A web agency weblog

Hi there. Tracking visitors in your site is very important for creating a succesful website.

Google recently launched Google Analytics, a free tool for reviewing your site’s statistics. As a Google Adwords user I’ve been using Google Analytics during the last weeks and really like how the Google boys have improved the product (based in Urchin, company adquired by Google some time ago) .

Google Analytics have had so much demand that they had to stop accepting more users.

Today I accessed my account and it was enabled for 5 profiles, so I started adding some of my other domains and I noticed something that I think wasn’t there before, a little confusion about the position of the Javascript code.

Some weeks ago when I created the profile for ventanazul.com I read:

Please verify that the tracking code is installed correctly by viewing your page source. The code should appear between the head and /head tags, and should follow after any meta tags in that section.

Ok, I did it that way and my reports started working some hours later.

Today I’m reading:

Copy and paste the code segment into the bottom of your content, immediately before the /body tag (the one at the bottom) of each page you are planning to track.

The funny thing is that both alternatives are currently appearing in Google Analytics help pages, I think putting the code at the bottom of the page is the right way, let’s imagine a visitor entering a page and leaving before the page finishes loading, with Google’s code in the head this user could be considered in the reports. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve also noted a big difference in the number of visits between Webalizer, Awstats and Google Analytics, the first two show almost 10 times more visits than Google, does anybody know how each one is defining one visit?

Comparing the performance of some of my sites in Google Analytics is going to be really interesting, specially when adding some Adwords campaign to the mix. What do you think?

Many of you may already have heard about Ajax, the suite of technologies powering sites such as GMail, Flickr and Google Maps.

Another web application that uses Ajax, and lots of great usability features, is Basecamp, a tool created by web developers for web developers.

At Ventanazul we have many months working with Basecamp and our clients really love it.

Basecamp allows an easy interaction between developers and clients, you can set milestones, to-do lists, upload files and post messages in an incredibly easy to use interface. Most of my clients needed little time to get things rolling.

This is a great replacement for email, where you can have problems like: “hey, why didn’t you posted our latest changes to the site?", “what changes?", “the ones I emailed to you a week!", “I did’t get those!”

The application is developed by Jason Fried and company, the guys from 37Signals, they seem to have shifted from working in client’s projects and now they offer their own web apps, very useful ones.

Take a look at the free version to get the feel of Basecamp and upgrade when you need more features, I really recommend this application if you need to get your web projects professionaly done.

Disclosure: The links included in this post are using my link to the recently launched Basecamp affiliate program, however this is not an attempt to sell a product that I don’t believe in, Basecamp is really great. Thanks John for reminding me about the disclosure, the post sounded too “commercial”

University of Illinois graduate Frank Anderson is the mind behind Blingo, a new search engine, powered by Google results, that is offering random prizes to people searching the Web.

The idea is actually simple, you only need to search as usual and could be randomly selected to win any of the following:

• Sony PlayStation Portable video game system
• Apple iPod Nano, 2GB digital music player
• Toshiba or Samsung portable DVD player with 7″ screen
• Apple iPod Shuffle, 512MB digital music player
• iTunes Gift Certificate or Movie Ticket Certificates

You can also cash your prizes and get Visa gift cards instead. The selection of prizes varies each month.

With Blingo you get the power of Google results plus the opportunity to win. The site and business model seems legit and I read they have some kind of partnership with Google.

I think Blingo is using the incentives to get attention and maybe introduce new services, paid ones?, in the future. Could the Adsense revenue be enough to cover the cost of the prizes they are giving away?, maybe, they could have done the math and get it working, time will tell.

Currently Blingo is open just for US residents and you don’t need to enter any personal information to join, just when winning and you’re limited to 10 qualifying searches per day.

One of the things I like is that you can refer friends and if one of them wins a prize you also win, there is no limit to how many friends you can invite and of course you should respect the usual terms of services: no spamming, no fake accounts, etc.

Could Blingo be the next kind of FreeIpods like sites? I don’t know, but this only demonstrates that there are many more online business models to be discovered.

Give it a try, this is my Blingo link: