Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
I have a dual boot machine, a Win 7 Home (and this is for my family usage and if I want to test apps using iTunes) and a Ubuntu (which serves as my primary development machine).
When Google Chrome updated on my Windows 7 OS, the people manager module seemed pretty nifty.
As a technical architect and a start-up enthusiast, part of my work is consulting organizations on how to go about implementing and monetizing their ideas. The past decade’s experience of working in this field, as well as having successfully built the product and development teams of two start-ups (which secured VC fundings) ensures that a lot of people are willing to share their ideas so that I can advise them on the implementation.
In the last days of September 2014, Rackspace customers were faced with multiple issues regarding service uptime, security concerns and network outages. The worst hit were the ones who were using Rackspace’s Chicago datacenter.
I happened to be one of those customers. This is my story.
As a person who literally lives off the internet, one of the first things I do when I get a new machine is install Chromium or Chrome and then go and install the Ad Block Plus plug-in. Fortunately, I am well past Windows, so I do not have to go to the trouble of removing IE!
Having said that, I thought, it would be interesting to see the world from the eyes of a non-power user and see the internet with it’s full glory … yes without an Ad Blocker!
For those of you who are new to this term – Ad Blockers, these are small plug-ins within your browser that stop Ads from displaying on any of the sites you visit. Those elements are not rendered at all! I strongly recommend Ad Block for this purpose.
Just follow the simple instructions on the link provided, and voila! No Ads … you can thank me later .. the web will be a different place for you. But enough of that, this is about seeing those Ads.
As someone who runs Ads on his blog, I still do not bother to see Ads .. why? Because a lot of these Ads are poorly made … very few Ads these days are awesome enough to catch your eye or even better make you click! Why do we require Ads? Well to pay for all this cost of content creation of course!
Mainstream Media does it all the time! Why cannot the Internet follow suit? Put up Ads, write content, generate traffic … the simplest formula in the series of crazy get rich schemes :-)
Sheer curiosity of checking how the Media agencies of the world are creating Ads was one. Some of the clients I was working with wanted to run Ads and I wanted to see how the Ads are going with the design of the site was another.
The third reason was the most important. I believe that users (yes, that’s you and me!) develop a certain immunity towards unpleasant experiences over time. Ads are generally ignored .. users learn to ignore them as time goes by, click through rates (CTRs) drop … that’s why it’s so important to keep changing your creatives!
I did this experiment in the month of February and ran it through till the middle of March. A little over 40 days. What did I observe? Well there are beautiful ads (naah, not Cilory ;-)), and the blockers are removing a bit more of the mark-up. Quite a lot of times an otherwise empty page suddenly looks fuller due to these display ads.
For e.g the Facebook layout looks marginally better with Ads. However, with Ads such as these, I’d still start running the blocker.
Social Media networks were fine, the worst places I experienced without an Ad Blocker were surprisingly not Pr0n sites, but gaming sites! The sheer amount of wtf-ery in Ads that I saw on gaming sites was outstanding.
What took the cake was an Ad by Gurudas Kamat on my own blog asking for support in elections. Ughhh … one quick shift to Adsense and I blocked the entire category out. That Ad shook me :-) … I prompty turned out the Ad Blocker.
Before I experienced the internet without an Ad Blocker, I was happily running multiple Ads on my own site. After those 40 days, I trimmed down the number of Ads (I believe there are two simple Ads in the sidebar and thats that).
Setting up advertising to bear the cost of content creation is good, but if it is destroying the user experience (HBR are you listening?), is a no-no.
I have always believed that a person can live off the internet. With virtual offices and office-less organizations being a reality now, one can operate perfectly without leaving their house. Having said that, ordering food online was not being done so well in India … yes there are many people who are trying to do this for quite some time now, however I believed no one had nailed the experience.
Until today!
I decided to give Foodpanda a try. The site features many restaurants in India with their menus. I went to find the nearby restaurants in Mumbai. You can choose to directly go to your favourite restaurant and start ordering, or you can provide your locality and area and find interesting joints from where you could order. All online.
I decided to discover places and found a place called Rocket Sandwiches … the prices were affordable and the menu looked great. After 10 minutes, I was done ordering and the order was confirmed!
The good part about the site is that the expectations and the wait time were given on the site for each of these restaurants. These wait times are fairly accurate and I was pleasantly surprised that the order arrived at my doorstep in the same amount of time.
Yes, there are a few of those!
All in all, I am going to keep using this site!
A simple search on Google about hitcounters would lead you to literally hundreds of different sites which offer pretty looking widgets which display a counter in your site. The question is do you think that the number really means anything to you?
Hitcounters are simple scripts solely created for measuring one thing only. The number of hits you are getting on the site. They are included in the HTML script so that when your site loads, the hitcounter records this as an increment to the total hits on your website. Yes, if you are interested in web analytics, hitcounters are a cumulative measure of pageviews. Thats it.
There used to be a time when web analytics was based purely on parsing server log files and crunching them into numbers. During this time having a hitcounter had a great value (since you would not be required to do the heavy lifting of understanding which page had which files and then parsing the server log). This is the era when these hitcounters really flourished … in fact in the pre Google Analytics days even I had tried a couple of these hitcounters. That’s around a decade back and things have changed.
With the onset of free web analytics programs such as Google Analytics, Clicky, Mixpanel, you can measure far many things than a simple pageviews metric. In fact the pageviews metric these days is almost meaningless. Hitcounters these days serve only as a source of eye candy on the site … an eye candy which is a sidebar/footer widget at the best or an eyesore at the worst.
There is yet a diminishing population of website owners who still brag about this metric and hence go ahead to put this script on their HTML.
I do not have any personal vendetta against any hitcounter script. However, think about it … you are adding a script to your page … this impacts your page loading speed. If this is scripted correctly, then hopefully it will not add to your web page loading speeds … if this some random script you have found on the internet, then it might as well be a backdoor for a malware.
A cumulative number is just one data point, instead if you tracked how this is growing, then you could eek out some insights from this number. What about tracking how a user is visiting your site across multiple visits? Naah … this functionality is simply not there in hitcounters! What about e-commerce tracking? Well … not there either. As I said before, it only counts pageviews and shows it in a styled manner. That’s it.
In short, at best it increases your web page loading times. Is that silly looking counter then really worth the cost you are incurring?
My answer is a resounding NO.
Well there are two approaches you can take. The first is to discount what I have said in my post and go ahead on that dark road.
If you go down that road, forget you ever read this post and live happily in the land where everyone counts the hits on their websites.
The best part about a cumulative metric is that it will never dip!
The other road from here is the road towards enlightenment, towards data and correct measurements. Towards Google Analytics and other tools which will help you measure each and every aspect of your site’s visitors. Here’s what you need to do to take this path –
In this journey you will come across many hurdles and questions, however on this road you will find other travellers who will have mastered those hurdles and they will be more than happy to help. Have fun and enjoy developing a richer understanding of web analytics!
Today a comment by Analytics guru – Avinash Kaushik made me to pause and take a re-look at my perspective on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Conversion Rate Optimization is the science behind increasing the conversion rate of the pages of a website.
Let’s say that you are running an Adwords campaign for your website, then most likely you would use a specific landing page built purely for conversions (be it purchases or be it lead generation). With the interaction that I have had with the different Search Engine Marketing agencies in India, the default target conversion rate that is considered acceptable is a measly 5%. At EduPristine, we try for 30% and on an average generate a healthy 25% lead generation conversion rate.
However, the tactics that we ended up using were pretty much what Avinash has mentioned to avoid … most of the time when we conduct CRO experiments, it is with a short term focus of getting an incremental raise in the conversion rates. Here is an excerpt from the comment –
Then I realize that I’m sure someone tested this. I’m sure some “conversion rate optimization guru” was brought in to do this. I’m sure they got 10% more leads. I’m sure their lead conversion rate went from 1.67% to 1.84%. I’m sure to them this looks awesome.
But what about the other 98.16%? People who did not convert, many of whom, like me, might have thought this was distasteful? Some of the 98.16% surely thought “This is not the type of company I want to do business with?”
I used to think that 25% conversion rate is awesome (and believe me, it is! :-) ). However, what is happening to the user experience on the site … a modal pop-up here, a lead generation form there … do the visitors on my site really want to see that?
The pragmatist within me says that the purpose of the site is lead generation, and that it is doing brilliantly.
However, the idealist says that in the long run the site needs to welcome the user … it needs to provide that the same user keeps returning again and again for clear value that he gets from visiting the site. The %age of repeat visitors needs to increase … and that metric is something that a CRO specialist hardly looks at.
How about a metric which measures the number of unique visitors who visits your site more than x times? That could be a measure of customer retention.
Instead of focusing on incremental changes on the page to get a temporary raise in conversions, focus on user experience and ask yourself this question … would you visit your own site again?
What are your thoughts on this?