if you're running adwords campaigns, you absolutely need prosper202 (or similar, maybe there's better these days) - which will tell you a great deal more than just the IP address. doing without is simply burning money.

Analytics doesn't have any way to show IP's, but if you wanted to track them you could log them when a visitor comes to your site with a utm_campaign query string set or something like that. Wouldn't be 100% accurate but would give you a good idea. I've never seen anyone analyse Google CPC ad traffic would be quite interesting, I've got a ton of data for it on my site but haven't had time to sift through it yet

WutRUTryin2Hit is correct. If you are installing a blog on your own servers then it doesnt make a difference, but if you want to use a 3rd party platform, using a subdomain is easier as its just a DNS change.

I help run a gaming website and I was wondering which ad revenue service we should sign up with given how many hits we get per month. I've heard that Google Adsense's rates are horrible, but I personally don't know anything about this kind of thing.

In a span of 10 days (we just installed tracking analysis software), we got 6k unique visitors, 240k pages, 775k hits (can't tell between pages and hits myself), and we use around 8GB of bandwidth. Assuming we get, say, 10k unique visitors a month, what would be our best bet? We want ads that give you revenue without having to click on them, and we don't want them to be intrusive, for a lack of better word.

site seems pretty bad at explaining features, can you give a run down on why you think this is such a great product?

Some of your numbers are off. There's no way 6,000 visitors generate 240,000 pageviews as that's an average of 40 per visitor.

You need to test multiple ad networks (including Adsense) and use whichever brings in the most. Expect to earn between $.001 and $.005 per visitor using CPM. That would be between $6 and $30 for your 6,000 visitors.

Some tracking software wont be up to date on search spider user agents, so that could be why it's showing high numbers.

It's basically the equivalent of Holdem Manager / Pokertracker for PPC campaigns.

it can give you ROI down to the keyword level, allowing you to optimize good performing keywords, fix bad ones or outright delete them to make adwords spend much more profitable. If you're doing content network, it can tell you again what keywords are good, but also which site placements are the profitable or if a site is bringing in a ton of clicks but few conversions. It can also do split testing between various ad texts, and various landing page easily. It can make pretty graphs of most anything, allowing you to see odd things like e.g. one keyword is only really profitable at a certain time, the rest of the day it's just chewing up money. Of course also gives you standard info like IP, country, browser etc. It has a sick "live view", which you can just watch as visitors arrive to your site and it'll add a $$ next to them if they convert and it's Free!

great explanation, sounds baller . Last question is will it back-test any of my analytics, i.e. if I get it now will it track my last 2-5M views/couple thousand clicks?

unfortunately not, it works by "bouncing" each click through it's database en-route to the target site, so it's only useful for live campaigns and those need their target url set appropriately.

It's also not a replacement for full analytics - it won't tell you much about how people behave once they're on your site, short of whether they "convert" or not (this is most easily done with a tracking pixel placed say on your "thanks for signing up" page - it's main use is telling you exactly where they came from / what ad they clicked on.

The little detail is that our website also hosts a forum, so that might be a reason there's so many pageviews. And in regard to Gullanian's comment, we actually get a lot of web crawlers on the forum now that you mention it.

Any reason you're not using Google Analytics? One huge advantage is they filter search bots really well.

If one search bot gets through then it can ruin your stats. Ruined stats are misleading and could lead to bad decisions. Some will create a new session for each page view, some will do lots of page views on the same session, etc etc. They all vary a lot in behaviour.

On our site for example I log every visit, we had 18,500 visitors yesterday but Google Analytics reports 6,800. Also 57,000 page views compared to GA's reported 42,000. So that's a difference of 12,000 visitors and 15,000 page views in just one day.

Yeah pretty much use Google Analytics, everything else is truly terrible. The only reason you would use something else is because Omniture has a special relationship with Facebook and gets the actual stats which Google can't. Even then you would still run GA parallel.

Watch out for flash game sites, they are basically an adwords scam.
People click like crazy all around the flash game site then misclick over your ad. Boom, one useless click paid for by you.

I prefer to target specific sites on the content network, maybe let it run free for a day or two to see if it finds decent sites by itself. After that tighten the belt and just go where the real audience is.

(This is more applicable to images than text ads).

Hey, I run a gaming site as well with 35-45k uniques/month and have been experimenting a lot with ad networks the last couple of months.

I have tried CPMStar, EpicGameAds, eGameAds, ad2games and IQU so far. All of them are gaming related ad networks, some are a CPC/CPM mix and the rest CPA. The result was that for standard IAB banners (we tested 728x90, 468x60, 300x250) these networks are far worse than adsense.

We are still using EpicGameAds though for a pop-under which has a ~3.70$ cpm for us (eu/us traffic mix). That pop-under alone generates twice the income of 3 adsense units combined with the dimensions mentioned above.

There are other alternatives/additions to adsense that I am currently testing, one of them is video advertising. If you are partnered up or have revenue sharing with youtube or any other video network you can embed a video and autoplay it on your site. The same concept works with a live stream, just have the stream running 24/7 and embed it. Or you can have your own player (flowplayer, JW FLV player) embedded, but for that you need an ad stream ofc (Intergi might be an option for this purpose). Video ads should crush any 300x250 or similar sized banner with ease in regards to profitability.

Generally there are 2 issues with video ads tho; 1. annoying sound and 2. loading times. The first can be solved with auto-mute (hard to do with youtube), the 2nd one is unsolvable but in todays world not a big concern because most people have good internet (especially people visiting gaming sites).

The other alternative are places such as BuySellAds. It is possible to sell ad spaces there for a really good CPM, but sadly its not as attractive as it initially looks. The problem is that you have to disable any adverts in the ad spaces that you are offering, they generally seem to not approve any websites with untargeted ads active and the competition is huge so you might never sell anything. Also, 50,000 page impressions per month is a requirement. I'm still looking for alternative sites that offer the same as buysellads without the downsides that they have but no success so far.

Depending on your website you could give CPA a shot tho. There are gaming sites which are specifically built for the CPA model. One example: xmmorpg dot com... this site reviews games and puts a big "play now" area in the review with their affiliate link. I would recommend IQU for a gaming CPA ad network. You could also browse Offervault, maybe you find something suitable there.

Do any of you have experience with Craigslist bots? My boss wants something posted a few times a day, nothing major. The products definitely sell and are worth $20-$30 a piece so it's fine to pay for something (but would obviously like free alternatives).

Anyone have suggestions? Thanks.

Wrote my first post for the Distilled blog on viral content http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/th...cant-go-viral/

Absolutly this. I use statcounter in addition to GA and the SC report is almost double what GA does.

good article.

I wondered if the recent viral ad was the work of some marketing company but if this article isn't total BS then looks like the CEO of the company is pretty ****ing savvy.

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1680076/...ave-club-promo

Hahaha that's awesome. #Doingitright

Does anyone know any resources for actually designing a page in the style of all the 37signals sites? It's the same style used by a million cool startup sites in 2012, you know?

I am not looking for CSS tips, just the actual design, like an actual book or article saying "hey listen, okay, so use this kind of grid, here are some tips on headlines, here are the kinds of fonts to pick" etc.

I can figure out a lot of it by looking at sites in this genre, but to have an explicit guide to it would be cool. Anyone know any guide to this stuff?

enjoyed the post

can you give some examples of those sites. you got me curious about the design. googling didn't help me.

I think www.37signals.com is probably the best example I can think of. but there are tons, and I have trouble even articulating quite what I mean. Just sites that are tasteful, usually have a white background, look very modern, and use a lot of very nice typography and grid-based layouts. Many many business websites look like this these days.

Got a question of SEO and domain names:

let's say "poker life" gets 50k searches
let's say "online poker" gets 100k searches

Let's say hypothetically I wanted pokerlife.com. If that's taken and someone has parked similar domains (like apokerlife.com,) but onlinepokerlife.com was available, is this a smart move to get a ranking boost from having both phrases in the name, even though the phrase "online poker life" had negligible searches and is not what the site is necessarily about?