Case study update

Hi Folks,

Thought I would give a quick update specifically on how my website experiment is progressing. Squidsquid.com has been on the web for 1 month. The first 3 weeks showed very modest traffic. I submitted the site to a few places and managed to get a few incoming links. Then on Sunday this week I was linked on the the presurfer which brought in my then biggest day to date of 192 unique visitors. On monday, to my amazement I was picked up by the 9 at yahoo - it was most surreal to see their 'news reporter' talking about squidsquid. Yahoo is consistently the most visited site on the internet (somewhat strangely to me because I don't know anyone who likes it). This resulted in a huge jump in traffic, as you can see below.


Traffic levels since monday have dropped sharply, but are still much higher than before. A number of message boards and blogs etc put up links as a result of the yahoo exposure. I'm also hoping that the traffic and incoming links will result in higher search engine rankings.

A few other points of interest:

• My adsense CTR is very low. I think this is mostly a result of content that is not easy to advertise (do visitors really want to know more things about squid?). Consequently I've had only modest income, with by far the most revenue on the one big day of traffic.
• My "email to a friend" box has been used about 45 times, which I think makes it quite worthwhile.
  
• I have been staggered by the proportion of visitors that are from the US (see below).

I don't really understand it. The US is the most internet-ed nation and the biggest population of English as a first language speakers. But still, a quick population comparison reveals: USA about 300 million people, UK 60 million, Canada 30 million. Only 1.5% of visitors have been from the UK, 2% from Canada, a whopping 87% from the US, which is clearly disproportionate. One factor is certainly that most of my traffic was from the yahoo link, which is probably mostly visited my Americans.

Top beginner adsense tips

I'm pretty new to using adsense. However, I've picked up a few things so far, and here are my top tips and advice:

1. There is a lot of advice out there on ad placement, size etc. There are no hard and fast rules but the consensus seems to be:

• Try to blend your ads with your site, use a color scheme that fits in.
• If possible, insert ads in your content e.g. wrap your text around them. Ads that appear just at the top, bottom or side are easily ignored or subconsciously filtered.
• If possible, use wide ads.
• Consider using adlinks. If placed correctly, they can look more like menu items than ads, and are highly targetted to your content. Note that you will only receive money if users click on the results of the adlinks page (i.e. two clicks required).

2. To begin with, adsense delivers only cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means you only get revenue when a visitor clicks on an ad. To also receive cost-per-impression ads, an advertiser has to choose to advertise on your site. If you have only CPC ads, and a low clickthrough rate, you wont get much revenue even with good traffic. Interestingly, this very blog started receiving some cost-per-impression ads after only about 1 week of being up. My website squidsquid.com has received no cost-per-impression ads, despite having considerably more traffic. It seems a little unlikely that an advertiser chose to advertise on my relatively unknown blog, but maybe. The only other explanation is that some adwords advertisers have an automated system of delivering cost-per-impression ads, dependant on the content (i.e. the advertiser 'automatically chooses' to advertise cost-per-impressions on your site).

3. Depending on the type of site you have, it may be difficult to target your ads (e.g. I have a comedy site about giant squid - adsense ads for "giant squid on ebay" are unlikely to have high clickthrough rates)! However, if you cant or dont want to change your content overly (and I dont think you should), then other factors that have a strong influence on the content of the ads are alt tags, your page title and your page filename. These can all be used to target the ads more appropriately.

4. Further reading:

• Scan through this longish article for some tips (there are quite a few advertising plugs for products there also).
• Check out this reasonably good article about how to increase your blogger traffic and adsense revenue.

Beginner PHP programming tips

I'm going to list a few disparate things I've come across that I've found useful in beginning php programming. This article should be useful for people with a background in programming but with little php experience.

First off, php is a scripting language. Its free, open-source, integrates easily with apache (the web's most common web server), and is supported on many web hosts. After installing php (see this earlier post), I started with this good introductory article to get me started and familiar with the syntax etc.

Sending mail with php

Sending mail with php is easy, via the mail() function. However, if your mailserver requires SMTP authentication (and it probably does) - then this won't work. For this, try the free PHPmailer. I got up and running with this by simply following installation instructions and modifying the example on the sourceforge project page. You can also send HTML formatted mail, add attachments etc.

Validating (and remembering) checkbox input

I have a page on my site (how to tell if you are part squid) with a number of checkboxes. One thing I wanted to do was ensure that all the boxes were checked (either yes/no) when the user submitted (or else show an error message). Testing whether they are checked is easy enough, but here is the nice code I found to save the settings for all the checkboxes that were checked, so the user doesn't lose that data if they have to resubmit:








Passing variables between pages

I'm no expert on this one. However, I wanted to get some information from a form, process it, then pass it on to another php page. I believe that the POST and GET methods can be used for passing information from a form, but not for passing variables that you have defined yourself(?). A way I found to do this is to use the session_start function. The documentation and information I could find about this was a little confusing (I probably need to read a decent book) - but I did manage to get it working. Two important points - you need to call session_start on both (or all) pages you want to use session variables, and you must call it before your html (or any header information like doc type).

See an example of session_start working at find out your squid name (I pass the user's squidname from the first page to fill in the text box on the second page).

Server side includes and php?

I've set my website up to use server-side includes (SSI), mainly for the menu and my adsense ads etc. SSI is very useful for content that is replicated on many pages - typically the banner or menu information. It means that this information can be stored in one seperate text file and included by the server in every page in which it is used, e.g.:

The normal way to configure a web server to look for SSI is to name the files with a .shtml extension (this means the server doesn't have to check every html file for SSI, which would be inefficient). But I would also like to use SSI in my php files - does anyone know if this is possible? If you ran your own webserver this would be easy enough, just configure it to also check .php files for SSI. But you dont have this option if your site is hosted by someone else, so I'm not sure if this can be done.