Quantcast.com – editorial review

Quantcast.com is the latest site to tip its name in to the web analysis market, offering a free service to webmasters and a large database of statistics for advertisers. It’s goal is stated boldly; to even the market and provide a more accurate representation of a website’s current statistics.

The website strives for a worthy cause. It is very true that advertising on the web can be a hit and miss affair. How do we weigh up the accuracy of statistics when they can be so susceptible to black-hat alteration and quick changes? Quantcast aims to settle this issue once and for all.

Genuine publishers can come and register their websites for detailed statistical analysis. In return, advertisers can use the service to outline their marketing strategy and gain fair insight in to the best websites for their cause. Quantcast offers excellent demographic analysis and the unbiased third party concept helps to increase the productivity of the advertisers. It cancels out the mistrust of where a site’s bloated statistics might have come from. Advertisers get a fairer price and publishers get a platform for their service. It’s a win-win situation, you could say.

So how does Quantcast actually function?

Ratings were available for over 200 million websites at the time of this review. That, we’d have to say, caters for the large majority of websites that hold any kind of significance on the web – and then some.

A basic search facility allows the user to locate statistics for any of these websites. The results will return information on monthly unique visitors, age, gender and even ethnicity demographics. You’ll find a lengthy list of active keywords for each website, along with Quantcast’s suggestions for similar sites.

The statistics are visually presented via a mixture of pie charts and graphs. You have your basic overall ranking mechanism, which works to rank the entire web. We couldn’t even begin to point our fingers on an algorithm to justify such rankings, but it certainly seems a more accurate representation than, say, Alexa, which judges ranking by web browsers with its own personal toolbar.

Publishers can use Quantcast to add their own profiles and increase the likelihood of striking up a deal with an advertiser. The Quantcast profile can then be used as a reference by the selling webmaster to conclusively prove that his statistics are what he says they are. 

For detailed analysis, publishers are asked to add a small snippet of JavaScript code to the pages in their website. This enables enhanced tracking and further statistics which are available on demand by the advertisers.

It should be noted that the website is geared towards usage in the United States. Most of the breakdown analysis is focused on this region, although coverage is available on a worldwide basis. We would give priority recommendation to the Quantcast service if you are based in the US. You can still make use of the website if you’re located elsewhere, but a few of the features will be redundant.

There is a large demand for web services detailing traffic statistics and SEM-friendly information. Quantcast is a worthy addition to the group and should be checked out, whether you’re looking to market a website from scratch or refine an existing strategy.

Drill.com / Syntryx reviewed

The competition for traffic amongst websites has reached a fever pitch over the last year or so and taking advantage of Search Engine Marketing has become a talking point of great debate. What are the best methods? What works? What is a waste of time?

We could go on for days about the intricacies of a field which nobody quite understands completely, and that’s where the thrills and frustrations of marketing a website lay.

Drill.com (aka Syntryx) arrives on the scene looking to provide a helping hand for webmasters and marketing analysts alike. While there are many websites offering a sandbox of tools to analyse web traffic and search rankings, not many can claim to do the job as comprehensively as this new site.

Drill.com has been experimenting through a beta phase, gathering further options to present one of the best online analysis tools on the web. It is a must-have for any webmaster who wishes to keep a close gauge over the traffic of his website – and competition websites too.

Sometimes the best SEM strategies involve pinching what works from other websites, and why not? We all have to start somewhere.

By using Drill’s complex member’s suite (dubbed The Member’s Club), you can draw up a tremendous array of statistics in relation to your website’s popularity. This applies to organic search listings, traffic demographics, Page Rank prediction, and much more.

The service is broken down in to three main areas; domain dossiers, keyword evaluation and advanced link analysis.

Want to compile a list of keywords to aid your marketing campaign based on what your competition is succeeding with? It’s possible to do so with the Drill.com member’s suite. Likewise, do you want to see where those blossoming websites are stealing their traffic from? You can get exact links so as to help your affiliation plans and link building strategies. It’s a wonderfully complete package and you can spend many hours analysing the intricacies of your website’s current performance.

Admittedly, the control panel can seem a little daunting at first view. There are a lot of tabs offering many different tools and it will take a while to get used to how everything functions, especially with the use of slightly confusing icons rather than text.

Don’t be put off though. The functionality is where Drill.com excels in a major way.

It is possible to run a search for a group of similar websites and compare them in great depth. We can look at market share, traffic force, the advertisement schemes that a domain is using, and even the value of the domain itself.

If you’re thinking about splashing out on a new URL, it’s great to have Drill’s analysis at the ready. You can weigh up the competitive rating of it before you’ve spent a penny!

The ability to build keyword dossiers and export them for use with your own campaign will save literally hours of painstakingly repetitive work. Not to mention, it’s likely to hand a major boost to your organic search ranking performance.

Drill.com utilizes an unusual credits system to cater for its members. For example, compiling a list of domains may require 20 credits which will be detracted from your member account. It’s a pay-as-you-go style system and one which can end rather abruptly if you tear through your credits.

All in all, however, Drill offers a brilliant overview of just about every aspect to SEM that you could possibly want to have access to. It is great for analysing successful websites, and starting from scratch with your own. This is certainly one of the webmaster suites that delivers on its promises.
 

Compete.com site analytics – review

Compete.com was established in 2000 by Bill Gross, the very same man who founded Yahoo’s inaugural paid search facility. The knock-on effect of his invention has been quite astonishing. Advertising and publishing on the web is now a major business.

But as the web landscape shifted towards pay-per-click advertising, a new concern was addressed. Somebody had to develop a tool which would help us understand what the web audience is doing. After all, marketing and advertising are both ridiculously expensive affairs if you have no representation of how your ads or websites are performing.

Compete.com has been replicated by several other web businesses, but through it all, the site remains refreshingly simple and easy to use right from the first click.

The concept is derided from what is known as click sharing. It is the sharing of information about what our web visitors are up to. What links are they clicking? What websites are they visiting? Are there patterns? Are there trends?

Without this information, search engine marketing would be redundant. Nobody wants to spend money on guesswork. And for that reason, Compete is offering a service which we should all be taking an interest in.

The site offers a very Google-esque search function which can be used to search for a site domain (i.e. YouTube.com). Upon searching, you will be presented with a visual representation of the site’s traffic statistics. The most striking stat is the gross traffic graph. This provides a monthly evaluation of a website’s traffic and is great for determining whether a business is on an upward curve or cursing a one-way ticket to the cyber scrapheap.

Further demographics are available, although you will have to register for free to enjoy site comparison and specific breakdowns of the traffic.

Where Compete breaks the mould is in its willingness to offer more than the SEM guru’s favourite collection of traffic numbers and unique visitor graphs. There is consumer friendly information which would appeal to all of us.

For example, each website profile has a panel of current offers. What can you expect to find in the offers window? Well, it depends on the subject matter. It might be a special discounted hosting price or a clearance sale for a major retailer. Either way, the deals portal is an interesting window in to the best offers that you can expect on a given website. It’s like a catalogue of the best deals around the web.

If you are the owner of a given website, you can add a deal to your profile. Otherwise the trusted Compete staff will crawl painstakingly through thousands of popular websites to keep us all updated on special offers.

Compete.com also offers a handy toolbar which can be downloaded for free. It offers the “Compete Snapshot”, which is basically a stripped down traffic analysis of a website, easily accessible by Internet Explorer as you browse.

You will also find site voting, to get a good appreciation of where the consumer popularity lies.

Compete, affiliated with ISPs and several security services, works tirelessly to compile a safety ranking of every website that it checks. They check the security certificates, past history and content. If the site is trusted, it will be marked as safe. 

Ultimately, Bill Gross will be remembered for his vision of a pay-per-click web advertising future. But in Compete.com, he has given us the perfect tool to keep an accurate eye on the status of a website. It might not have the advanced features of other analytical products, but Compete’s clean friendly approach makes it a great resource for webmasters, experienced or not.

Article Marketing offers superior ROI over PPC

With PPC traffic getting more expensive and competitive by the day, it now becomes worthwile to examine again the organic (SEO) side of search engines – as with article marketing – aka content marketing - it might be possible to get a higher ROI on your marketing dollar over there.

A quick example: Lets assume an average unique outsourced keyword optimized article costs $10 and on average that article brings  in one unique visitor per day (365 per year) from organic searches. I have verified with several SEO specialists and this is a rather conservative assumption, as some of these guys claim that with good SEO an article could bring an average 3-5 visits per day.

Lets stick with the 1 visitor per day assumption though.

If you ordered 1000 such articles and added to your website, over a year you would expect to have an additional 365,000 targeted visitors - for an investment of $10,000. The cost per visitor would be 10000/365000 - which results $0.027 per visitor.

This is considerably cheaper than what is available on either Adwords, MSN Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing PPC.

Furthermore:

1. Organic traffic is supposed to convert better than paid traffic

2. Some of these articles would bring in traffic in the following years as well – driving cost per visitor down even further.

This seems almost too good to be true, and obviously requires more work and an upfront investment in articles, but if the numbers work then the ROI on organic article listings is much higher than paid search. 

Please comment if you have any real data that either supports this hypothesis or contradicts it!

Drill To Provide Free Competitive Data on More than 40 Million Sites

A couple of days ago I chatted with Gil Alter, co-Founder of a company called Drill.com that is about to launch an online competitive measurement device in approximately two months from now. Drill.com is currently in beta mode with around 50 chosen media buying and mega affiliate companies paying to use the tool. Focusing on offering a complete picture of site-top referral ad avenues, for nearly all relevant online destinations, it represents one of the first free competitive measurement sources. Alexa.org, Compete.com and Quantcast.com (the main competitors for free data) are known to be quite limited, and other options such as Nielsen Netratings, HitWise, and Comscore are often out of the price range for many smaller organizations and clients (and therefore not as widely used). Those 40+ thousand dollar tools are all based on ISPs and Panel data, which is purchased by those companies and derived from third parties, and in many ways it abuses the end user’s privacy. The beauty of Drill’s solution is in its crawling based view (see screenshots below) that allows you to compare your sites, large and small to your competitors’ sites and to your industry in general. A key challenge Gil Alter noted for advertisers is finding highly targeted and untouched inventory of a particular viewers, on sites beyond the top-tier media properties. For instance, if you sell travel packages, finding the sites that produce quality traffic for everyone else selling travel packages but you has never been so accurate and available.
Efficient media planning demands much skill. However, media planners tend to look for the superficial solutions in interactive, using networks like AdBrite and going for the largest sites in a particular category without much consideration. On one hand, this generates a considerable inventory flood on the largest players, on the other hand it overlooks a large number of sites.  The vision of Drill.com, so Gil Alter, is to facilitate advertisers’ access to hidden data treasures, consisting of enormous amounts of PR avenues, affiliate link-ins, media-buy sources, blog postings and the SEO structure of competitors.  As Drill crawls more sites for a longer time period, this data will gather greater value, as more inventory is exposed in a more up-to-date fashion. In the meantime, the system is already a human-resource and time saving tool for anyone who does not want to miss out on the top media spots.

Website Visitor Value – revisited

How well does your site do its job in monetizing Traffic to US dollars? Brian Clark’s classic article written back in 1999 is as valid today as it was before the first dot.com bubble burst. In short – anything above $0.50 revenue per 1 visitor is a job well done. anything less means room for improvement. 

Adwords Booster – Scientific PPC Bid Management

a startup company – www.mediaboost.com claims to have developed a service that uses advanced statistical methods such as data mining, sampling, predictive modeling and regression analysis to determine optimal CPC bidding on Google Adwords. their flash demo looks very promising too. I have applied for a free demo account and I will update if their technology actually delivers the goods.

SpyFu – PPC competitive intelligence database

 I’d like to share a very important resouce: www.spyfu.com This site, by Velocityscape, is probably the best tool to figure out your competitor’s keywords. What you do is type your competitors domain and BINGO – all of his adwords keywords are yours. The data is several months old but the owner is promising an update very soon.