analytics & ads

It's not like fredshouse is going to pay the bills or anything, but nonetheless I've started experimenting with AdSense and Google Analytics (Wes, you need a catchier name for that, dude. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue or the keys). Seems like a fun, semi-geeky thing to play with optimizing the site, so I guess we'll see how it goes.

You'll only see the ads if you are on an individual entry page, not on the home page or any of the category archives. I figure that will reduce the yuck factor for frequent readers, and help improve relevance of the ads to the specific entries. Also, most of the pageviews on those individual entries come from search hits, so maybe the ads will actually be of value to a few folks. I'll likely screw around with ad types and placement a bit just to see if it makes a difference, so bear with me.

Regarding Analytics, I'm pretty impressed with the service even though it had a rocky and slow start. I'm not sure I'll be designing any serious marketing campaigns or goal funnels here, but the overall package of stats and graphs is quite nice. Hey, did you know that one of the top searches for this site is "reasons to be happy"? Apparently a lot of people are in search of these. Interestingly, about 90% of these searchers come in via google, vs 3% from yahoo search. Compare this to my search stats on "guitar code", where the referrals are split 50-50 between GOOG and YHOO. I wonder does this reflect differences in indexing/ranking algorithms, or personality differences in search users? Heh...