Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Advertising and Stats on OracleAppsBlog

I recently signed a contract with Creative Weblogging to place ads on the blog. To advertise on the blog follow the instructions under the Adsales heading in the left pane of the main site. Until now I’ve been using Google ads which provides me with enough income to easily cover my monthly hosting costs. In order to provide potential advertisers with statistical information on the site I’ve subscribed to a couple of services which provide up to date real time statistical information on my web site traffic.

I’m using three services to provide public blog stats:

1. Sitemeter - a free, fast, and easy way to add a web counter to your web page. Not only does it display the number of visitors to your web site, it also keeps statistics on the number of visits each hour and each day
2. Statcounter - A reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats
3. MyBlogLog - Know what makes your readers click

If you go to the very bottom of this site you will notice the logos for all three services. Clicking on a logo will take you to the publicly available stats on my site for that particular service. The service I use the most is MyBlogLog as it provides you with information on what links are being clicked on on the site, something that Sitemeter and Statcounter don’t do. Unfortunately the publicly available stats only give you the top 5 links clicked on but when I’m logged in I get to see all the links clicked on for the site. If you want to take a look at what I get to see through the back end, check out this mybloglog pic I uploaded to my flickr account (to see the picture properly you will have to choose ALL SIZES on the picture menu and then view the Original picture uploaded).

Some interesting information provided by Statcounter is the Visitor Paths which shows you who entered your site, where they went and how they exited. On Sitemeter they provide some very interesting demographics relating to which time zone your visitors come from. The diagram for this site, which is shown below, indicates that most of my traffic comes from the States.