My reaction was a loud WTF when I tried logging in to check my click stats. Click Audit, the link/click tracking tool I was using until very recently to track subscriber count to SEO ROI has just been turned into a parked domain! In other words, it just features a bunch of useless ads. It may be a temporary thing, because the site likely didn’t make the owner(s) much money, but I’m not waiting around to find out.

I’m not going to cave in and go to Feedburner. Or annoy you guys with ads from Pheedo. What I will do is set up my own click tracking script on my server and just run things that way. Anyone got a favourite free click tracking script that’s easy to install and easy to use? I’d like it to have a similar interface to Click Audit, preferably, if you know what that was like. Helpful suggestions for alternative scripts to track subscribers with in the comments will be rewarded with dofollow links in updates to this post.

Oh, FYI: I had 1300+ subscribers (or clicks on subscription links, which is how I was counting subscribership) as of yesterday. Feel free to subscribe (and let me know that you did in the comments, since I have no way of knowing now that Click Audit is gone..

Lesson to the wise: Be as independent of third party services as possible.

UPDATE: John of Z Scale Model Train Layouts (who sell PSW concrete abutment sets and a Blasted Rock abutment set) shared a free script that’s very easy to install and use. There’s almost all the functionality of Click Audit (there are no groups and no PPC cost measuring) and most importantly, you can install it on your own server! So I’m now using PHP Junkyard’s Free PHP Click Counter.

Update 2: In a further helpful comment, John highlights some problems with the database being text based,
such as it not being able to handle very high volume. Also, Click Audit appears to be back up for the moment. I’m sticking with the script for now. Also, for future reference, here’s a screenshot of where my sub stats stood as of May 12th, per Click Audit.

My understanding of total clicks is that it comprises those clicks coming from the same Ip within a given period of time (like 24 hours). So someone whose feedreader was slow to grab the click and turn it into a readable subscription might click a second time, for instance. That’s why I refer to the unique clicks count as my subs.

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And it isn’t Google Analytics, as I mistakenly thought. So I need to apologize to Google (and to you, my readers) for the error/false accusation and getting people worried for nothing.

Even more humbling, both Matt Cutts and the official Google Webmaster Central blog have called yours truly’s site “high quality.” So let’s see …

• Matt Cutts intervenes early at Sphinn and in my comments here to clarify that Google Analytics wasn’t at the source of these new items in Google’s index;
• In followup explanations by email, he shares where those site SERPs were coming from;
• Matt & Google provide a public explanation of what’s really going on, thus joining the conversation rather than ignoring it and hiding away
• Matt and Google compliment me/ SEO ROI (!) for having a high quality site worthy of this fancy treatment.

How’s that for reputation management? (Incidentally, on a prior occasion it took Matt about a month to get back to me on something, so it looks like they’re improving .)

A little while back I wrote about how I thought Google was indexing site SERPs for those sites that had Google Analytics tracking site searches. In effect, I mistakenly accused Google of leaking Analytics data into its index. I had enabled site search tracking and my friend Brian had too, and we were both seeing these site search results pages turning up in Google’s SERPs. Thus we were worried about the integrity of our data.

As it turns out, Google’s experimenting with a new form of discovering deep content on “high quality” sites. Whereas content hidden behind forms and javascript was once inaccessible, Google is now testing out new ways of discovering and crawling it, including performing limited numbers of site searches [and indexing the results].

Read the full explanations at Matt Cutt’s blog and the more technically detailed explanation at the official Google Webmaster Central blog.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, don’t you think it’s time you subscribed?! Consider that prior to the loud-titled “Google Analytics Is Leaking…” post, I had actually written about the topic over a month earlier! If you pay close attention to my blog, you’ll learn/discover nuggets of information waaay ahead of everyone else!

Social media is one of the most difficult things to justify in terms of ROI because current analytics aren’t well suited to measure its data. Outside of linkbait, whose value can be measured by analogy to the link-buying market, there are no standard metrics for tracking the result of social media activity. This ties into my question on the proper measure and value of attention equity: How do you measure it and what is it worth to you? Here’s my proposal for social media analytics and tracking. (more…)

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index. How is this happening?

Final Update: This has been disproven as being the source of the site-search-results appearing in Google’s search results. I had good reason to believe that Google Analytics was the source of this (you can see below for my original thoughts on the matter), but there’s now a clarification. My apologies to Google and to my readers for the mistake.

A while back I saw a video about using Google Analytics to (more…)

I was emailing a prospect recently who mentioned that a competing firm had proposed doing A/B multivariate testing. If you’re familiar with the jargon of testing different ads/landing pages, you would know that A/B testing is different from multivariate testing. I can’t blame the prospect or my competition however, because ours is an industry enamoured with jargon and it sometimes gets me confused too! In any case, let’s see what A/B testing (more…)

I was chatting with Ann (she of the SEO Smarts) the other day about measuring social media efforts. What follows are a few ideas on how measure that, as well as a related metric that might help you identify linkerati who’ve visited your blog. If you like this post, I encourage you to subscribe. My other material is just like this.

1) Longtail searches to new deeplinks. Frequently, I’ll read something, find it interesting enough to link, but won’t necessarily bookmark it. Or perhaps I’m feeling lazy and it’s easier to search Google than my bookmarks. Whatever the case, traffic referrals that show longtail queries with hyper-specific intent are often a presage to getting a link. People look for something they already saw before they’re about to link.

By taking note of these searches and the IPs they’re coming from, then checking backlinks to that page in the subsequent days/weeks, you can likely find out who the IP belongs to. In the future, you can show that person your best content in the aims of getting more links, show them a “welcome you awesome linkerati” message and so on. I’m sure you guys can find other worthwhile uses for IDing visitors in this way - and if you do, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

2) Number of unique visits by a given person (based on IP, ISP, geolocation, screen size, browser, resolution) prior to subscribing (RSS or email). It took me reading lots of Skelliewag’s guest posts around before I subscribed to his feed. The reason is that people usually need to be convinced of the consistent quality of a blog’s content before subscribing.

To measure this, you would use some click-tracking in combination with analytics.

On a related note, the plugin that shows new visitors a ‘you’re new, why don’t you subscribe’ message is likely not that effective for most people. That’s because the default setting is three visits, and imho, it takes more than three before someone is convinced enough to subscribe. I had to see about a dozen of Skellie’s posts before getting the feed! Then again, I tend to be a skeptic and thus a late-adopter, so for the average folk it’s likely to be a half-dozen - 10 times.

Another related point is considering the # of pageviews per visit, and especially the frequency of return visits (sometimes termed the loyalty of your visitors). As analytics expert (and recent email correspondent :D!) Avinash Kaushik can tell you, the “stickiness” of your content and its pull aren’t such great success metrics. However, they do measure how much of your content people consume. Usually, people will consume lots of it if it’s really good. Coincidentally, they also subscribe if it’s really good…

3) Frequency of Sphinn frontpaging/StumbleUpon orgies. (This latter colourful term is courtesy of my friend X). This relates to the speed of daily traffic and feed growth. SSS did 0 - 700 in only a few months. That was achieved, afaik,with near daily frontpaging for a month or more! And again, obviously, this was because he pumps out some seriously killer content.

This can be pretty good as a predictor of traffic and future subscriptions, assuming you keep it up.

Incidentally, I’m not sure this is entirely original, as Neil Patel has mentioned that you need to hit digg’s frontpage several times in a week to have maximal impact. While I think he was talking about it in a link-building context, he may also have meant it regarding subscribers, but I can’t find the reference unfortunately - please do post it in the comments if you have it. I’ll update this post and give some linky-love to whoever finds and posts it first, with whatever anchor text you want (just no pills, porn or poker)!

Come back tomorrow for my Top 20 Reasons to Brave RSSands. (aka: Won’t you please subscribe? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? I’ve got good - some might even say influential - stuff, really and truly! )

Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs (more…)

Here is the final campaign data of my two Facebook flyer campaigns, both of which were terminated December 3rd. All things told, spending under $2 for about 30,000 impressions seems like a sweet deal to me! Plus, I got some clicks and awareness, and it helped me make a good industry connection that has since translated into a few links. So while Aaron paid $500 for links through AdWords, my results seem to have been similar (OK, so you can’t compare newspaper links to industry links, but still) for much lower cost :).

I tried copy-pasting the table from my Facebook report, but it ended up only showing one line of data. So I’ve changed the copy-paste to attempt to show you both campaigns. The column headers that have consequently been ommitted read:

Campaign Name | Date Range | # Clicks | # Impressions | CTR (%) | Max CPC | Avg. CPC | Dly. Budget | Total Spent.

So on the first campaign, Want to Make Extra Money?, running from Oct 30 to Dec 2nd (i.e. they were no longer running the 3rd), I got 16 clicks on 22,113 impressions. The CTR in % is thus 0.072. I was topping my bids at 8 cents and ended up paying an average 7 cents. My daily budget of $5 was never reached obviously, as my total spent on the campaign was just $1.13.

Want to Make Extra Money? Completed

Oct 30 to Dec 02

16

22,113

0.072

0.08

0.07

5.00

1.13

The other campaign, which was a bit of a trial grounds, got 6 clicks on 7,492 impressions, for a total cost under a quarter. Because I was bidding less per click, this one ran more sporadically (though erratic impression volume seems to be inherent with the system, from what I’ve seen) getting 1000+ impressions some days and none others.

Date	Clicks	Impressions	CTR (%)	Avg CPC	Total Budget Used
Dec 01, 2007	0	452	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 30, 2007	0	277	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 29, 2007	0	50	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 28, 2007	0	143	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 27, 2007	1	343	0.292	0.08	0.08
Nov 26, 2007	0	162	0.000	0.00	0.00

Date Clicks Impressions CTR (%) Avg CPC Total Budget Used Nov 24, 2007 0 633 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 23, 2007 0 366 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 22, 2007 0 230 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 21, 2007 0 265 0.000 0.00 0.00 Nov 20, 2007 0 418 0.000 0.00 0.00

Date	Clicks	Impressions	CTR (%)	Avg CPC	Total Budget Used
Nov 17, 2007	0	763	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 16, 2007	0	665	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 15, 2007	0	605	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 14, 2007	0	214	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 13, 2007	0	652	0.000	0.00	0.00
Nov 12, 2007	1	920	0.109	0.08	0.08

On a related note, you might not have noticed, but there’s new Facebook advertising fare to be had: Facebook profile page ads by Weblo (story tip from Marty & aimClear).