A sip of Social Media Curry
A friend shared this informative presentation on Social Media. Just thought sharing it on my blog will also be a good idea.
We often fail to describe what social media is because there are no boundaries limiting it’s presence and extent to which it can expand. This presentation on social media is an attempt to put it in a summarized way (although not complete).
You can download this presentation in form of a PDF Document from here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/172142757/whatthefissocialmedia070208-1215026815612657-8.rar
This presentation contains some worth knowing facts and stats about the social web. The author states Social Media as a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and opposes it’s status as a fad. Other than theories the document also shares some insights on behavior of an Internet user of today. The presentation portrays social media as a promising marketing channel.
I think that Social Media is yet to be fully explored and in it vest millions of marketing and brand building opportunities. I say so because the social web is the web of today and that is where consumers have the power to be your marketer and brand ambassador.
Time on Site & Time on Page – Google Analytics metric mystery
When asked whether ‘time spent on site or page’ hold any meaning in a website’s performance, I have always said that, “if it means anything to you”. But before we can relate any performance measure to them, we need to understand how are they calculated and how relevant are these two metrics.
How is Time on Page and Time on Site Calculated?
Time spent on site is calculated by generating time stamps on visit to every page and then calculating the difference between the last and first time-stamp of a visitor session. For time spent on page time stamp on entry to that page and time stamp on entry to next page are taken into account.
Let us consider the diagram below:
The above diagram should make it clear how time stamps are used to calculate Average Time on Site and Average Time on Page. It should be noted that since the visitor exited from Page 3, therefore, there is no succeeding time stamp and hence time spent on Page 3 cannot be calculated and is shown to be 00:00 by Google Analytics.
So this means that if a page view of a particular page leads to an exit, then the time spent on that page is shown to be 00:00. In case of a bounce, time on site and time on page are both reported as 00:00 minutes. What is Exit Rate and Bounce Rate?
How reliable is this method of recording Time on Page & Time on Site?
Since time on page cannot be fetched for bounces and exits, the reported values are not 100% accurate because the data for exited and bounced traffic on a page is missing.
Reliability of Time on Page = 100% – Exit Rate
The above is true because Exit Rate indicates the percentage (number) of visits that led to an exit from that page so for that many percent of visits the data is missing and hence not reported. However, the Average Time on Page is calculated by taking 100% of page views (visits). So if my a web page has an exit rate of 20% then the reported Avg. time on page is only 80% accurate.
Lower the Exit Rate more reliable the Avg. Time on Page.
Actual Time on Site = Reported Time on Site x 100 / (100 – Bounce rate)
The above equation discounts the contribution of bounces. A bounce contributes 00:00 and hence causes an error because a bounce is taken as a page view (visit) whatsoever while averaging the Time on Site. Bounces should be left out because what we are are more concerned about is the visitors who browsed through the site. So, if my site has a Bounce Rate of 30% and the Reported Time on Site is 120 seconds (00:2:00 minutes) then the actual time on site is
120 sec x 100 / 70 = 171 sec = 2 min 51 sec
Note: This method assumes that reported Avg. Time on Page for all pages is correct.
Lower the Bounce Rate more reliable is the Time on Site.
And if you are to approximate the Avg. Time Spent on a Group of pages (a section of your site) then you can replace the bounce rate with Avg. Exit rate for those many pages in the second equation.
This method of calculating Time on Site is also not 100% accurate because even the reported time on site is faulty to begin with. Time on Site is nothing but the sum of Avg. Time on Page for all web pages. And we know that the reported Time on Page is not 100% accurate because Google Analytics does not record time spent on page for exits and bounces.
While you’ll be reading this I’ll be preparing a tutorial post on How To Calculate Time on Site with Maximum Accuracy. Until then enjoy this curry!
Alexa’s Top 1 million websites globally
The web information company Alexa has released a list of Top 1 Million websites on a global level. The list contains an ordered set of 1 million most popular sites of the world. According to this list Yahoo.com still leads the hall of fame with Google.com at the second place.
Download the complete ranking list from here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/169738144/top-1m.csv.zip.html
Check if your website has made it to the Top 1 Million Popular websites on the Internet.
What is Alexa Rank and how is it calculated?
Alexa rank is a cumulative measure of a website’s reach and the number of pageviews it gets. It is calculated by aggregating browsing trends of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and traffic data from other sources.
Reach of a website is the percentage of internet users (globally) that visit that site. e.g if ConceptCurry.com has a 20% reach then that would mean that 20 percent of global internet users visit this site.Page Views for a website is the average number of pages visited by a visitor of that site. more information on Alexa Traffic Rank
Top 20 Websites as per the list
- yahoo.com
- google.com
- youtube.com
- live.com
- facebook.com
- msn.com
- myspace.com
- wikipedia.org
- blogger.com
- yahoo.co.jp
- baidu.com
- google.de
- rapidshare.com
- google.co.in
- qq.com
- microsoft.com
- hi5.com
- sina.com.cn
- google.fr
- ebay.com
I personally feel that the Alexa rank should only be used to get an approximation of the real traffic or reach that website might have. Since Alexa itself calculates based on it’s toolbar users and some other data sources to approximate website stats.
Enjoy this curry!
Using Google Analytics to track Unique Visits from a referring site
I was confronted with a problem of tracking unique visitors from referring partner sites. A friend was to pay his partners per click and he wanted to know how many unique visitors every partner site was generating. This would help him track efficiency of traffic and click fraud if any.
Currently, Google Analytics does not show unique visits for a referring source but it does show unique views of every content page. Yes, this showed me a light bulb near my forehead.
Google Analytics: Referring Source Details
Google Analytics: Content Details
See? I was not lying about the light bulb…
How to track Unique Views from Referring Sites?
1. You can create a custom tracking URL for partner site like the one shown below:
http://www.mysite.com/landingpage.htm?utm_source=PARTNER1&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=PPC
You can also create this URL by using the Tracking URL Generator tool by Google Analytics.
Note: utm_source parameter in the above URL is the referring source.
2. On your landing page replace the following code with the code below in your GA Script:
REPLACE pageTracker._trackPageview();
WITH pageTracker._trackPageview(utm_source);
The idea is to pass the value of the parameter utm_source (which is the name you gave to referring source) from the URL to the ga.js which is your google analytics script.
3. Another thing you can do to measure the legitimacy of the referring source is that you use the Dimension filter to see the visitor type for a particular referring source. This would give you an idea about New v/s Returning visitors that partner is sending to your site. If you see a high number of Returning Visitors for one particular referring site then there is a probability of manual click fraud. Of course this is only true when these returning visitors are showing no conversions or high bounce rate.
I suggested the above to my friend, hope it works 
YooWalk.com – Walk Through the 3D Internet
We’ve only surfed the web until today by navigating through web pages from one site to the other. Ever wondered what is it like to walk through the web? Just stroll through the Internet?
With YooWalk you can enable your virtual self to walk in the Internet. YooWalk is a 3D view of the web where you as a user can walk your avatar through various websites. Yes actually!
A lot of popular websites have been depicted as 3D blocks on a road side with an entry door to each one of them. It appears as if those blocks are buildings and you can move around your avatar or a virtual character and walk into any site that you like. The sites have been grouped and are shown on a 3D map as if you were strolling througha city. An experience worth having, just to see how else you can view the Internet.
It reminds me of Second Life and Google Lively though. Yoo Walk also has 3D chat rooms similar to those of Lively. On the screen you can see other virtual characters and you can walk to them have a chat and network with them. You can call it the browser version of second life if you want but it has a unique offering for different kind of visitors. Like the sites have been grouped together based on their geography and category. So can walk around a block of sites according to your interest, whether sports, news or arts etc. There are a lot of empty blocks (real estate) on the website. I think they intend to sell that off for advertisements.
The business/revenue model of YooWalk appears simple and delicious. There is so much that can be done on this website but that is only if it’s a hit. It appears to be exciting but it still needs to go a long way ahead. When you enter a building (site) then browsing through that site isn’t very easy and you can only view select content. By the way Google is calling Lively off and they’ll be putting it down on 31st December 2008.
May be there is something for YooWalk people to learn that this whole 3D Internet just aint working out good for business.
This curry is hot!