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).