Archive for Testing Technologies
Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself – Paul Edmondson on Online Marketing
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Online ad optimization is the science of identifying on the basis of statistical data the best performing ads / ad network providers as well as the best performing ad position, layout, color and font style on your web pages in order to optimize online advertising revenue.
Paul Edmondson, Co-Founder and CEO of YieldBuild, an online web service designed to “take the guesswork out of ad formatting“, has kindly agreed to have a good conversation with me to understand better how this optimization service differs from already established online marketing services that focus specifically on real-time ad network optimization (such as Pubmatic and the Rubicon Project).
Paul was in San Francisco and I was in Rome, when, a few days ago, I recorded this interesting video conversation.
Below is the complete recording and a full English text transcript of my conversation with Paul on internet marketing and online ad optimization. Check it out:
Interview With Paul Edmondson – CEO and Founder of YieldBuild
Full English text transcript
Intro
RobinGood: Hello everyone! Here’s Robin Good from Rome, Italy and I am here today with Paul Edmondson who is the CEO and founder of a very interesting company: Yieldbuild.
I don’t know if my Italian pronunciation is the best one, but the service is, to my eyes, really interesting because, at least in my superficial knowledge (I haven’t signed up yet), just like PubMatic or the Rubicon Project, this is supposed to be a service that allows you to optimize different ad networks and make the best of money, while not fixing yourself with just one advertising partner.
From what I understand, Yieldbuild allows you to test out a number of things and in real time you can select for you what is the best solution that you should adopt. But let’s find out from one of the fathers of Yieldbuild, Paul! How are you doing in San Francisco today?
Paul Edmondson: Doing very well, thanks for having us Robin.
What is Yieldbuild?
Robin Good: You’re very welcome. Thank you for reaching out and asking to have a conversation. That’s only what it takes indeed. Why don’t you introduce briefly yourself and Yieldbuild. What is Yieldbuild, from your take, in a short one, and what do you do over there?
Paul Edmondson: Sounds good. You got it right, I’m one of three founders of Yieldbuild and what we really set out to do is to help publishers make more money and that’s about helping them manage the monetization on their website through the various ad networks they choose.
To start, Yieldbuild it’s really about text ad optimization and what that means is we help publishers to pick out the right combination of elements. For example, let’s say you are a Google AdSense publisher. You wanna know: “should my background be white, should it be blue, should it be gray, should it have borders, what should font color be, what should the link color be…”
So what Yielbuild brings in is a set of heuristics that figures out, tests algorithmically, to find you the best combination of ads. Then after on that site it will also do your ad network management.
Easier Ads On Your Site
Robin Good: Good. I was not completely on-track, actually quite off-track and that is great that I didn’t know correctly what you’re doing because I’m much more curios now.
While you do have some of the ad optimization facilities, your key focus as is about understanding what is the best combination of components in a text ad to make it work, is that correct?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of summarizing it.
What we do is really specialize in the placement. There’s the placement and the formatting of those ad. Think about your page and how a publisher may lay out the ads on it. For example, they may put a 720×90 at the top of the page, a 300×250 in the sidebar, maybe another 300×250 in the content footer ad, maybe another ad on the other side.
We’ll find the best combination of the formatting attributes combined with the placement. Then, once we get a real good understanding of that, then we go into the ad network management.
A Solution For Publishers
Robin Good: Let me understand. This service is more targeted to an advertiser, who wants to understand how to best package his punch to an ad, or is it for a publisher to optimize the delivery and click-through of the ads he is carrying from his inventory?
Paul Edmondson: That’s a great question.
It’s a publisher solution.
For example, use AdSense. Most publishers that are getting started online use AdSense. It’s very easy to get going, just a little JavaScript that goes in your page. What they don’t know is really how to optimize their AdSense for the best performance for their site.
It’s a publisher solution and what we do is we help them tune their ads for the best response.
Overcoming Competitors
Robin Good: In this respect there are similarities or overlaps with the options offered by apparently similar services like PubMatic, the Rubicon Project or even some of the Google’s own tools that have been coming out in the last few months. I guess I’m thinking specifically of the Site Optimizer. What do you say?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, first technical problematic at PubMatic and Rubicon is that I can’t speak for too much for those sites and those services. But I would say that what Yieldbuild does is it optimizes your entire ad layout of ads. It’s aware of all the different ads that you have in your page. It’ll do the formatting and the ad network optimization.
Our best understanding of Rubicon and PubMatic today is that they really focus on the ad network management behind one given spot.
We try to think about your page holistically and all the different ads that you have on your page and how they work as a ecosystem of ads for the publisher, so all the different rules that go behind their networks, all those types of things to give you the best monetization experience as a publisher.
The great question about the Site Optimizer for Google. One of the things that’s really interesting about the Site Optimizer. It’s built on multi-variant type testing. Let’s say for example you have a landing page and you need to figure out does the “buy now” button here work better than “save 15%“. Something like that. And what it does, it requires the publisher, requires the web site operator to go in it to find those tasks and set out those pages.
Yieldbuild is quite a bit different. In the sense that it goes in and sets up all the tasks algorithmically. It examines your site, figures out things that are about it and then it uses our optimization system to do all of that automatically. So no user setup for all the different tasks.
Placement Does Matter
Robin Good: That’s very cool indeed. And that’s something that had been bothering me about the Google Site Optimizer, so you’re right on the spot in thinking a way that, even if I only read about it, it made sense and motivated me to try it out. And I’m indeed motivated to go after you and your service.
I’m a Premium AdSense partner, I use AdSense as my main resource of income for now. I’m opening new business lines, but as of now it remains my main one.
I have recently signed up with a major advertising network in the US and the issue of not only optimizing the different solutions but make them live together is part of our daily work. I mean, you just can’t do it all by yourself. Secondly, I’ve even a person dedicated on a daily task of testing AdSense.
The idea that this AdSense testing time could be saved and put to use in other direction, while some software magically could think as well as he does and develop all the possibilities that we’re trying out, is definitely interesting. I understand this is not Disneyland and the software can only do so much.
I suppose that if we contribute our help in defining where we wanna try out things, I’m now imagining your tool displaying the ads with different colors, different fonts and styles until it finds a better click-through and then stays on that set of options that it has found. Is that how he dynamically learns about it?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that you talked about:
First, when you set up a site to get tested by AdSense it requires you to put in a piece of ad code in the page and then to continually move it around to find the different placements that work best for you.
But, with our system is you can put all the snippets of code in the page that you wanna possibly testing an ad location for. For example, let’s say you only want to show two ads at one time. You can put three or even five, or six zones in your page and then YieldBuild will look at those combinations of placements and do the best. Then it will do all that formatting placement, bold, all the different text options that you have for the given ad networks.
A Worthy Dish
Robin Good: Wow, well you know what, this is really exciting. I don’t know if to trust you or not but I gotta go try it out!
In your words this is just godsend for a publisher. I’m glad I reached you without having tried the service, because I got the opportunity of you really opening up for me the idea of what the service is.
It looks like you said very clearly and we’re gonna find out now that is clearly different from your competitors in some specific ways which are not insignificant.
Why waste more of your precious time and possibly sliding to the hyping part when you’ve just given the best facts and then what I’m gonna do now it’s just go out and try it.
You know what? I think that the best video conversations are the ones that are like precious dishes at restaurants. They bring you this big dish with a small little thing on it and some fancy food decoration. You eat it and it feels like: “God, where’s the rest man? This is gonna cost me 35 bucks and there was nothing here!” But you know you’re not gonna forget that dish in that restaurant.
I think we got some jewels from you and I just wanna thank you. I don’t wanna go forward with more, I wanna go sign up and try it!
Paul Edmondson: Great! Hey Robin, thank you so much for having us. It was a lot of fun being out here.
Robin Good: Alright, have a great day in San Francisco and I’ll talk to you right after I try it!
Paul Edmondson: You too, take care!
Robin Good: Ciao!
Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on September 4th 2008 as “Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself – Paul Edmondson Video Interview”
About Paul Edmondson
Paul Edmondson is one of co-founders and CEO at YieldBuild. He held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management. He also worked for MongoMusic and Hewlett-Packard after graduating from California Polytechnic University.
Online ad optimization is the science of identifying on the basis of statistical data the best performing ads / ad network providers as well as the best performing ad position, layout, color and font style on your web pages in order to optimize online advertising revenue.
Paul Edmondson, Co-Founder and CEO of YieldBuild, an online web service designed to “take the guesswork out of ad formatting“, has kindly agreed to have a good conversation with me to understand better how this optimization service differs from already established online marketing services that focus specifically on real-time ad network optimization (such as Pubmatic and the Rubicon Project).
Paul was in San Francisco and I was in Rome, when, a few days ago, I recorded this interesting video conversation.
Below is the complete recording and a full English text transcript of my conversation with Paul on internet marketing and online ad optimization. Check it out:
Interview With Paul Edmondson – CEO and Founder of YieldBuild
Full English text transcript
Intro
RobinGood: Hello everyone! Here’s Robin Good from Rome, Italy and I am here today with Paul Edmondson who is the CEO and founder of a very interesting company: Yieldbuild.
I don’t know if my Italian pronunciation is the best one, but the service is, to my eyes, really interesting because, at least in my superficial knowledge (I haven’t signed up yet), just like PubMatic or the Rubicon Project, this is supposed to be a service that allows you to optimize different ad networks and make the best of money, while not fixing yourself with just one advertising partner.
From what I understand, Yieldbuild allows you to test out a number of things and in real time you can select for you what is the best solution that you should adopt. But let’s find out from one of the fathers of Yieldbuild, Paul! How are you doing in San Francisco today?
Paul Edmondson: Doing very well, thanks for having us Robin.
What is Yieldbuild?
Robin Good: You’re very welcome. Thank you for reaching out and asking to have a conversation. That’s only what it takes indeed. Why don’t you introduce briefly yourself and Yieldbuild. What is Yieldbuild, from your take, in a short one, and what do you do over there?
Paul Edmondson: Sounds good. You got it right, I’m one of three founders of Yieldbuild and what we really set out to do is to help publishers make more money and that’s about helping them manage the monetization on their website through the various ad networks they choose.
To start, Yieldbuild it’s really about text ad optimization and what that means is we help publishers to pick out the right combination of elements. For example, let’s say you are a Google AdSense publisher. You wanna know: “should my background be white, should it be blue, should it be gray, should it have borders, what should font color be, what should the link color be…”
So what Yielbuild brings in is a set of heuristics that figures out, tests algorithmically, to find you the best combination of ads. Then after on that site it will also do your ad network management.
Easier Ads On Your Site
Robin Good: Good. I was not completely on-track, actually quite off-track and that is great that I didn’t know correctly what you’re doing because I’m much more curios now.
While you do have some of the ad optimization facilities, your key focus as is about understanding what is the best combination of components in a text ad to make it work, is that correct?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of summarizing it.
What we do is really specialize in the placement. There’s the placement and the formatting of those ad. Think about your page and how a publisher may lay out the ads on it. For example, they may put a 720×90 at the top of the page, a 300×250 in the sidebar, maybe another 300×250 in the content footer ad, maybe another ad on the other side.
We’ll find the best combination of the formatting attributes combined with the placement. Then, once we get a real good understanding of that, then we go into the ad network management.
A Solution For Publishers
Robin Good: Let me understand. This service is more targeted to an advertiser, who wants to understand how to best package his punch to an ad, or is it for a publisher to optimize the delivery and click-through of the ads he is carrying from his inventory?
Paul Edmondson: That’s a great question.
It’s a publisher solution.
For example, use AdSense. Most publishers that are getting started online use AdSense. It’s very easy to get going, just a little JavaScript that goes in your page. What they don’t know is really how to optimize their AdSense for the best performance for their site.
It’s a publisher solution and what we do is we help them tune their ads for the best response.
Overcoming Competitors
Robin Good: In this respect there are similarities or overlaps with the options offered by apparently similar services like PubMatic, the Rubicon Project or even some of the Google’s own tools that have been coming out in the last few months. I guess I’m thinking specifically of the Site Optimizer. What do you say?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, first technical problematic at PubMatic and Rubicon is that I can’t speak for too much for those sites and those services. But I would say that what Yieldbuild does is it optimizes your entire ad layout of ads. It’s aware of all the different ads that you have in your page. It’ll do the formatting and the ad network optimization.
Our best understanding of Rubicon and PubMatic today is that they really focus on the ad network management behind one given spot.
We try to think about your page holistically and all the different ads that you have on your page and how they work as a ecosystem of ads for the publisher, so all the different rules that go behind their networks, all those types of things to give you the best monetization experience as a publisher.
The great question about the Site Optimizer for Google. One of the things that’s really interesting about the Site Optimizer. It’s built on multi-variant type testing. Let’s say for example you have a landing page and you need to figure out does the “buy now” button here work better than “save 15%“. Something like that. And what it does, it requires the publisher, requires the web site operator to go in it to find those tasks and set out those pages.
Yieldbuild is quite a bit different. In the sense that it goes in and sets up all the tasks algorithmically. It examines your site, figures out things that are about it and then it uses our optimization system to do all of that automatically. So no user setup for all the different tasks.
Placement Does Matter
Robin Good: That’s very cool indeed. And that’s something that had been bothering me about the Google Site Optimizer, so you’re right on the spot in thinking a way that, even if I only read about it, it made sense and motivated me to try it out. And I’m indeed motivated to go after you and your service.
I’m a Premium AdSense partner, I use AdSense as my main resource of income for now. I’m opening new business lines, but as of now it remains my main one.
I have recently signed up with a major advertising network in the US and the issue of not only optimizing the different solutions but make them live together is part of our daily work. I mean, you just can’t do it all by yourself. Secondly, I’ve even a person dedicated on a daily task of testing AdSense.
The idea that this AdSense testing time could be saved and put to use in other direction, while some software magically could think as well as he does and develop all the possibilities that we’re trying out, is definitely interesting. I understand this is not Disneyland and the software can only do so much.
I suppose that if we contribute our help in defining where we wanna try out things, I’m now imagining your tool displaying the ads with different colors, different fonts and styles until it finds a better click-through and then stays on that set of options that it has found. Is that how he dynamically learns about it?
Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that you talked about:
First, when you set up a site to get tested by AdSense it requires you to put in a piece of ad code in the page and then to continually move it around to find the different placements that work best for you.
But, with our system is you can put all the snippets of code in the page that you wanna possibly testing an ad location for. For example, let’s say you only want to show two ads at one time. You can put three or even five, or six zones in your page and then YieldBuild will look at those combinations of placements and do the best. Then it will do all that formatting placement, bold, all the different text options that you have for the given ad networks.
A Worthy Dish
Robin Good: Wow, well you know what, this is really exciting. I don’t know if to trust you or not but I gotta go try it out!
In your words this is just godsend for a publisher. I’m glad I reached you without having tried the service, because I got the opportunity of you really opening up for me the idea of what the service is.
It looks like you said very clearly and we’re gonna find out now that is clearly different from your competitors in some specific ways which are not insignificant.
Why waste more of your precious time and possibly sliding to the hyping part when you’ve just given the best facts and then what I’m gonna do now it’s just go out and try it.
You know what? I think that the best video conversations are the ones that are like precious dishes at restaurants. They bring you this big dish with a small little thing on it and some fancy food decoration. You eat it and it feels like: “God, where’s the rest man? This is gonna cost me 35 bucks and there was nothing here!” But you know you’re not gonna forget that dish in that restaurant.
I think we got some jewels from you and I just wanna thank you. I don’t wanna go forward with more, I wanna go sign up and try it!
Paul Edmondson: Great! Hey Robin, thank you so much for having us. It was a lot of fun being out here.
Robin Good: Alright, have a great day in San Francisco and I’ll talk to you right after I try it!
Paul Edmondson: You too, take care!
Robin Good: Ciao!
Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on September 4th 2008 as “Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself – Paul Edmondson Video Interview”
About Paul Edmondson
Paul Edmondson is one of co-founders and CEO at YieldBuild. He held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management. He also worked for MongoMusic and Hewlett-Packard after graduating from California Polytechnic University.
Video Metrics And Analytics For YouTube Clips: YouTube Insight
Posted by: | Comments“Insight turns YouTube into one of the world’s largest focus groups.” (Source: Google Blog)If you have a YouTube account and you do upload video clips to it you may be interested in knowing that YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload, has been made accessible to all YouTube account holders who upload videos to the site.
Official demographics for viewers of the YouTube Robin Good channel – 5-2008
If you had not yet heard about it, YouTube now offers to all of its users a free video metrics and analytics service, which allows you to check traffic trends and statistics of your video clips on YouTube according to a number of variables which include world geographic area and relative popularity of the specific video clip you are interested in.
In essence, this new service, called YouTube Insight, gives you access to specific visual stats on the number of views per day your video received, where those viewers are in the world, and how popular your video is compared to other videos in a given period of time.
“For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.“
Here more details and a short introductory video from Google:
Overview
YouTube Insight is a free web-based tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account — users, partners, and advertisers — to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload.
YouTube Insight gives both publishers and advertisers an inside peek at the viewing trends of their videos on YouTube, and provides them with relevant distribution and delivery information that can help them increase video views and better target their specific audience traits.
Just to make a simple example, thanks to YouTube Insight you can now learn how different parts of your distributed identity on the web (via your Blog, Facebook or Twitter presence) is effective in driving traffic to your video content on YouTube.
Video publishers could also leverage this opportunity to reach out to form relationships with those sites who consistently point readers to their videos on YouTube.
Finally, since advertisers can now access reports detailing the search queries that lead viewers to their videos, they can make more informed decisions about the keywords and bids they select to appear on Google.com.
Key Metrics Offered
YouTube Insight video metrics show most popular videos for Robin Good channel
YouTube Insight video metrics show popularity of Robin Good’s YouTube channel across different world regions (darker green more popular)
Viewing trends of Robin Good’s YouTube
With YouTube Insight you can also see:
1. How often a video is viewed in different world geographic regions
2. How popular a video is relative to all videos in a market over a period of time
3. How much time it takes for a video to become popular
4. What happens to video views as popularity peaks
Some new metrics are also being rolled out now and will soon appear in your YouTube account as well. These include:
A discovery tab now shows how viewers found your video, whether by searching on YouTube or Google, browsing under “related videos”, receiving a link to the video from an email or website, or watching it in an embedded player away from YouTube.
In this view you can also see a search results breakdown for YouTube and Google search queries that led to your video, as well as for the external websites driving traffic to your content. (Insight will show up to 50 inbound links.)
(You can find these new metrics under the “Discovery” tab within the Insight dashboard. Click on the “Insight” button under “Account > My Videos.” )
Benefits of Using YouTube Insight
By using the YouTube Insight data, you can learn more about what works and what doesn’t by doing a number of tests. Now that you have precise and detailed access to this data, you can gauge a lot better what factors may be influencing the most your successful videos.
By studying your video traffic trrends you may also learn a great deal about which days and times may be most appropriate for posting or releasing your new clips. Though you may think this may have a marginal value, when you add up all of this factor and you plan for a strategic video viral campaign, each and every one of this factors has some tangible importance.
By knowing more you can better customize your video content, packaging and delivery to address the specific traits of your target audiences.
Where Do I See These Statistics on my YouTube Account?
Go to your “My Videos” page and then you will see an “Insight” button next to each one of your video clips.
Next to each one of your video clips you will find an extra button labeled “Insight”, just like the one I am pointing at with my cursor here below:
By clicking on it you get to access the statistics for that specific video in a screen like this one:
To go and see all of your YouTube viewing trends you can also click first on your “Account” link. Once you are on your Account page scroll down to the bottom where you will see on the left a link to YouTube Insight.
Here is a screenshot:
More information:
YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool For All Users
Woopra is a new real-time web traffic monitoring service which provides extensive visitors and traffic data, alongside some very cool analysis features and the unique ability to track and live interact with your selected site visitors.
Woopra, the new advanced real-time traffic tracker
As a matter of fact I have been looking for a new alternative to my now forever closed WebsideStory/ Hitbox account. Nonetheless all of the negative experiences as a customer I have had with Hitbox and which have forced me to take a critical final step only a few months back (Dec 07), Hitbox Professional was a great service, especially because it provided easy to understand web site traffic data in real-time in a way that, notwithstanding its own limits, I haven’t found in any other traffic monitoring tool I have tried to this day. Too bad the company behind seems to have no interest in the small to mid-sized web publisher, has limited ability in fixing its own technical issues (they have not been able to ever resolve mines) and is clearly interested only in very large web publishers and corporate institutions who can pay them thousands of dollars per year.
Given the above and the disappointing alternatives available on the market I got pretty excited as soon as I was given early access to Woopra, this new web traffic monitoring service which really packs a hell of great features into a service that, nonetheless has its share of bug-troubleshooting and refinements to be made, is brand new and is definitely above the average in this small but rapidly growing field of real-time web traffic monitoring services, which will inevitably need to expand further.
(I am really appalled to see great sites and highly popular blogs tracking their web traffic via tools like SiteMeter or ShinyStats – I mean these are OK tools, and they do allow you to see your web traffic, but there is a lot more to traffic analytics than what these tools have been offering for the last few years… c’mon.)
As a matter of fact, nonetheless there is already Google with its Analytics service ready to capture a great part of this market, even Google’s own service is still marred by lots of limitations, a significant delay on your ability to see what’s happening (Google Analytics data is not in real-time), and, in my opinion, a great deal of improvement still to be made to the interface design and organization.
For all these reasons I am definitely excited to invite you to sign-up and try out this new real-time web analytics solution which I find full of useful data reports and sporting an interesting set of compelling data analysis features alongside a cool facility to filter, select, tag and interact live with individual visitors on your web site or blog.
This last feature by itself may be worth the whole price of admission, which for now amounts to nothing, as Woopra is fully in Beta and has only now started to accept sign-ups from the Internet public at large.
Head over to Woopra right now and sign-up for this valuable free service. If you have a small site in terms of monthly traffic (To find out more about Woopra and how it works, take a short 5-minute tour of this new web traffic monitoring tool with me in the video clip I have just prepared for you.
Here the details:
Web Traffic Monitoring With Woopra – Video Introduction
Photo credit: Ophelia Cherry
Full Text Transcription
Hi guys, this is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and this is Woopra, the new real-time web traffic monitoring service that really goes a little bit beyond normal tools that we have available today to check out our traffic.
First of all you’re seeing here in front of you the traffic as it is moving in real-time on my site: start looking from the dashboard on the left side here where you see actually traffic moving across the continents and coming from the different cities online and coming to MasterNewMedia.
Here the visitors are coming through and they’re assigned a unique serial number but you can even “tag” them and give them a specific identification number.
For each one of them not only you see immediately from which country they’re coming from, but you get all the data about the browser platform, operating system, screen resolution, what article they’re looking right now and whatever navigation path they’re taking and whatever referrers sent them over to your site.
There are a number of other very interesting things: if you go into the analytics section you can see all of the referring web pages, referring domains, the search engines, you can check up the specific searches, the queries and the keywords being used on the site, you can check out the outgoing links for example that are happening on your sites.
But the most interesting thing is that you can actually arrange for custom messages to be sent to selected visitors. You can create the so called Event Notifications, which allow you basically to say “hey, look, whatever visitor is coming from the country U.S. Virgin Islands, only those people, and when they come and check out one of my articles that talks about YouTube, then you may want to say to these guys check out my other videos about Caribbean Islands that I have over here and give them a specific URL”. I mean you can create messages that will pop-up very discretely on the browser of your visitors when certain conditions are met.
But listen to this: there’s more! While they’re moving on your site, I said you can tag your visitors, that is, if I knew that now some guy that I just sent on the site was coming over, I can actually recognize him, I can tell him to go to a specific page and see him come through… I can tag him and give him a specific name and I will see him each time he will come back while I will see in front of me all of their navigation history on my site.
And not only that. I can actually start a conversation with them.
So, let me see, somebody coming from Italy…OK let’s see…I can pull up this window and can actually say: “Ciao, I am Robin Good and I am testing un nuovo sistema per chattare live con i miei visitatori, scusa l’intrusione” that is “I apologize for intruding, I’m just testing it“.
OK, so now the guy who’s visiting my pages is receiving this message via a little pop-up window on the bottom right of his screen which he can decide to look at and can decide also to respond to or not. He’s probably not going to answer it because I am really intruding in his experience and maybe he doesn’t know what to do. I’m not really inviting him to react but if he does react I can have a direct chat conversation with this person at any time.
I can also filter visitors then in a number of ways, and not only track in real-time what they’re doing but actually I can interact with them and create even special notifications that happen only when certain conditions are met.
Go out and check it out, Woopra at www.woopra.com and you can get all this wonderful information including the live number of visitors, your top referrers, the queries people are doing moment by moment on your site, and much more at absolutely no cost.
This is still in beta, they’re having still some rough corners to be smoothed out but for the rest is definitely something you want to check out.
Woopra!
From Robin Good, for MasterNewMedia this is all for now.
Ciao guys.
More Information
Download Woopra (PC, Mac, Linux)
Analyze Your Web Traffic With Google Analytics: Video Tutorial
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the most useful things you can do to better understand and improve the quality and quantity of web traffic on your site or blog, is to learn how to track, monitor, measure and make sense of the large quantity of data your web visitors leave on your server.
Comparing web traffic on www.MasterNewMedia.org via Google Analytics
Thanks to Google anyone can have easy, free and immediate access to one among the best and most powerful web traffic monitoring and analytics tool: Google Analytics. If you are not yet using it, I suggest you to give it a good try.
As a matter of fact, if you have no previous experience in web traffic monitoring and analysis, Google Analytics may actually scare due to the richness of its data sections and the good amount of new terms you are not going to be familiar with.
Even for more experienced professional web publishers Google Analytics may pose some challenges,
as some of the terms used may be different than what you have been used to elsewhere and getting to the hot zones of the traffic reports may not always be as easy as it should be.
To help you out on this front I have brought here for you two short video tutorials, produced by the official Goggle team and explaining clearly both the basics of analytics if you have never used it, as well as the fundamentals of how to go about doing some serious web data analysis on any site.
I must say, that even after many years of studying and using web traffic and monitoring tools I have learned a few new very useful things myself by looking at this two nicely produced videos.
Take a look yourself.
1) Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting On Your Data (Advanced)
“If you’ve just started to use Google Analytics and aren’t sure which reports to look at, this video provides a helpful 1st-time analysis walkthrough. You’ll learn how to interpret what you see in these key reports and what actions you should take as a result.“
2) Google Analytics Interface Tutorial (Basic)
“A brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. If you are new to Google Analytics or you’d like to pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different features, this video is a good place to start.“
For more informationanalytics google help
on Google Analytics please see:
- Getting Started
- Account administration
- Reports central
Browser Compatibility Testing: BrowserCam Gets Better – Video Review
Posted by: | CommentsBrowser compatibility testing is a web development practice that allows a web site owner to verify how her web site or blog, appears on computers utilizing browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions that are different from the one used in originally designing / developing a web site.
These visual differences is a critical element to consider when wanting to increase traffic, provide greater accessibility and allowing commercial publishers to extract the best from their online communication efforts.
BrowserCam puts a full range of browsers and operating systems at your disposal
With Linux, Mac OSX and Windows machines all accessing your website through a range of operating system versions, and even more web browsers, how are you going to know that your web site is going to look the same across all these other computer setups?
There are now a vast range of browsers on the market, from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Camino and Opera, to touch on just a few. If you then take into account the fact that more and more people are switching from Windows computers and over to Mac OSX and Linux operating systems, things become even more complicated.
But how can you hope to know what your website looks like on a Mac running an older version of the Mac OSX while using Opera?
Sure you could call your friend up and ask them to take a look, but there are only going to be so many friends with so many different machines, operating systems and browsers at their disposal.
One common way that web development agencies around the world have adopted is the one of having a range of machines all running different operating systems and browsers, and making use of them every time you need to check your website. This is far from being easy, inexpensive and speedy, and when you bring into the calculation the several versions available of all major operating system, the various versions of the major web browsers, and the infinite number of combinations that these two variables can generate when coupled with the myriad monitor sizes and screen resolutions that your readers may have, you soon realize that this amounts to a big headache that is not going to be that easy to solve.
So, while most (webmasters) simply resort to check IE and FF at their default resolution, on their standard operating system, this is a far cry from being able to serve a truly accessible web site that looks and acts the same no matter what computer, browser or monitor size your readers happens to use.
I don’t need to add that given the increasing good interface design and usability of many commercial sites, if you have any stake in being commercially successful online, this is something to which you must give very serious attention.
Luckily, there are several services and tools out there, which can ease your pain within a few clicks.
Among them, we have chosen to go back to the one that did impress me the most when it was the first and only solution against this web riddle.
First reviewed in 2004, Browsercam, is a web-based solution exclusively devoted to provide webmasters with an semi-automated system to check your web site appearance across all the operating systems, browser and screen resolutions available out there.
Now, Browsercam has added some new and truly powerful features to its already jam-packed line-up.
In this video review I guide you through the ins and outs of this must-have cross-browser compatibility testing:
Video review
The video, which has five separate parts, covers the following aspects of the BrowserCam experience:
- Selecting your capture parameters – A guide to the full range of compatibility settings available, and how easy it is to select from among them
BrowserCam’s vast set of testing parameters
BrowserCam effectively puts a huge range of browser and operating system versions at your disposal, and gives you the opportunity to select from a vast range of parameters. Once you have decided which of these parameters you are interested in, it then systematically goes about taking screen-shots of your website.
With the ability to choose from Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems, and different versions of the various browsers available it then provides clear screen grabs of exactly how your website is going to look under the parameters you have set.
Furthermore, you can decide if you want to see the site with the popular (but not entirely ubiquitous) Flash plug-in activated or deactivated, and can select from a range of screen resolution sizes to get an idea of how your website pans out on different sized screens and settings. This truly comprehensive range can either be dipped into, to produce a limited number of images, or else used to test every single permutation available to you.
What’s great is that once you’ve made your selection, and taken your captures you can filter and sort the resulting images that the service has created in a number of useful ways.
Checking your results
Once your screen-shots have been captured it is very easy to browse through them, even if you have taken a huge amount of images to truly cover yourself in terms of browser compatibility.
BrowserCam’s interface makes it very easy to sort images by operating system, browser and a range of other parameters that make it quick and easy to locate the exact images that you’re looking for at a given point in time. Any of the thumbnails provided can be clicked to give you an instantaneous full-sized version of the screen-grab.
Then, it is simply a matter of ticking the appropriate check boxes for those images that you would like to make a copy of, and clicking on download. Straight away you are given a zipped folder full of the images, to download directly to your desktop. Obviously, this then allows you to email them directly across to the people you are working with, if you haven’t granted them access to your BrowserCam account.
DeviceCam and the handheld market
One nice new addition to the service is the ability to perform a browser compatibility check not only for home computer based systems, but also for the increasingly popular Windows Mobile and Blackberry PDA devices.
As an increasing amount of people are using these hand-held devices to access the web, it’s a good idea to see how you are faring when your site is squashed onto a 320×240 or smaller screen. While obviously this great new feature to the BrowserCam service will be of most interest to those developing websites specifically for these devices, it is nevertheless a useful addition to your compatibility toolkit.
Remote testing functionality
Screen-shots are a great way of checking out how your website is going to look on other operating systems and browsers, but unfortunately they cannot tell you how it is going to perform.
With BrowserCam, this doesn’t pose a problem, however.
In addition to being able to take accurate screen grabs, the service allows you to remotely access a range of computers, running a range of operating systems via VNC. In short, this means that you can take control of the exact computer that you need to test your website on, and use it from your own location.
This is a great way to test a particular system in hands on way, and it is possible to capture and save the results as you do so. Using this approach is a great compliment to the screen captures you can take with BrowserCam, and while the process is time consuming, it does allow you to look into the kind of issues a screen grab just won’t show you.
If, for instance, you need to check for JavaScript browser compatibility, or want to work out the specifics of a Flash or Ajax interface, the best way to be sure that all is well is to get stuck in and have a quick play with your site.
BrowserCam makes this incredibly easy, and gives you the option of either using your own VNC client to access their remote computers, or else using their own bundled Java VNC client, which will allow you to get stuck in straight from your browser window.
BC-Virtual – virtual machines at your disposal
As if all of that wasn’t enough the BrowserCam people have just added yet another supercool feature called BC-Virtual, which is currently in beta testing.
Put simply, BC-Virtual allows you to make use of dedicated server space to run private virtual machines, to which you are granted full administrator access. This effectively means that you can have at your disposal the ability to create machines with the OS, browsers and resolution of your choice, and tweak all of the finer points you don’t have access to as a guest user of the previously mentioned remote machines.
This adds a whole new level of control, and the ability to truly customize a machine to your exact specifications. As it is stored within your allotted server space, you can obviously do as much compatibility testing as you need to, without having to worry about losing your configurations and data.
Every time that it seems that BrowserCam have reached a plateau, they pull something like this out of a hat and push the envelope a little further. With the addition of this new feature, there are now a number of options available for those looking to extensively test browser compatibility.
Pricing and plans
I am genuinely impressed by the flexibility of the pricing infrastructure of BrowserCam’s service, which seems to have an option to suit every level of user. The range goes from casual users that might want to make use of the service on a once-only basis, right up to unrestricted, annual premium access.
The price range goes from a measly $19.95, which will buy you 24-hours of unlimited access to the service, right up to $999.95 for unlimited, annual, premium access. Between these prices there is truly flexible range that allows for different access plans and pricing structures that can be mixed and matched to suit your needs.
A list of the available plans is available on the BrowserCam website, and involves varying degrees of remote access, and additional features at the premium end of the scale.
Conclusions
Having extensively tested BrowserCam for this review, I can say with positive confidence that BrowserCam will make the task of testing your website on multiple operating systems and browsers a truly effective one.
While most blogging platforms have pre-designed templates already designed to work across the vast range of browsers and operating systems out there, anyone who has any kind of customized design or web site template needs to make very sure how her site is going to be seen on the browsers, monitor sizes and screen resolutions she can’t see directly on her development machines.
Browsercam ensures your easy access to Mac, Linux and Windows previews, no matter whether you want to see these through the eyes of Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer or several other browsers and versions of the same.
Webmasters and website designers that do not make use of such a straightforward, easy to use shortcut to checking a website’s compatibility could end up spending a lot more time (and money) finding alternative approaches to the problem. Nonetheless the apparent significant cost for buying yourself a yearly subscription (about $1000/year for the top level service) I can state with confidence that not only this is money well spent, but that if you take the time to evaluate how much time and effort it would have cost you or your webmaster to find out what BrowserCam does in a click of your mouse, you would rapidly realize that this is a tool that saves you a great deal of money and time too.
The BrowserCam service is also available on a monthly basis, and at different pricing levels, including a full one-day free try-out option.
Additional resources
If you are interested in learning more about BrowserCam, the following links might be useful:
- BrowserCam’s homepage has a lot more information about the service