PubMatic idea

PubMatic solves you your problem: it allows you to use at the same time the following affiliation programs:

• AdSense
• YPN
• ValueClick
• Komli
• Blue Lithium

Raising all revenues: that’s PubMatic system

Once subscribed to this service, you insert your account for any listed affiliation program. Then, PubMatic code will be used instead of the pay-per-click ones.

The system works this way:

1. All visitors open your blog page containing PubMatic tag;
2. PubMatic tests which one among all affiliation programs guarantees a higher revenue in that particular context;
   
3. Once verified which circuit allows us highest revenues (more CPC), you will be shown its ads.

A part from this, the control panel joins either statistics and revenues, that will be still controlled by each circuit (in other words revenues will still come from AdSense). This service, in beta version, is now completely free.

For a more detailed description as for subscription, implementation and control, you should read Micheal Pick article.

PubMatic: risks and advantages

Strictly speaking, most publishers have a huge interest in increasing their blog revenues, increasing AdSense revenues that during years revealed to be the most well performing and steady one.

Still have to understand whether PubMatic can be useful for this goal or instead it just does an idle comparison among ads profits deriving from different affiliation programs (as it really seems to be).

On the contrary, it could be a very good tool to start considering new independence strategies from AdSense so to avoid any unpleasant situations as many people had in the past (as for instance Master New Media case, or the bad experience I personally ran in the period November 2006 – January 2007).

So, I tried some sort of Web feedback. Cris Adams says on Webware.com to be very disappointed from the very low assistance level he received and from the impressions and clicks misalignment of PubMatic compared with AdSense report.

ItaliaSW.com is even more categorical: “Is it suggested for Google Adsense? NO, here you have all the reasons”, and a list of problems follows:

• Lost impressions for too much engaged servers
• WordPress troubles
• Impossible to delete one’s own account

Use it or not?

The choice is a personal one, even if I think it is quite unsafe to give one’s own good working affiliation account to such an unstable service.

A part from this, the possibility of doing an on-the-fly comparison for ads performances of different pay-per-click affiliations (and in different contexts) has a serious importance particularly for online marketing and advertising.

Photo Credit: Miodrag Gajic

This system allows you to solve definitely one of the greatest problem of the digital era: the high number of accounts (and as a consequence usernames and passwords), that we are always forced to remember in order to enter in every online service as, for instance, banking, blogs, online tickets and so on…

In order to put a light on the matter I’m dealing with, I want to specify that I’m not only speaking about accounts memorization whenever we digit our access password, but I am referring also to the possibility of visualizing, when requested, our reserved area web sites complete list with the same usernames and passwords we used in our last access.

Set Firefox in order to remember all passwords

If you want to use this function (that I consider quite fundamental) set Firefox as follows:

1. Open the preferences window in Instruments>Options

1. Click on Safety

1. In password form verify that the option remember all sites passwords is selected. This way Firefox will remember for you any username and password.

How to visualize all used usernames and passwords list

At this very moment we can visualize our list always by using our front mask (Tools>Options>Safety) doing a click on the Show my password button. You’ll notice then that Firefox is somehow “shy”: in fact, in that list there are all reserved areas addresses and all usernames, but no passwords! So you must click once more on the button Show my password and after the nth confirmation, here you have your list:

• url

• username

• password

referring to the last accesses. Anyway, pay attention that some wrong passwords will be shown: they appear but they don’t work anymore. I suggest you to delete them from your list as you meet them.

And what about privacy?

The first time I opened the front mask I made the same question. Of course, we can use our pc access password as protection, but showing all our remote banking accesses is absolutely out of any protection.

In order to solve this trouble you can use….try to guess….!! The main password! That is to say: go to Instruments>Options>Safety and then set the main password you will be asked every time you’ll start surfing the net, in order to authorize the access function in all passwords control.

I started testing it on a couple of web sites after obtaining an invitation as beta-tester from antirez (AKA Salvatore Sanfilippo, cofounder of Merzia together with Fabio Pitrola).

There is an essential difference between a normal web analytics program (like GAnalytics, for example) and LLOOGG: it allows you to track in real time accesses and navigation of the users on your web site and provide a lot of useful information like:

• Visitor origin
• Keywords
• Originating country
• Graphic resolution of the client
• Browser and OS
• navigation path

Nevertheless, it doesn’t finish here. These data are already present (more or less explicitly) into the logs of every web server. These are the winning points of LLOOGG:

• It is a different, but complementary, service respect the traditional web analytics that uses log files to generate stats
• It provides information in real time using an Ajax web interface. A browser is all you need.
• It improves and makes more readable the data already present into the httpd logs
• It let you to correlate between the each log related to a single user thanks to a colored marked

It’s sufficient to insert a JavaScript code, which will detect the user’s visit into each content page that you want to track and the visitor information will start to fall into the web Ajax interface. It’s seems a kind of Matrix effect. Look:

As you can this visitor landed on this page searching for “voipstunt” via Google.co.uk and it come from United Kingdom. There is also his monitor resolution and browser type/version. This information block will fall down from top each time a user accesses a page. Look on the grey marker: every user is marked by a colour, which allows you to identify it in the long list of accesses in order to follow his navigation.

This user is reading several pages:

Reading from top to the bottom:

1. he entered directly into the VoIPStunt article page
2. he clicked to the VoIP category link
3. he read the Gizmo Project article
4. he went back to the VoIP category page
5. he is now reading the guide about mobile VoIP installation.

Even if geeks will enjoy the idea of a web analytics in a Matrix style, imho LLOOGG strongest point is about web marketing: in fact it allows to monitor the efficiency on the immediate of social news and social networking that web usually use to spread our contents.

In this way I discovered that also the rejected news posted on Slashdot could produce an interesting traffic amount thanks to the approval tail any way available for logged users.

Log blocks obviously will populate an historical DB, which will be used to generate chart and stats. It’s still not clear exactly what kind of features will be available for the PRO account and what will be available for the free one. Anyway, this is the list of features currently available for beta testers:

• Maximum number of logs shown in the Ajax interface (LIFO list)
• Pause/restart monitoring buttons
• Top Referrers
• Top Searches
• Monthly/daily/hourly charts and stats
• Browser Stats

LLOOGG is currently available only on invitation. If you want an invitation just leave your email using the comment form.

I realize that many users have some trouble in order to get simple reports such as search engine keyword list, or most viewed web pages with Google Analytics. Some example;

• Referring web sites
• Referring pages
• Search engine hits
• Most popular keywords

and so on. This is a micro-guide to Analytics for essential usage with some little hints and tips.

How to get a referring web sites list

Check the left menu and select:

Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > Referring Source

You’ll see a list of  referring sites on the right side of the screen grouped by domain of the current week   (ou can change it,l et’s see it later ) . Take care, search engines will be shown here among others referring sites.

Specific referring URLs

Click on the red bullet close to the domain name in order to show more informations about the source domain, like the specific URL and others useful informations.

Search Engine Hits

Many users are not able to find their most popular keywords inside Analytics. Here it is;

Marketing Optimization > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion

That’s it. We get a list of  the search engine hits grouped by domain. You can also draw a trend chart related to each engine; just click on the red bullet to open a submenu an click on: Data Over Time. Take a look on others items; there a lot of interesting reports.

Popular Keywords

Now let’s see the keywords of a single engine: click on the [+] engine bullet and that’s it!. Also in this case you can draw  a trend chart for each keyword clickin on the red bullet close to it, in the same way you did for search engines domains.

Hints and tricks

You can change the time range of each list/chart shown on screen in this way;

1. Click on the yellow icon on the top right of the calendar table
2. Select the start date on the left
3. Select the end date on the right
4. Click on “Apply range>>” below

Another useful feature of Analytics is the daily trend which can be really useful to discover the best hour to publish new content on your website. It’s enough to click on a single day into the calendar panel in order to display the traffic trend on hourly basis.

So, it’s not exactly the Analytics Bible, but it’s enough to start. Now it’s up to you.
Google Analytics is a free service. Register here.