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September 27, 2006 at 9:43 am · Filed under web 2.0, development
These are the top 10 things I learned from attending the Future of Web Apps Conference 2006 in San Francisco earlier this month. The summit was hosted by Carson Systems and included speakers like Kevin Rose, Mike Arrington, Mike Davidson, and more. It’s a condensed and aggregated summary of points covered by different speakers throughout the conference that I found most useful.
- EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program.
Disoverability – everything is easy to find, features meant to enhance, not distract – can still be advanced, as long as it’s easy. Recoverability – actions should be without cost (ex: Digg, UnDigg). The web is about fulfilling needs – create things that let people do this as easily as possible. Drive usage. Generate touchpoints for easy spreading – easy to tell friends, relentlessly remove barriers to account signups. Make the website easy to use. Then make it easier.
- Visual design and copy are extremely important.
Your credibility is at stake. Don’t have your coder do xhtml/css. Start with the design, then markup, then develop the backend. Obsess about your copy and how you communicate to your visitors via text to complement how you communicate with your visitors visually. Remove distractions and simplify.
- Open up your data as much possible.
The future is not in owning data. Expose every axis of your data for people to mash up. Get an API and release it out to the wild, but stay conscious of abuse, whether intentional or not (ex: newbie programmers unwittingly making 100 sever requests/sec.) Offer an RSS feed for everything on your site.
- Test, test, test.
You can do your best to make educated guesses about what will work, but you will never know unless you create it and then test it. Create goals and measurements to be able to gauge progress. Good example: contrary to previous predictions, it looks like contextual ads don’t work well in RSS feeds. (Branding ads perform better). That was only known after testing. Then again, this may not apply to your niche – test, test, test!
- Release features early and often.
Start with a core set of features (and create plugins on top) – always know your end goals. Don’t offer “me too” features just to to have them – stay true to your core. Small increments show visible progress. If you stay personable and honest and set expectations, people will be a lot more receptive when things break. Ideally your development should be modular, incremental, and well documented to mitigate future problems.
- Be special.
Passion for what you are doing and creating is paramount. If you believe it, do it. Don’t let anyone else tell you that it’s not possible or shouldn’t be done. Create purple cows. Challenge the status quo. Do it against the odds and with little startup money. (Raising too much money can hurt you and make you lose focus.) Prove all your detractors wrong. Passion and a belief in yourself will get you through the rough times.
- Don’t be special.
Use common standards or open source frameworks whenever possible. Don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily. Also, try to share user databases, ecommerce systems, and other elements between your projects to prevent siloing.
- If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability from the ground up.
Anticipate growth and plan for problems ahead of time. Document everything. If you want a good real-world case study on scalability, check out Inside LiveJournal’s Backend (PDF). Find a top notch hardware partner if you don’t want to deal with the nitty gritty yourself.
- Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away:
- Microformats (opens up your data easily and contextually)
- Adobe Apollo (deploy Rich Internet Applications easily)
- Whobar (manage digital identity)
- Akismet (stop comment spam)
- User generated content and social software trends
This is a bit of a catchall, but I’d like to list what has been working and not working in the user generated content space.
- Not working:
- Requiring participation from square. Not all users need to participate to generate social value.
- Buying communities.
- Social networks for the sake of social networks.
- Wikipedia consensus model (many people contribute to one idea for the greater good) is not a good model in general and probably cannot be duplicated outside Wikipedia.
- Working:
- Giving users control, being open to different uses you did not anticipate.
- Dunbar principle – segments of under 150 people.
- The individual should get value and the organization should derive aggregated value from all the individuals.
- Social sites have and need different types of users and each should be motivated/rewarded equally.
- Many voices generate emergent order: you can get much value out of all that data.
There was a lot of other really good information and insight that I’ve not covered here. For more in-depth coverage and summary of each speaker’s contributions, check out Allen’s excellent summit notes and recap.
Hopefully by paying attention to these points you will make it to the winners list and void the losers list, next time Paul Scrivens does a roundup.
(Also, thanks to Copyblogger for guidance about writing a better headline.)
September 25, 2006 at 6:53 pm · Filed under marketing, pay per click
AdBrite is actually a CPM ad network (you pay for impressions, not clicks) so it’s not PPC but I will share my horrible experiences with them anyway since I tested AdBrite along with the other PPC systems in this series.
I setup an account with them several months ago and put in a very low CPM price for a single ad - at the time my maximum amount was too low to run anything on their partner sites, so nothing really happened. Since nothing was happening, I sort of forgot about my ad in their system.
Fast forward a few months later - I saw a massive amount of traffic to our site. I looked at the stats to try to figure out where it was all coming from and the referrers were all strange foreign sites (lots of Korean sites) - hundreds of them - most looked like foreign versions of MFA sites - some were not even sites, but cloaked pages, non-pages, ad pages, frames - just complete garbage. But they were sending our site a ridiculous amount of traffic.
Confused, I started digging deeper and logged into my AdBrite account. Lo and behold, my ads had gone active 3 days ago and I was being charged $100 per day for a total of $300. So I went from $0/day and 0 visitors to $100/day (my maximum) and thousands of visitors.
I called AdBrite and they told me that they had just changed some things in their system to “allow more exposure for our advertisers”. I asked them to refund my money since I was not told about this change, and all the traffic I had received was from spammy sites. They sent me the following response:
I spoke with you today regarding the clicks your ad received. We upgraded our system to optimize the ad servers and on Thursday we introduced those new filters, which is why you saw the increase in traffic. Looking at your network, it doesn’t look like there was any fraudulent activity going on, but you can send us any statistics and sites that you would like us to review. Let us know if you have any further questions.
I then proceeded to study my stats and make screenshots of the reports. Fun facts: A lot of the top referrers were not even websites but blank pages, 100% ad pages, redirects, etc. 50% of the traffic was coming from a single IP in Korea! When I contacted AdBrite again with the stats, they referred me to their quality control department and asked me to provide specifics, which I did. This was August 21st.
I followed up several times with them and was told that they were investigating the matter. One whole month later on September 22nd, I received the following email:
Thanks for writing. We have concluded the necessary research for the network ad in question. There was total of $101.64 invalid clicks generated in your network campaign. The invalid clicks has been refunded back to your credit card as requested.
So after a whole month of “investigation” I only got 1/3 of my money back. The methods they used to determine clicks? Who knows. Needless to say, I am not happy. My opinion of AdBrite: STAY AWAY FROM THEM.
As a bonus, on the bottom of their emails they usually had the following:
Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: DFU-######
Department: Online Support
Priority: Low
Status: Closed
So I’m glad they considered my click fraud request LOW priority and considered it CLOSED even before it was resolved.
September 25, 2006 at 6:03 pm · Filed under marketing, pay per click
I tried Looksmart about 3-4 years ago and I was less then thrilled with the results. But I figured it has been a while so I would test them out again. I signed up for a bonus credit and tested them out with a trial campaign.
Well, it turns out they start to charge you automatically once your account balance drops below a certain threshold. So I was automatically charged $80+ before I had a chance to even test out the system properly. It’s a good thing I caught this in time, else they would have just kept charging my account. I looked at the stats and the quality of visits were the lowest of any source I had - lowest pageviews per visit by a decent margin. My stats also showed far less visits to my site from Looksmart’s network than they were showing me (and charging me for) in their control panel, so I’m a little baffled about the difference there.
Looksmart Pros:
Looksmart Cons:
- They will drain your account if you don’t keep an eye on it.
- Quality of traffic was suspiciously bad.
- My site stats and Looksmart’s own traffic stats were very different.
During an episode of Shoemoney’s Webmaster Radio show, his guest Dillsmack talked about his experiences with Looksmart, where they charged $3,000 to his account while he was trying to redeem the FREE $150.00 worth of clicks before he realized what was going on. A call to Looksmart solved it in his case, but Shoemoney still gave out a warning about trying to redeem “free” credits.
I would not recommend Looksmart.
September 25, 2006 at 5:29 pm · Filed under marketing, pay per click
MSN AdCenter was a bit late to the PPC game and had a lot of catching up to do. I think they rolled out a decent product and have a few features that set it apart, namely targeting. The biggest problem with them is market share.
MSN AdCenter Pros:
- They offer demographic targeting that allows you to specify spending increases depending on sex, age, income.
- Quality of traffic seems pretty high
MSN AdCenter Cons:
- Response times to stopping or pausing campaigns are notoriously bad.
- Pretty low volume of searches overall in their system
When I first started the campaign I was advertising women’s jewelry so I set “-man, -boy, -cheap, …” keywords as negatives right in the same list of keywords. Well, it turns out MSN has a negative keyword matching system that’s completely separate from the rest of the keyword system and they ignore any minus signs in the keyword list, taking the word as a keyword instead.
So over a course of about 4 days, I had jewelry ads running for “play boy” and “man love”. It was coincidentally during a weekend when they were upgrading their system so it was down all of that Saturday. So the time for me to notice this in the analytics, plus the time before I was able to login and correct this, plus the time it took for them to change it over (like I said - slow response times) - added up to about 4 days of really untargeted ads and wasted money.
September 25, 2006 at 4:53 pm · Filed under marketing, pay per click
Yahoo Search Marketing (or YSM, also formerly known as Overture) is a PPC network with a different structure than AdWords or AdCenter. It’s fairly difficult to make apples to apples comparisons between these services because of how each is structured. Each one of these programs have nuances that you have to get used to.
YSM is based more around keywords as opposed to Google’s Adwords (which is more centered around campaigns).
YSM Pros:
- Highest pageviews per visit of all the networks in my experience.
- Pretty decent volume of searches
YSM Cons:
- Interface can be fairly confusing, control panel is not laid out very intuitively.
- Have to prepay for your ads in set amounts and set a recurring pre-payment.
- Ads have to be reviewed before they are shown. This can take several days.
Overall, I think YSM is worth testing out, but I would read up on how to use the system and go through some tutorials before taking the plunge. I think it has a bit of a steeper learning curve than the other PPC networks. I see YSM being well suited for a company with a larger budget, especially one going after generic terms for branding purposes.
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