Get More Complete Web Analysis With Performancing

We use Google Analytics to get stats on visitors and pageviews for ProductCritic. Late last month, we signed onto Performancing. Although their tagline is "Helping Bloggers Succeed", it's useful for all sites like our Digital Camera Reviews site which is not a blog. I had been meaning to write a blog entry about it but by coincidence, today, I noticed that Performancing has a blog entry up that will provide pMetrics free for 12 months for a review. Great timing!

Although I think Google Analytics is pretty complete, the additional features of Performancing are a really good companion to Analytics. Here's a walkthrough of Performancing.

First of all, when you go to Performancing.com, it takes you to their blog. I don't quite understand that. The value of their site is in pMetrics, not the blog! They should really take you to the value part of their site by default. Instead, you have to click a top link (labelled "pMetrics") to even find the good stuff (not that the blog is bad at all).

Like Google Analytics or HitTail or other tracking sites, Performancing is very easy to set up. You just need to include a bit of javascript code to every page on your site.

Performancing has a very nice comparison chart giving you a feature comparison between pMetrics and Analytics, SiteMeter, StatCounter, Mint, and Feedburner.


While there are quite a few features that are great, my favorites are:

• Daily Top 10 (pages, incoming links, and searches)
• "Actions" per user (you can see how many things people do or how many pages people visit on your site)
• Spy - a real-time view of your users

The stats are displayed very differently than Analytics. I think they are laid out in a very intuitive way and let's you see individual users vs. the whole trend (unlike Analytics). You are always shown the time, the action (or number of actions), the page(s) hit and most important to us, the referer.

The Spy feature is the best feature. It's constantly updated so you can literally follow along and see users move through your site. In this way, I noticed a few users do searches on ProductCritic that didn't return any links (I saw them try the search in different ways "SD 500", "500", "SD500"). What was odd about this was that I knew ProductCritic has reviews for the Canon SD500. Looking into it more, we found a problem with our search code that was easy to fix. Without looking at the Performancing data, we might not have noticed the problem for quite awhile.

It's much harder (if not nearly impossible) to track and follow individual users through their experience on your site via Analytics. That's why I think Performancing has done a great job with pMetrics and I can only hope that they have planned well enough so that their site scales to a large number of users without the stats gathering breaking down.

Testing Great Firewall of China

John Chow just posted a blog entry about his very successful blog being blocked by the Great Firewall of China. Well, I decided to go and try it out to see if either this blog or ProductCritic (the main site) was also blocked.

From the results, it looks like ProductCritic is available (yay!) but for some reason this blog is blocked. I've included both images from the test result.

I'm not sure how much I can believe the results because Google Analytics shows that I've been getting hits from within China to this blog. Maybe the analytics data is wrong? Also notice that in the 'available' image, at the bottom, it actually says that the last test was 'blocked'. Something is definitely odd with this test.

It's not that big of a deal to me as access to the main ProductCritic site from China is what is actually important to me.

Get Full Referral URL's Despite Using Analytics

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm completely addicted to the stats generated by ProductCritic. Maybe it's just the fact that we gain knowledge on areas we need to tweak for the site (and we're tweaking on an almost daily basis).

Besides the server logs (which I don't check all the time), we use Google Analytics as our main source of information about visits to the site. Analytics provides a large amount of data and first time users of this tool can easily find themselves overwhelmed.

Although I look at almost all areas of Analytics from time to time, I mainly focus my daily stats fix on two areas. The first is Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source. I want to know where visitors to ProductCritic are coming from. It's been quite useful as we've immediately been able to determine when someone links to ProductCritic and where that link exists.


The second area that I use in Analytics is Search Engine Marketing/CPC vs Organic Conversion. Although we currently don't use Adwords, this section is still extremely useful for us as it provides us with the ability to see what keywords people are using to find ProductCritic via searches (hence "Organic Convesion"). Since we get a majority of our traffic from search engines, the information here gives us some indication about whether we should concentrate more effort on aggregating reviews for digital cameras, camcorders, or cell phones.

So, what does all this have to do with getting full referral URL's? Well, that's one thing that Google Analytics does NOT do well. For example, last week, we noticed a sharp spike of referrals from the forums at dpreview.com. Although Analytics showed us the referrals, we couldn't tell EXACTLY where they came from (only that they came from forums.dpreview.com). We could check the server logs, but if you don't have access to them, there's an easier way.....sign on and use HitTail.com. It's an awesome free service and although most people use it primarily for keyword suggestions, the tool gives you every referral URL in full detail. Since it also does this for searches, you can click on the links that HitTail.com gives you to exactly reproduce the searches that people use (including ones from localized versions of Google).

Note that we're not affiliated in any way with HitTail.com....it's just a great FREE tool that everyone who's serious about tweaking their site for optimal revenue should use.

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Block Your Ads. Get Better Stats.

As part of the added value of ProductCritic over other review aggregator competitors, we add reviews and products manually (instead of using a spider or bot to scrape review sites). We believe that the quality of review summaries, the overall coverage on a product, and the summary review scores (and therefore, resulting ProductCritic Score) are much higher than with automatic scraping.

On any normal day of working on ProductCritic, I probably reload the page 20-30 times depending on how many products and reviews I'm adding. This has a negative affect on the stats that you see on Google Adsense and Analytics because your pageviews are added to the total thus giving you inaccurate statistics. Since I'm such a stats addict, I wanted to remove my own pageviews of the site.

Since I use Firefox, I installed the Adblock add-in. It's a great add-in for blocking all ads or specifically chosen ones. I actually don't block ads from other sites because I want to see what ads other sites, blogs, and competitors are displaying. As long as you enable your filters correctly, the Add-in works great because I can choose specifically just to block my own Adsense or Chitika ads but still see those ads that are located on other sites. Furthermore, it is very easy to enable/disable the blocking of ads just by right-clicking the "Adblock" link located at the bottom right of the browser window (which allows me to easily see the ads on ProductCritic if I want to).

Once you install Adblock, you will need to add filters. Here is what you need to add to your filters in order to block Google Adsense and Chitika ads:

google_ad_client="pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX*
ch_client="productcritic";
http://mm.chitika.net/minimall?*&client=productcritic*

*Note that you'll need to replace the bolded parts above with your own client number or text. Don't forget to keep the "*" that's at the end of some of those lines as they act as a wildcard (which tells the filter that you don't care what is after that text).

So far, it's been working great for me as my Adsense and Chitika stats for Page CTR and Page eCPM are much more accurate (since my own pageviews are not watering down the results).

Finally, an added bonus of blocking your own ads is that you don't accidentally click on your ads (which can get you kicked out of the Adsense program by Google). Overall, a fantastic add-in and another reason to use Firefox as your default browser.

I'm Already A Stats Addict

As part of starting up a new site, you need to get all your metrics in place early. ProductCritic currently uses stats gathering tools:

• Google Analytics
• Google Adsense
• Google Webmaster Tools

Even though the site hasn't officially launched, I'm still checking the metrics quite regularly to see the affects that the implementation of various strategies or link sites have on visits. Since we haven't really even officially launched to friends and family, we can tell that most of the current visits to both ProductCritic and this blog are either from people stumbling onto the sites or are our own clicks.

Besides ensuring that we are being spidered from the big search engines and all posts on this blog are being pinged by Weblogs or Technorati, I saw a new site called Tag A Cloud that allows you to create a tag for your site and some keywords as a link to your site. Almost immediately, I saw referring links from Tag A Cloud. For interests sake, the tag I added to that site for ProductCritic is "stuffyouwanttobuy".

I'm looking forward to seeing how ProductCritic grows over the year. The problem with being addicted to seeing the web stats is that they'll become even more addicting once there's some growth to the visits and (hopefully) to this blog.

One thing we've learned that we'd like to pass on is to get your site on Google's Webmaster Tools as early as possible and upload a sitemap. It takes quite a while for Google to crawl your site when you first start out (ProductCritic hasn't been crawled since October).