Month: October 2006

One of my new favorite Web 2.0 tools is a user activity monitoring tool from crazyegg. There are several javascript based applications that can track what links/images your users are clicking on, but crazyegg has taken it to a whole new level. Their userface is intuitive, the free account is certainly worthwhile and the data you can gather is fantastic.

My favorite offering from the crazyegg tool is a heatmap which shows you which links are getting the most clicks with an easy to understand graphical interface. Not only does the tool show you which links are getting clicks, but the actual placement on the screen where those clicks are occurring. In just a few days I’ve started to see trends among my users wherein they gravitate and click on specific words more frequently than others.

Below I’ve taken a screenshot of the tracking campaign I’m running for 1km1kt.net, my role playing games website. This particular screenshot represents 1,199 visits and 289 clicks on the page. I’m particularly pleased with this tracking information because it shows that my ad placement for this page is spot on!

In recent news, larger megalithic websites like Google, MSN and Yahoo! have been losing traffic and web presence to smaller more niche oriented sites with focused user bases. We’re already seeing a shift in attitude of the larger sites as they make moves to harness the marketing power of millions of individual websites and stop trying to draw traffic away from them.

One program poised to lead the way in this Internet revolution is Google’s widely disparaged AdSense program. Google is currently the #1 search engine and serves more than 50% of Internet search engine traffic. If it were to monopolize the search engine market and double in size to 100%, where would it go from there? Google has already addressed this issue by instituting their AdSense program that allows their company to have presence and control over not one, but millions of websites.

This process of diversification is facilitated by new web standards, RSS and XML feeds, and open source community software. As it becomes easier to establish an online presence, individual markets become more focused and competitive.

If you haven’t carved out your own place on the net, you are losing your opportunities. The good niches are going fast and the rest won’t be around forever. With such emphasis placed on the age of a website and the effort it takes to establish one, it will be difficult for newcomers to plant a foothold and make an impact further down the line.

Web server outages are a fact of life for website owners and online entrepreneurs. Site downtime means lost customers and less advertising revenue, but can also lead to a backlash from online search engines. Search engines crawl your site on a daily basis checking for new content, but also to see if your site is up and running.

Typically, most search engines build a small amount of downtime or website inaccessibility into their algorithms, but if a search spider is continually visiting a site that’s out of commission it will be reflected in the search results and can negatively impact your traffic.

Consider using a website up time monitoring service like Alertra.com or something similar. There are several freeware programs that can be implemented on off site servers if you have one available to you.