Entries from May 2008 ↓

I just found out about this cool site the other day, called the Mechanical Turk. The site is named for a machine some guy made a long time ago, dubbed the Mechanical Turk. The machine could apparently play chess, quite well in fact. Except after quite a lot of publicity etc etc the secret got out of the bag that it was in fact a little guy inside the machine who happened to be quite good at chess. Surprise Surprise!

So what does that have to do with mturk.com? Well, basically, mturk lets people get inside the machine. People post things on there that seem almost mindless sometimes. For example: does this picture match this description? Yes or No? Any human that is half awake can probably tell you in a heartbeat whether or not it does. However, it is very hard to get a computer to do that. Hence the person in the machine. So on Mechanical Turk you can accept these strange jobs, and get paid a set rate for them. Now, before you go and get all excited on me… let me just say the standard rate is measured in pennies… not dollars! The task I just mentioned would likely bring 1 penny for 1 match.

That is all from the perspective of the worker (or Turker, as they like to call themselves!). Now lets look at it from the perspective of the requester. Think of something you’d like to get done done and pay very little for!

Would you like to get a whole bunch of articles written for cheap cheap? I just submitted a “hit” to get 20 articles written on digital picture frames at a staggering rate of 25 cents each! I’ve got one back so far… it isn’t the most amazing thing you will ever read, but it is sincere and I can definitely use it as filler text somewhere on one of my site’s pages.

Another idea could be getting Turkers to bookmark your site on social networking sites… Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. Pay them a penny for the job, while driving traffic and rankings for your site!

Have a blog you’re trying to promote? You can pay people pennies to come and leave comments, which helps give your blog the impression of being a bustle of activity (no, I’ve not paid for comments here, and won’t =).

Why not go over to mturk.com and check out what people are looking to get done? You might be surprised how cheaply you can get the same things done!

I’ve been so busy lately trying to work out some kinks in getting my first webstore online (selling digital picture frames - and yes - I’m trying to get some link love here =) that I’ve somewhat neglected my affiliate marketing endeavors. However, as the site is slowly coming together I find myself starting to think about how I’m going to market it. As I previously posted, I have had no end of SEO related sales calls, some of them totally discounting the value of PPC advertising. I think that is rather misguided. SEO alone is like having one leg on a stool. You need more legs if you want to stand securely!

Pay Per Click advertising gets you results fast, and it also helps you really drill down to find the money words, if you’re doing proper analysis. This can really help inform you when it comes to SEO, and choosing what keywords to optimize around. So I set out on a quest to find some tools to really help me do that proper analysis, and along the way I’ve discovered a couple great ones. If you’re into affilate or pay per click marketing, I highly recommend you seriously consider these.

Disclaimer: This is not a sales pitch, and even though my affiliate links are in here (you can only be an affiliate once you’ve purchased) I honestly do recommend these products. Evaluate them on their own merit.

Affiliate Radar

I’ve been looking for a way to quickly build campaigns that are trackable at the keyword level for a long time. I’m fairly handy with Excel so I’ve limped along with some homebrew solutions for quite a while, but when I found Affiliate Radar I knew I needed it. Their slogan is “Don’t Fly Blind” and it’s true. If you’re an affiliate marketer and you’re not tracking the performance of every keyword you’re advertising on, I can almost guarantee you’re both losing money (even if you’re making money) and at the same time leaving money on the table.

The great thing about AR is that I’m now able to easily implement keyword-level and ad-level tracking on pretty much any search engine I choose. I can send all the traffic to one page if I wish, and the software will handle it all for me. Later on, I simply go into my affiliate network, grab the relevant report, import it into AR along with my cost data and boom - it spits out a gigantic report that gives me cost / revenue data per keyword / ad across all my campaigns all at once! It takes seconds! From here I can quickly identify which keywords are winners and which are losers. This allows me to save a ton of time testing new affiliate offers, and means I’m much more likely to hit upon a profitable combination (even if I’m only running two keywords!).

Another interesting thing about the method of tracking AR uses is that it assigns a unique ID to every keyword - such as 7A000123 for example. The only place this has relevance is in their database, so the manager of your affiliate program will have no idea which keywords or tactics you’re using to drive sales. This effectively keeps your secrets safe.

Affiliate Radar is setup for simple report importing for most of the affiliate networks you can think of (and they’ll add more on request). CJ, Clickbank, Linkshare, CPA Networks, Azoogle, the list goes on and on. One of the coolest features is the ability to quickly export any given campaign to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. What I do is build a campaign in Adwords Editor (another FREE must have for anyone using Adwords), export the whole campaign into Affiliate Radar, add all the special keyword links, then export back to Adwords, adding Yahoo and MSN at the same time. This can really triple your efficiency when building new ad campaigns.

Speed PPC

I just got Speed PPC the other day, and I’ve yet to really take full advantage of its power. However, using these two systems in conjunction can provide some stunning results. Speed PPC allows you to manipulate keyword lists into massively long lists, broken down by category in order to provide maximum relevancy. For example you might have two lists, one of type of shoe (running shoe, tennis shoe, hiking shoe etc) and another of brand names (Nike, Reebok, Adidas, etc). Speed PPC can merge these together into every combination you can think of (Nike running shoe, Nike tennis shoe, Nike hiking shoe) and group them together. You can then do similar things building the ads themselves. The final screen lets you export all that data into Adwords Editor where you can have a campaign with hundreds of keywords broken down into dozens of adgroups live in about a minute.

Now take this data from Adwords Editor, send it over to Affiliate Radar, add keyword tracking, then export it back to the three main search engines and you’re well on your way. A competent user of both programs could have a fully fledged, optimized keyword and ad tracked campaign (with hundreds of keywords) setup from start to finish in just over 10 minutes. Where I come from that is pretty impressive.

Adwords Editor

I thought I should mention Adwords Editor in here as well. I know a while ago I was conned into buying a similar product that allowed me to edit my Google Adwords campaigns from a Windows client; however the software didn’t work that well and I ended up discarding it. Little did I know, probably at the same time, Google was releasing their free tool called Adwords Editor. By far the most impressive feature of this software is the ability to easily import / export bulk data. I can add hundreds of keywords to multiple campaigns from one screen, or change the max bid on all my keywords simultaneously. Did I mention it is free?

I bought a Dell XPS 1530 about three months ago (February ‘08), and I’ve been using it as my main computer since then. I use it basically all day long, in a wide variety of applications, so I thought I would write a bit of a review of my experiences with it so far. Hopefully someone finds this useful. If you’ve got one of these or are thinking of getting one, please leave a comment at the bottom! Cheers.

First off, here are my specs:

Dell XPS 1530

Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz/800MHz FSB, 4MB Cache)
3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2 Dimms)
High Resolution glossy widescreen 15.4″ LCD (1680×1050) & 2MP Camera
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
Windows Vista Premium
250GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive
8X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capacity
Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy HD Software Edition
Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-card
6 cell primary and 9 cell additional Lithium Ion battery
Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0+EDR)
1 Yr Return to Depot Service, Complete Care, Tech Support with Lojack

First let me say that I received my laptop sooner than I expected - I guess Dell operates by the age-old “keep expectations low, then over deliver” adage. Compared to their timeline I think I got it a week early. Which was good, because we promptly took it to Hawaii.

Traveling

It is fairly easy to travel with the XPS 1530 because it is very slim, and reasonably light. Included in the package was a slim nylon covering for the laptop with a magnetic flap. This helps protect it if you plan on throwing it in a backpack or something. On the plane, the XPS 1530 was great, because it has dual audio outputs, enabling both my wife and I to plug in and listen to movies. I think pretty much any 15″ laptop is going to be somewhat awkward on a plane (unless you fly first class everywhere), but this one fit fairly well on the tray in front of me. A major bonus was the fact that I had ordered both the 6 cell standard battery and a 9 cell backup battery. Using them together, I was able to watch movies for the duration of the 6+ hr flight. Having traveled quite a lot in the past, I can truly say it is a joy to not have to worry about where I’ll find the next electrical outlet and time to charge!

Appearance

The appearance of the Dell XPS 1530 is really quite sweet. I got the Tuxedo black model; you can also get it in blue or crimson. It is a mixture of brushed aluminum (looks like it at least) and black plastic. I don’t think you’ll find too many other laptops that look as good as Dell’s XPS series; they’ve won a few awards for that as well I believe. The hinges on the side are nice, they don’t look weak like some other laptops and they really anchor the screen quite securely from flexing. One complaint I have is that the built-in speakers are hidden under a perforated plastic grille that tends to collect dust and grime, and isn’t easy to clean. The media buttons are kind of cool; they light up when you touch them. I know some people have complained about the placement of the mouse pad (its off-center), however I find it is in just the right place when you’re typing properly. The keyboard itself feels good to the touch, though mine seems to have a slight upward bow in the center. Maybe it is my imagination though because I can’t see it from every angle. The fingerprint reader is a bit of a gimmick I suppose, though it is handy as a faster way to login to windows than typing your password. I’ve been known to use this feature to login while walking down the hallway booting up my laptop…

Display

I have my display set at max resolution (1680 x 1050) and it looks great. Colors are vibrant, everything is sharp and I find it a comfortable size to work at. Additionally, I also have a second monitor that I run off the VGA output, as an extended desktop. This works great, except for the fact that every single time I login to windows or resume from sleep mode I have to reset which side of the computer the monitor is on! (default is to extend to the right, but my monitor is on the left). This is sometimes infuriating, though I expect it is more a shortcoming of Vista / NVidia drivers than the fault of the XPS 1530. I’ve also used the XPS 1530 quite a bit with my projector (using the HDMI output) and it works well. However, another gripe with the drivers - the computer doesn’t always properly detect which secondary display is hooked up, and it screws up my custom video settings. One time after using the projector my laptop display was perpetually bright (60% or so) and every time I changed it, it would pop back a few minutes later!!! ARGH!

Network / Wireless

I don’t like Vista’s wireless admin tool. I think it sucks. They took too much control away. XP was better. That said, I use my wireless card all the time, and I haven’t noticed any slowdown as a result of my connection speed. I’m often downloading things and I often get in excess of 500kb/s download speeds. The range also seems very good (must have a very good antenna in the monitor) and my laptop far outperforms two other wireless computers I have in the house (a desktop and a Compaq laptop), both in terms of connection strength, range, and speed. Once again though, Vista sucks at handling network connections (IMHO).

I recently bought an AirPort Express, which is capable of 802.11n (draft) and the two are working beautifully together. I frequently get wireless download speeds around the 600kb/s mark. Now I just need to upgrade the other wireless cards on the network.

Audio

I got the upgraded audio option - the Sound Blaster Audigy. I notice there is a “Software Edition” tagged on the end of the line item - I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I can tell you I’m not super impressed. I’ve done some audio recording on my XPS 1530 and so far it hasn’t been able to compare to my previous desktop. Sometimes during playback (I often play music while I’m working) the sound cracks up - almost like it’s losing reception! Typically, this happens under periods of heavier stress on the CPU; using Photoshop or something of the like, but unnervingly, it also happens reasonably frequently when I am doing nothing more than scrolling my mouse! It makes me wonder if there is an IRQ conflict or something (I haven’t had to deal with with those in 10 years!!). So I’m not sure if this is a Vista configuration issue, or if it is actually a hardware problem. Nevertheless, I’m underwhelmed with the audio capabilites. The two audio outputs, as I mentioned previously, work great while traveling; when in use as a desktop the laptop automatically uses both connections so you can run a 5.1 system, which is cool. The only problem is that the connections are in front, which is annoying this time as now I’ve always got a pair of nice white speaker cables going to the front of the laptop.

Another problem related to recording is I’ve been unable to run any of my higher-end software applications like Cakewalk Sonar, due to hardware problems. I know most people probably don’t run that on a laptop, but it would sure be nice for what I’m doing. Also, I haven’t been able to monitor what I’m recording, without playing it back. That really sucks, as it is far better to monitor a live audio stream than have to play it back every 2 seconds to isolate a problem!

Miscellaneous

Dell ships a cool little remote control in the ExpressCard slot. This works great from across a room to control the laptop for music or movies. The range isn’t great, but props to Dell for including this inexpensive perk with the XPS 1530. Many times my friends have commented on the cool factor of this little remote.

Ability to run OS-X Leopard

When I was looking into what laptop to buy I seriously considered getting a Mac. The tipping factor was price. For about $1000 less at the time I was able to get a machine that was spec’d out almost EXACTLY the same as the MacBook Pro. The other thing was that I have several little programs that are only made for Windows, so even if I got used to running in OSX I’d still have to use Windows on occassion, which kind of defeats the purpose. Plus I like games.

So I looked into it, and realized that the Dell XPS 1530 had pretty much exactly the same hardware as the MacBook Pro. Right down to many of the model numbers. So I looked into it, and after spending an often frustrating Saturday afternoon on the issue I got OSX “running” on my XPS 1530, dual booted with Vista. Unfortunately, the sound doesn’t work, likewise the network drivers. I managed to get video drivers off the net, and probably by now someone has done the audio and network. I suppose if these issues could be resolved, there would be serious potential to kill the entire Vista installation and go straight from OSX Leopard, perhaps with XP as the Windows option inside of Leopard. For now though, I’m sticking with Vista. Leopard sure looks pretty on my Dell though.

Other Issues

I think most of the other issues I’ve had with the laptop are Vista related. Unfortunately Vista is an incredible memory hog, even with my 3GB of RAM managing to go quite slowly quite frequently. I’ve got tons of programs installed, but I’ve had to shutdown most of the background processes to keep the thing running ok. When will Microsoft come out with a slimmer OS? LOL.

Lately, I’ve also been getting several Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) - something I haven’t had to deal with since the early days of XP or Me. I’d almost forgotten about these. I think this is again related to the IRQ issue and I’ve been meaning to contact Dell regarding them. I hope my hardward isn’t screwed. This brings up another issue - warranty. Lucky me, I live in Canada so I paid more for my unit than I would have in the States (I priced it out) and I only got 1 year, depot service, while the US offer was 3 years onsite!! Argh. I hope that doesn’t come back to haunt me. I heard though that transferring warranties or getting them serviced cross-border is an absolute nightmare so I shied away from that option.

Conclusion
The only real beef I have with the XPS 1530 is the low quality sound card. It would likely be more than adequate for your typical user, but for the things I want to be able to do with it (recording) it is inadequate. I might have to look into some external solution. All in all though, I’ve really enjoyed the Dell XPS 1530, and I think that without the nastiness of Vista, I would recommend it to anyone.

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I’ve been getting a flurry of sales calls lately, mostly offering me costly SEO services (typically $1000-6000). I think this is due to the fact that I’ve just launched DigitalFrameGuy.com and I guess it hit some list somewhere of newly launched e-biz sites.

Problem is, I’m becoming increasingly calloused to sales calls because I’ve been taken in by a few things in the past, and I don’t really have a great desire to throw more money down the golden toilet.

So I’ve learned a few statistics, courtesy of my friendly cold-callers. Here’s one: 92% of all web sales apparently come from search engines, hence the high focus on rankings. These people seemingly completely write off all other forms of marketing, which I think is incredibly narrow-minded. Yes, I will agree that for a web-store, SEO is incredibly important. But to take the line that it is more important that anything else, and that you’re basically wasting your time if you think of doing anything else (hahaha - you newbie moron! - you’re doing PPC?). I know internet marketers who have had amazing success just using lists, and others who are producing amazing results with social media marketing. Personally, I’ve had tremendous success with pay-per-click.

The problem is that these phone marketers don’t know me from Adam, and don’t have a clue that internet marketing is what I’ve chosen to do. I realize I need help along the way, but primarily, I want to learn how to do it myself, not turn my site over to some outfit who will charge a couple grand for an XML sitemap and a few hundred directory submissions.

One outfit guaranteed me page 1 or page 2 on Google, within six months, or my money back. Now that is an offer that is more interesting; however I have this desire to do something for myself. I want to achieve something on my own here! I suppose you could make a business model on having people do everything for you, all the time; however I think it would be a very expensive one. Being naturally techie minded, I’ve learned so much along the way that I can now do in minutes, which other people outsource. Yes, they save a small amount of time, and at some point if life gets busy enough I may do the same. However, I think that until you truly understand what the key elements of your business are you won’t truly have the keys you need to get ahead anyways. Putting 10 outsourcers together is brilliant; and I hope to do it one day, but I MUST know what each one is doing, and why, and how they relate to each other. That knowledge will likely only be gained by doing it yourself, at least the first time.

I’m getting off topic. Back to the sales calls. I am typically polite to callers, and I usually try to hear them out. Sometimes I even learn something. But I really wish they could somehow get a better grasp of who I am before they launch into their one-size-fits-all sales rant. If they actually took the time to find out where I was coming from, I’m sure they would be a lot more effective.

Well it’s time for my monthly traffic post, in the ongoing spirit of trying to grow this blog and chart its  growth. (See last month here)

Here goes:

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 3,559,160 (up from 6,181,254)
Google PR: unranked
Technorati Authority: 5
RSS Subscribers: 0

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 297 (last month I had 143)

Inbound Links
During April I did the 30 Minute Backlinks exercises and boosted my links way up from a hundred or so to over 700, in only a week or so. Now for some reason, everything I try using to measure my inbound links comes back with a 0. I know that isn’t possible, and I’ve tried measuring it manually on Yahoo, so I don’t know what is going on with the applications I’m using.

Woopra
I just got Woopra installed so I’ll be using that for my stats from now on, although I’ll continue to keep Google running as a double check.

Conclusions
My Alexa rank is steadily improving, which is nice to see, though I don’t know how useful it is. I’m still not getting much regular traffic. Most trickles in from comments I leave elsewhere, with the majority coming from a few heavy days with StumbleUpon traffic. I’d like to see my inbound links straightened out, and I wonder when Google PR starts kicking in? Still, overall I got double the visitors this month from last, so that’s good progress.

In affiliate marketing we’re often trying to find the most effective and targeted way possible to drive traffic to a particular offer. I don’t know about you but I know that I don’t just stumble upon the best way to do that the first time I try. I know many affiliate marketers simply link directly to the offer; however this isn’t always possible. With Yahoo for instance, they won’t let you do that, meaning if you want to take advantage of that traffic you need to create your own landing page. So how do we get the best landing page possible?

Let me introduce a cool tool by Google: Website Optimizer. This is a great split testing tool (sometimes called A/B testing) for internet marketers. Google handles all the complicated code and statistical analysis; all you need to do is come up with a few versions of the page you’d like to try, and drop a few lines of code onto each page.

You can access the Website Optimizer via your Google Adwords account. You’ll see it under the Campaign Management tab, on the far right. You don’t need to use it in conjunction with an Adwords campaign: it can be completely separate.

The concept behind split testing is that you take traffic coming to your site and randomly redirect each visitor to a different version of your landing page. This works best if you keep your different versions to a minimum, hence the term A/B testing - two versions. The whole point is to be as scientific about this as possible. If you remember your scientific method, the idea is that you isolate single variables and measure those alone, while measuring your control.

Ideally, we’re talking about using traffic all from the same source. For instance, I’m only split testing one of my landing pages on Yahoo traffic. This means that your visitors are all coming from the same place, so you’re measuring results from a somewhat standard crowd. However, this isn’t by any means a make or break scenario - you can definitely split test pages getting traffic from multiple sources. The software will take care of sharing the traffic equally.

More importantly, when you make changes to your page, make them incrementally. If you come up with two completely different landing pages, one will definitely outperform the other, but you’ll have no idea why. This can be a good approach initially, as you’re trying to get into the right ballpark, but once you’ve got something that’s working fairly well you’ll want to split test on single variables.

For instance, I recently ran a split test on a landing page for a particular product (gotta keep some secrets you know ;). Anyways, let’s just say I get more money for homeowner applicants versus renters. So my theory was why not put a fairly prominent link on the page saying “Homeowners Apply Here” or something to that effect. Try to encourage my primary targets onward to the offer.

So I started with my original page, which has just a standard “Apply Online Today!” text link, and added a “Home Owners Apply Here” text link, then created a graphic from some clipart that also said “Home Owners Apply Here.” So I was testing two things: does a Homeowner link perform better, and does a graphic outperform a text link? Therefore, I ended up with three different versions of my landing page, each with a single difference from the others, all while keeping my control page constant (I’d been running the control page for months and months).

In the test results (below) Combination 1 is the text link, and Combination 2 is the graphic link. Here are the results from the split test I’ve just described. If you click the picture, it will open a larger copy in a new window.

There are quite a few important things you can learn from this little table. First off, Website Optimizer is telling me that my trustworthy landing page that I’ve used for months is converting at 34% (plus or minus 6%). So this is my baseline. The longer a split test runs, the better this confidence interval gets. I happened to quit this test early, because I could see where it was heading and I wasn’t happy forfeiting the traffic for the sake of a statistically significant result.

Next you can see that Combination 2 (graphic link) underperformed my original page, but over performed the text link. I would have to run the test longer to see which one truly worked better, as they are fairly close, however I’ll save that for another time.

So quickly, through the table, you have the estimated conversion rate range, shown in percentages, with confidence levels, as well as in the very cool graphic. This graphic shows you at a glance how well or poorly your split tests are faring. Next is the chance to beat the original. This is a way of showing you what probability each split actually has of beating your original page. The chance to beat all shows the probability of each split being #1 overall. Observed improvement is the improvement or lack of, as compared to the original. Finally, to keep things grounded in reality, the conversions over visitors tells you exactly how many results went into each split test.

Lessons
So what did I learn from this split test? Well first off, I realized afterwards that even though I get paid more per homeowner, I still get paid for renters, so why would I want to alienate them? So singling out the homeowner is perhaps a poor idea, and possibly was contributing to the lower conversion rate. Secondly, although the test didn’t run long enough to be truly statistically significant, at first glance it appears that the graphic link was outperforming the text link. This would be a good place to start with another split test - excluding the home owner part. Third, 34% conversion for a landing page isn’t bad, I guess, but it certainly isn’t stellar. Basically this means that I’m throwing away 66% of my advertising dollars before the visitor even sees the actual offer page. That’s kind of horrendous if you think about it.

As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!

If I can get a landing page that is converting above 65% (the current forerunner) that means that for the same advertising dollars, I now get 30% more people viewing the offer! That is nearly double! Assuming final conversion remains constant, this should more than double my profits.

Here’s a super rough example:
If I currently spend $100 in advertising at $1/click, then 35 visitors make it through to the final offer. Assume I get $150 revenue from the 35 visitors. ($4.28/visitor) = $50 profit.

Now, if I spend the same, but have a better landing page, this means 65 visitors go through. With the same ratio of $4.28 to visitor, that would give me a revenue of $278, or $178 profit!!

So you can see the tremendous value of improving your landing page!

Once I have some solid results from this current test, I’ll post them and discuss what I’ve learned. I might even have a valuable tip for you on how you can improve your page the same way!

Since I have installed Woopra, I have attentively watched visitors come and go, browse around my site etc. One several occasions I gathered up enough courage to actually initiate a chat with someone. Not one of them has ever chatted back.

I got to thinking about this, and I’m not really all that surprised that no one has chatted back. For one thing, perhaps they all had popup blockers and they never even saw the window! Or, how often have you been to a site only to have one of those fake chat windows appear with pre-programmed responses? Or, worse yet, isn’t it just downright plain wierd to be visiting a website and knowing someone is watching you! I mean, talk about big brother.

When I go to initiate a chat, I have am staring at the visitor’s IP address - you might as well be watching their front door - I know what city they are from, I know how they got to my page, and I know what they are reading. Imagine it like this:

“Hello friend from Springfield, Illinois - I know you’ve only been on my site for 3 minutes and 15 seconds since you got here from Digg - but do you want to chat? I just got this new software called Woopra and it lets me do that! It’s cool huh?”

Okay, so I’m not that creepy. But seriously, how would you respond if someone started chatting with you out of the blue? Would you feel like your privacy was being invaded? Would you feel like they were stalking you?

From the blogger’s perspective it is great fun to watch people come and go (In Woopra you can even tag visitors with partictular nicknames!), but real time stats great reduces the anonymity of web surfing. I guess the closest example is back to my BBS days. Logging on then meant they knew what you were up to all the time (their computer would make that great modem sound just to let them know you’d connected, for one), they knew your phone number, and several other things about you.

One thing I know for sure, is that for better or for worse Woopra is going to change the face of web analytics, and quickly. My previous post, Woopra - The Chuck Norris of Site Analytics has become the best viewed post ever on my young blog. Woopra is making waves. Woopra pre-approved invites are even being sold on eBay!

What say you? How do you feel, knowing you’re being watched right now?