What Tech Support Problems Do People Have?

As part of our continuing effort to make ProductCritic the most useful site on the Internet for helping you decide if you should buy a certain digital camera, camcorder, or cell phone, we've worked with FixYa to be one of the first sites to support their widget.

If you don't know what FixYa is, they had recently been written up on Lifehacker. In short, FixYa is a database of user-submitted instructions for fixing tech support issues for various products. They have a pretty good database so far and are continually adding more support answers.

We've started adding the widget to every new product that we enter into ProductCritic and will, over the next little while, add the widget to all the existing products that are on ProductCritic. We've already added them to the Top 10 Rated Digital Cameras. I've included a pic of what the widget looks like and you can see it on ProductCritic's page of Apple iPhone reviews.

I like the widget as it adds another level of information for people who are trying to decide whether to purchase a particular product. It provides a quick glimpse at what problems people may be having with a product despite the reviews or scores that professional reviewers are giving.

We will continue to make ProductCritic as helpful as possible a tool so that when you do finally make a purchase of a camera, camcorder, or cell phone, you have the greatest chance of being happy with your purchase.

If you'd like to see a feature on ProductCritic that would help you in making the right purchase decision for you, let us know!

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.

Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

Organically Grown Website - Is it Possible?

Before we officially launch ProductCritic, I'm going to see how many people can stumble upon the site without us linking it from anywhere. Besides putting up a tag on TagACloud, I haven't placed a link to ProductCritic anywhere else on the web.

Today though, I noticed two things. First, a spike up in traffic to the site (which I've only told some friends and family about). Looking at the referrals, I noticed that the visits came from a blog called Web 2.0 Magazine. After digging around a bit, I noticed that in a blog entry talking about Web 2.0 sites, a comment had been put up with a link to ProductCritic. That's where all the links came from!

The second interesting thing I noted related to organic growth of the site is that I did a search on del.icio.us and someone had added a bookmark to ProductCritic already! As of this writing, 14 people have saved the url to their bookmarks. I would have thought that most of the 14 people came from the above blog referral but actually the ProductCritic link was entered into del.icio.us before the blog entry comment link. That tells me someone found the site useful enough already to bookmark it.

We're focused on the usefulness of the site. We feel that if the site is useful, people will visit it, bookmark it, and tell others about it. Overall, a great learning experience for us so far.