Performancing Metrics now uses Clicky stats as its core. It wasn’t built from the ground up, but rather re-branded. I’m not sure what it offers as unique, but regardless, it’s still a nice stats program with the promises of unique features yet to come.

So what makes Performancing Metrics different? Well it’s more about what is happening now then rather aggregating data. It’s great for seeing what’s happening today, but not great for finding out what happened over the past month.

The dashboard shows incoming links, unique visitors, searches and top content. None of it is older than today and it’s a nice overview.

Digging into the analytics a bit you can get visitor information like country, web browser, screen size and OS among others. The actions tab will let you see the visitor’s information including the time and date, what they clicked on, the web browser and OS they used and referring information. It’ll even count downloads, outbound links and FeedBurner subscribers.

Then there is Spy which is really cool. It shows you, in real time, how others are interacting with your site. I had my co-worker go to the site and click on a post title. As she did that, the Spy area in Performancing Metrics told me when she arrived and what she clicked on as it happened. Very cool, yet a huge time waster.

There are two downsides to Performancing Metrics. The first is the daily limit of 1,000 page views on a free account. For $20/year you can have 10,000 daily page views and if you need more, you can spend $50/year for up to 50,000 daily page views.

The second downside is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to finding your top keywords, searches or referring sites for a specific period of time. What’s the top referring domain for June? Well, that’s why I suggest having Google Analytics installed also.

Overall, I really like Performancing Metrics. It’s a great way to see what’s happening on your blog right now. It has some great features and is definitely a step up from the old metrics program. However, you should also have Google Analytics installed as Performancing Metrics does lack some features you or your blog consultant may want.

pMetrics is not the same analytics solution that Performancing had before, their new offering is a white-label of Clicky, a somewhat new analytics solution that is my current favorite analytics package for blogs.

So why would you use pMetrics over just using Clicky directly? At this point it looks like pMetrics will be building widgets and putting more community around it:

As pMetrics usage increases, we’ll be unveiling some uber-cool widgets and plugins to enhance your blogging experience. Plans currently include: 1) an AdSense tracking plugin and a 2) a Performancing “top blogs” widget that links back to the top 50 or so blogs using pMetrics. Discussion about pMetrics development and plugin/widget suggestions will be taking place in our pMetrics forum: http://performancing.com/forum/578

The base analytics package is free, but the premium is just $1 a month and adds RSS capabilities and a Spy feature that resembles DiggSpy. I personally love those additions, so I’d highly recommend the premium.

It really seems like a good move for Clicky who gets the marketing and name associated with Performancing to drive more users to their application. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more white-labeling of analytics applications in the future.

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As far as I am currently aware, Clicky, developed by Roxr Software Ltd are not a direct competitor, and thus in my mind them having access to my data is potentially less risk.

Accuracy of Tracking Data

The accuracy of your tracking data is important, thus I am doing a test

Clicky
Performancing Metrics
Mybloglog

Just to give Performancing Metrics a slight advantage, I am going to include their tracking data first in my page.

Clicky does seem to have an edge currently on interface over MyBlogLog, but remember that as I previously wrote, MyBlogLog might well have an API available soon and that historical data is highly valuable if you have been using them for a while.

Also what happens if Clicky gets acquired? I feel more confident in a change over and longevity of the service if it is not being hosted on 3rd party servers.
If Performancing Metrics was just an affiliate white label, and they didn’t have anything to do with my data, I would be much happier to recommend them, but at this stage, Clicky direct gets my vote.

Update

Performancing Metrics and Clicky don’t seem to want to co-exist, thus one of them has to go at least until they improve their scripts so that they truly are different. Maybe there is a problem with shared declaration.

Performancing Metrics

Nothing highly personal, I would just prefer Clicky to have my data rather than Performancing.

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*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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Well last night I was pinged by a few people @ SES London and also a few emails pointing me to the searchenginewatch article on Nick Wilson’s presentation @ SES London in which he let it be known that he had the deal all wraped up with Pay-Per-Post and left the company to start a new venture. Nick went on to say that when his partners let the deal slip they were just ready to pack it in and let everything fall apart. That is when Nick said he returned to salvage a deal for Performancing.

No specific numbers were disclosed to me.

Thanks to graywolf for pointing out the sew article and others in attendance at SES London for dropping the skinny.

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About the Author

Years ago I found myself on unemployment and in debt but with many service oriented websites. Determined never to work for "the man" again over the next several years I learned how to monetize those websites through donation, subscription, direct sales, contextual advertising and affiliate advertising. People say that I have a knack for seeing marketing angles that most people do not. I work hard, party hard, and have a relentless work ethic when something catches my interest.

http://www.shoemoney.com

The Performancing Partners program offered bloggers and advertisers the opportunity to reach audiences of highly targeted blogs and generate revenue for the blog publishers. It appears the product never reached its potential.

Chris Garrett, Performancing’s CTO, disclosed the end of the Partners program in a blog post:

When launched, Partners offered a “new, smart way” for publishers to get paid for doing their blogging. Substantial competition for publishers exists. Google’s AdSense appears on sites throughout the Internet, while John Battelle’s Federated Media has gathered a number of very high-profile blogs to host its advertising.

One commentor on Garrett’s post suggested the Partners program simply wasn’t working as advertised:

Another comment came from Performancing’s co-founder and former CEO, Nick Wilson. He left Threadwatch to create Performancing, but his remark seems to suggest a disconnect existed between himself and Garrett when it came to Partners:

Ultimately any effort to promote an online ad network has to provide a benefit to its membership. The blogging landscape, aside from the most highly trafficked blogs that can negotiate a deal, may end up being the personal playground for Google and Yahoo publisher advertising products.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

They sold that part of the company to PayPerPost and PayPerPost returned it. Now no one is taking care of the stats and it’s been closed.

So my first thought was, what do I replace it with? Google Analytics is great, but a bit overwhelming for most people. Mint is one of my favorite stats packages, but costs $30 and I wanted something free for now. Who doesn’t? That’s when I saw Feedburner’s StandardStats.

StandardStats will track and report on blog visitors, inbound traffic, browser usage, OS usage, outbound clicks and much more. I just installed it and I’m waiting for my stats to come poring in.

With Feedburner’s track record with feed stats, I have high hopes for StandardStats. Only time will tell though. Give me a week or two and I’ll report back with my findings. If you’ve been using StandardStats, let us know what you think.

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Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer for TopRank Online Marketing in Minneapolis, MN. His specialities inlude technical optimization of existing web sites, creating search engine friendly web designs, and blog optimization. He has also created a number of blog marketing tools, WordPress plug-ins and FireFox add-ons.

Blog: http://bloggerdesign.com

The market has grown tremendously, and with it there are more options out there for publishers and advertisers to get together to make money. I’m a big fan of this as a long time web publisher and small advertiser. I don’t want one or two companies dominating the online advertising world because I know that competition brings out the best in companies and choice is very important.

That being said, while I support and love to see the multitude of “ad marketplace” type of companies on the market, I see some things that make me wonder how they will get to be major players in the space.

So who am I talking about here? In the past two years we’ve seen Adbrite, BlogAds, Performancing Partners, Adify, Adster, and other marketplaces where advertisers essentially directly buy on publishers sites. There are some differences in these companies’ models, but they all hold true to the idea that advertisers buy on publishers or some type of category of publishers.

As a publisher I’ve found these solutions to be easy to work with, and have had moderate success with some of them. From my experiences and what I’ve found out from others, the biggest sites in their “marketplaces” tend to do the best from them, which is really no surprise. The biggest problem though is that often there just aren’t enough advertisers buying my sites, and many others have given me that feedback, and this is a crucial problem. If publishers don’t get ad buys through them, what’s the point in leaving the space available on your site and dealing with yet another ad provider?

Let’s look at it from an advertiser point of view. I’ve used a few of these sites as an advertiser as well. Again, they’ve done a pretty good job with the experience, but there are some inherent problems.

1. Volume and Time

The most popular platform for online advertising is Google Adwords. Although Adwords is a well-made product, the primary reason for that is because Adwords delivers quality and volume through Google Search. Advertisers can spend the time and effort to learn the Adwords interface because it will drive a high enough volume of clicks and conversions to make it worth the time. Because there is so much volume, it also allows lots of clicks to be bought at a low cost.

There is a huge drop off from the number that buy on Adwords to the number that buy on the next biggest self-service platform, which would be Yahoo Search Marketing. Then an even bigger drop off to MSN Adcenter. Then an even bigger drop off to these small marketplaces. Why does this occur? Each ad system I work with as an advertiser is another thing to learn, and to spend time on, and people use Google primarily because of the volume (and quality). You spend a few hours setting things up, and you get a large number of clicks and conversions. You spend the same time buying on a smaller marketplace and you aren’t going to get close to as much volume.

With these other smaller ad marketplaces, each one is a new interface to learn, and advertisers aren’t sure if they can drive the necessary volume to dedicate the effort to trying it out or sticking with it. I’ve tried a few of them and had this exact experience. It’s not always a case of just increasing your budget either. If you are looking for targeted traffic, you can’t just blow the bank on a small marketplace trying to drive larger volume and get what you want. So in my tests, I spent the time to learn these new marketplaces but couldn’t drive enough volume to justify continually monitoring and spending money there. My failure as an advertiser in turn hurts the publisher on the other side because they are no longer getting my money.

2. Hitting ROI

Additionally, very few ad marketplaces provide feedback on ROI, or guarantee that as an advertiser you’ll hit your ROI goals. In fact, I don’t think any of them do, although using Google conversion code and Google Analytics you can figure it out. Anyway, my point is that as an advertiser, I have to track and watch all the ads I’m buying to make sure I stay profitable. For the few places that provide me volume, I’ll do the manual effort with spreadsheets or some third-party application to track my ROI. Will I really have time as an advertiser to watch my ROI and check my profitability on a bunch of smaller buys on all the ad marketplaces? Personally I found that I didn’t.

What does this mean for the future?

How do these smaller “ad marketplaces” get to the next step? I don’t have the golden answer. You can tackle the volume problem by getting more quality inventory, but how do you get more quality inventory unless you are getting lots of advertisers spending their money with you? Do you shrink your revenue share to increase payouts in the short term? Do you focus on building publisher tools that allow them to work with you before you have the advertisers? It may just be that the company that can grind it out the best will win. But perhaps it means someone needs to take the next step in evolution? Perhaps it’s a company that opens all their data up for any use?

In regards to meeting ROI for advertisers automatically, on the Right Media Exchange advertisers can specify ROI goals that our technology then works to hit for them. At this point we don’t have a small to medium-sized advertiser solution, but if we do you can bet hitting ROI will be part of it.

It will be interesting to watch it play out. All the competition is good for publishers, but if all the ad money is fragmented out across all the small marketplaces it makes it hard for publishers to work with all of them to get the maximum revenue.

Related Posts:

Online Media Auction Services Already Exist
Is Advertising and Aggregation the Key to the Long Tail?
Contextual Text Ads Get All The Hype But
RMX Direct Week One Is Over
Is Valueclick Isolating Itself?

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Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog.

Rowse indicates Nick Wilson, in a private email exchange, indicated that there will initially only be 6-10 network ads running. The ads will be run in conjunction with an undisclosed affiliate network.

I for one am happy to see Performancing Partners start this. I joined the program the day after Partners was launched, listed some of my sites, and have been watching the evolution of the network over the last month and a half.

Their growth on the publisher side has been impressive, and rapid. They recieved a lot of attention when they were first launched with posts from a bunch of ‘A-list’ bloggers. Unfortunately, while their growth on the publisher side has been fantastic, the advertisers growth has not been able to keep up. This has resulted in many smaller publishers not recieving any advertiser interest yet. In my own experience, I have had three of my sites listed since the beginning of the program, and have not recieved any inquiries into the ad space.

The inclusion of network ads into their system while allow some utilization on the advertising space of these smaller publishers who have not had any direct purchases. While I doubt this will pay anywhere nearly as good as a direct buy, it will allow advertisers such as myself to finally see some return on the space invested in a Performancing Partners unit.

Update – the information has been posted to the Performancing Partners site.

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Did you like this article? Keep up with Brian’s expert search optimization tips and tricks at http://www.caydel.com

You can find this out in Performancing Partners stats for advertisers. All the figures are there, for websites that are part of the Performancing network.

PS: Did you guys know that I am the 77th most visited blog amongst all of those that use the Performancing Metrics ?

Get your own Performancing Blogrank Widget (the number in the widget above is not an updated one. I am currently nr. 77. Nick can you speed up the updates for the widgest’s numbers ?).

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Cristian Mezei is the Founder of Infomarket Network, a web marketing agency
based in Bucharest, specializing in search marketing, social media and usability/accesibility. Cristian shares some of his views in Seopedia, his personal blog.

For example, I plugged in aplawrence.com and pointed at the area where I sell text link ads for $20.00 a month.

The calculator says that spot is worth $138.00 a month. No, I’m not undervaluing: that spot is shared by up to 5 rotating ads on my site, so the $20.00 figure is on the money.. maybe a bit cheap, but pretty close.

What was most interesting to me is how the website category chosen affects the value. Apparently tech sites like this aren’t worth half what a gambling site would be worth. Finance comes in next highest, but tech is way down the bottom.

Position also affects the value of ads, and folks do disagree about values. For example, Performancing Partners would “autoprice” this site at over $250.00 a month for an ad in the top left column. I think that’s too high, and offer that position for $150.00 instead.

See those links just above this paragraph? Those are $20 a month ads. To illustrate the value of position, the ad space earlier on the page (“above the fold”, as they say) is easily worth several hundred dollars per month, as is the space at the very top and the top portion of the sidebars. Don’t undervalue your space!

Don’t overvalue it either: you need traffic to be worth that kind of money, of course.

So can you sell links? Probably: How To: Sell Links On A New Blog has some suggestions for how to get started.

If you don’t yet have the traffic volume that would let you sell links, consider buying them.

Most links are placed by those trying to sell something, but some are simply for the purpose of building traffic. You can do the same thing. And yes, of course you can buy them here: see Advertise Here for more information.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com