the action too! If he can spend 5 minutes writing a huge traffic pulling post, then I'll spend 10 minutes on mine!

Here's what I did. Using semrush I was able to type in this guy's domain, and find the top keywords that it ranks for. Bingo! Using the Google Keyword Tool, I dicovered that the top two keyphrases each attract more than 20,000 searches per month, and one of his pages ranks #1 and #5 for those two phrases. And those phrases are not competitive. These two search phrases must be the ones pulling the traffic, and the page that ranks highly for them must be the one he's boasting about. Let me tell you - that page is nothing to write home about. I know that I can easily target these terms myself, rank highly and hopefully increase the traffic to my site.

One thing's for sure. You need to be very careful with the information you divulge on the internet. This guy was particularly careless because in his boastful IM post he even links to the site that has the magic traffic pulling article.

I haven't had time to create content for those phrases yet, but I will soon. I'll set a date: one month after I publish this content, I'll disclose here the traffic that it receives. Deal?

Other tools that find the keywords a site ranks for are:

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By admin – April 4, 2010

Multiple Adsense Accounts

If you need a separate account for your business, Google have this to say (from the same link, above):

In this case, you may submit a new application. Please make sure that the account type (individual or business) and payee name are different from your original application, and ensure that you can accept payments to that payee.

For each company with an account, you need to make the payee the name of the company and create bank accounts for that company (which you will be doing anyway).

I've had some success with Adsense. OK, it took me years to build my Adsense revenue to that point, but when that point came it made sense to incorporate a company to handle the income that my sites generate. Of course, after setting the company up I needed to create an Adsense account in the company's name. Hence the question.

The company is doing really well.

But get this. After I set the company up and created the Adsense account for it, I started transferring my most lucrative sites to the company account first. I've currently got 3 high earners there. I've just received an email from Google inviting me to particpate in a 4 week programme for "high potential accounts"! I suspect that the programme won't teach me anything I don't already know (such modesty!), but there's always a chance.

This just demonstrates that Google do keep a watchful eye on performance. Scary huh?

On the subject of multiple Adsense accounts, you might find this informative post on Pro Blogger illuminating. The Pro Blogger reader whose experience is described moved their high performing and low performing sites into different Adsense accounts. The revenue on the high performing account went up whilst that on the low performing one went down. This ties in with the smart pricing affects whole accounts not sites theory. I don't know how good the testing was, but that post is certainly food for thought.

My experience with using multiple Adsense accounts differs from that of the Pro Blogger reader in one important respect. The revenue from both accounts has gone up!

After a year or so, I'll create an ultra Adsense account and move the highest performing sites owned by my company to the new account - see how smart pricing affects that!

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By admin – March 30, 2010

Expired Domains And PR

Many people are wary of buying domains that have PR (PageRank) because they believe that the PR will vanish on change of ownership. Well, I can tell you that the PR on the toolbar doesn't necessarily disappear when you buy an expired domain. I can also say, with some degree of certaintly, that the real PR in the background doesn't vanish either.

I've bought quite a lot of expired domains and I've found that the PR showing on the Google Toolbar usually remains constant when I take ownership. In one case, the PR was showing as 0 but then after I bought and developed the domain, it became a PR2 at the next update. That's with no link building. Another domain I bought around a year ago had a PR5 showing on the toolbar for the homepage and it still shows the same value now.

Expired Domains And PR

Why The PR Would Vanish On An Expired Domain

There is one reason why you might suffer a reduction in PR after you buy an expired domain. Often, people that buy expired domains forget the domain's previous life and neglect the site's inbound links. PR is all about links, and if you don't replace missing pages or redirect links to another page on your site, you will lose PR. But that can happen on any site where you don't take care of your inbound links, so this phenomenon is not unique to expired domains.

Expired Domains And Real PR

The PR that displays on your Google Toolbar is not the real PR that Google uses in its calculations in the background. A page's real PR is updated continuously, based on the sum total of all the PR passed by its inbound links, whereas the toolbar PR is updated only periodically (once every 3 months or so). Therefore the PR you see on the toolbar is more than likely out of date. Also, the toolbar can be particularly quirky when reporting PR, and sometimes shows odd/inaccurate results.

So, the fact that the toolbar PR is retained when you buy an expired domain, doesn't necessarily mean that the real PR is retained too. However, I'm fairly certain that it is, because I have linked to other sites I own and seen a proportionate increase in toolbar PR on the linked page.

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By admin – March 26, 2010

Indian Traffic

I was looking at this auction because the traffic numbers looked interesting. The seller claims 4,300 unique visitors per month, which is backed up by the Google Analytics stats she posted. Impressive.

But look at all that direct traffic from the Ukraine and India! What gives? That accounts for 76% of all visits reported. If you look at the Map Overlay section in the Google Anlytics report you can see that the Indians just love this site. They view on average 6.53 pages per visit and spend an average of more than 5 minutes on the site per visit.

But why are they here?

After a bit of digging around the site's inbound links, I think I found the reason. Using nothing more advanced than Yahoo Site Explorer, I was able to find links to momshare advertising it as a source of high PR social bookmarking links!

Indian Traffic

That's why they're here: they want to spam their links. And that's the biggest draw for traffic to this site.

Shame.

Anyone looking for traffic that they can monetise would do well to ignore this traffic, as they won't be clicking on adverts or signing up for anything but an invitation to spam their links.

Double shame.

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By admin – March 18, 2010

One Month’s Traffic Stats

The seller in this auction thinks we're all stupid.

Look at those impressive traffic stats! 11,570 unique visitors per month is a very nice amount. I'm interested!

But wait. Look at the date range selected in the Google Analytics screenshot.

One Month's TRaffic Stats

Unless I'm very much mistaken, the seller has selected a time period greater than a month and slapped the stats for that period in their auction details. Last time I checked, Feb 2 - Mar 10 was more than a month. It's not even a leap year or anything! Naughty naughty.

But the crime isn't limited to using a time period greater than a month. Look at the graph in those traffic stats. The seller is taking full advantage of a spike in traffic they had over a month ago. Of course, if they were presenting the last 30 days worth of traffic, we wouldn't be able to marvel at that huge traffic number.

Also, this spike is due to the product launch and associated promotion undertaken by the seller. But you can't do a product launch every month, so you shouldn't expect similar traffic levels every month.

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By admin – March 17, 2010

Due Diligence On Website Buyers

I'm currently selling one of my domains on Flippa. I have the luxury of knowing 2 of the bidders, who I feel I can trust. A new bidder has entered the scene, though, and I don't know him. The question arises: what due diligence can you do on a website buyer?

In my case, all the only information I have about him is his Flippa user name. Let's see what we can do to allay our fears about non paying bidders.

The first port of call must be the bidder's past activity on Flippa. Unfortunately for me, although this bidder registered in 2005, he has no activity recorded in Flippa.

I did a search on Google for his user name and found a listing he'd created on bestwayclassifieds.com. The listing advertised a site he was promoting and gave the URL. At this point I didn't know whether my bidder owned that site, but I did a search for the site on http://www.domaintools.com anyway.

From that search I found the owner of the domain. The owner had only given their first name - and it matched the name the bidder signed his PM with! It's looking good, but it's not concrete.

The domaintools listing also gave the address of the registrant so I performed the following search on Google to try and find other sites owned by the same registrant:

"address line 1" site:http://whois.domaintools.com

This search returned one other site.

I PMed the bidder and asked if he could tell me any other sites he owned. He gave me the first one I'd found in domaintools. Bingo! Now I have a reference point. I know the name (OK first name!) of the bidder, two sites he owns and also his address.

Of course, this isn't enough information for me to feel confident that I'm not about to get scammed, but at least I know the bidder is being honest and also isn't some schoolkid tyre kicker. Through the PM conversation I had with him I know at least he has a brain in his head and he seems to have his wits about him. Again, that's no gurantee that he won't rip me off, but it does allay my fears a little.

I will be, after all, performing the transaction through escrow.com, and it's only the domain that will get transferred here (not a full website), so I think I've got myself covered. Read more about the reasons why you shouldn't feel secure about transferring a website using escrow.com.

When selling on Flippa, or any other website marketplace for that matter, you need to take into account the time zones that bidders operate in. I'm in the UK and it's 23:38 when I write this, but the bidders on my auction live in the US. It's my bedtime now, but for my bidders it's the middle of the day. That means that they will be bidding while I'm asleep and won't have my fatherly hand to guide them. And each time a new bid comes in, the auction end time extends by 3 hours! Bugger! With any luck, a bidding war will start and it will still be raging when I wake up tomorrow :)

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3933535&postcount=44

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By admin – February 26, 2010

Instant Parking Cash

No, I'm not selling an ebook!

Our latest entry in Danger Corner is jovigirl with this auction. She is claiming 5,000 unique visitors per month, but is providing no proof. In her last auction for this site, I asked for Da Proof but she politely declined. OK, she deleted my comments!

What are the chances I get the same reaction this time?

I did some digging around and found this interesting thread on Warrior Forum in which she is promoting her product as a Warrior Special Offer (WSO). Quoting one member:

Be careful guys... I bought this and I wasn't happy with the content.
Asked for a refund and never got a response. Buyers beware.

Scammer or innocent victim of malicious libel? You decide.

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By admin – February 18, 2010