

DuckDuckGo Twitter ad by the numbers  - stevefink
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/07/replaceawordinafamousquotewithduck.html

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yahelc
Hard to know for sure, but the discrepancy between clicks and referrals is
probably because not all of the promoted tweets will be shown on HTTP twitter.
DuckDuckGo should know better than anyone that HTTPS to HTTP traffic doesn't
leak referrer.

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epi0Bauqu
Right, that's why I counted up the requests of the images.

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yahelc
Now I'm confused. Won't the images have the referrer of the requesting page,
not Twitter.com? <http://d.pr/ZFHF>

EDIT: HN won't let me reply directly, but realizing I misunderstood. You're
counting total image loads, not image loads with the referral. My bad :)

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epi0Bauqu
There are two distinct groups of clicks being counted. For clicks to the
search engine (from the micro-site) I can use referrer stuff.

For clicks to the micro-site itself, I disregarded referrer stuff (for the
reason you said and from previous experience I know Twitter clients often omit
them), and looked instead at the requests of the images on the page.

So what would click to the page but not request an image? Either they left
immediately (though even then I'd expect the first image to be at least
requested) or a lot of people have no images enabled (very unlikely for
mainstream Twitter users) or it is some form of click fraud (e.g. bots,
miscalculation?) or something else?

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DrJosiah
Non-https images? It is not uncommon for browsers on https sites to not load
http images.

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mike-cardwell
I would say it is uncommon.

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jamesgagan
I've tried a similar strategy (throwing up a quickie site based on a trending
hashtag) in the past by making <http://threewordstoliveby.info> and
<http://weedcommandments.com> So far it seems that once the hashtag has
stopped trending, the sites don't get much traffic. But I suppose it's
possible that a hashtag might trend again in the future so I keep them alive.
One idea I had was making some kind of automated program to grab the trending
hashtags, see if a matching domain is available , make a site from the twitter
stream, then... profit?

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ddelphin
Question is, are there really any true benefits to these microsites that just
show the equivalent of a twitter search on a separate page. What would make a
user want to click over to it? I kinda understand the point of a site like
texts from last night, but I think that has some unique appeal. No?

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epi0Bauqu
Here's an update on the click discrepancy issue. Ricky from Crowdbooster (YC
S10) notified me about this click policy for promoted tweets.

Promoted Tweets: When a user clicks on the Promoted Tweet to open it in the
details pane, or clicks on a link or _hashtag_ within the Tweet copy.

That is, I had a hashtag within the tweet, and so that probably accounted for
half the clicks. Now why someone would click on the hashtag when they're
already on a hashtag search, I'm not sure -- maybe to refresh the page?

The above is probably the first order effect. Other new theories that are
probably second order (but real). 1) Intermediate proxies could be caching the
images. 2) Duplicate clicks from the same user.

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johnrob
Is it possible that some of those users clicked on the ad multiple times? If
that's the case, their browser would likely cache the images and not reload
them.

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redthrowaway
Possible, but his Twitter clicks were almost twice his image loads, so it
would have to be a pretty large amount of users exhibiting that behaviour.

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mike-cardwell
I would have thought Twitter would de-duplicate such clicks as well...

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epi0Bauqu
I now think this is the first order answer:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741915>

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jgmmo
Although tools like monitter make it easy to sort out streams of tweets - I
think your microsite has far better presentation and has the additional movie
graphics, etc. I think it adds value to the 'replaceafamousquotewithduck'
conversation going on.

After looking at your case study, I took a look at the term stream and I can't
see any mention of you in the stream at all.

I realize you were afraid of getting your account banned but I think the way
to go is to make a new twitter id, name it DuckQuotes or FamousDuckQuotes or
who knows. Then just tweet out messages like you have on the domain right now
- every x amount of new quotes tweet a "1011 tweets; this latest one by
@MeekaMeyer"

<side note> I met you at PSL one time back when I lived in Philly. Congrats on
your success thus far.</side>

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epi0Bauqu
Thx for the idea! So that would presumably try to get the link in the stream
more -- that's the idea, right? I guess ideally the people would notice the
@replies and like them so much they would retweet to double the effect.

Too bad you don't still live in Philly :(.

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heavydrew
Well, now I found duckduckgo so this little experiment may have unmeasurable
tertiary value...

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afhof
Is it a coincidence that Google owns duck.com ?

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epi0Bauqu
See <https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google>

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Hisoka
Off-topic, but what was responsible for the steep decline from March to April?
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/duckduckgo.com/>

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jordank
See real traffic numbers at <http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html>

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twog
Someone at compete should probably fix this, they are pretty off.

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speckledjim
They're measuring completely different things.

Number of raw searches != number of users

That said, Compete numbers have always been hilariously random.

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epi0Bauqu
The best numbers I've seen consistently are from Google adplanner:
<http://www.google.com/adplanner/>

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3pt14159
That might be true for your site, but for sites I have intimate knowledge of
while freelancing in the analytics space, Compete has always been the closest.
Except for their search analytics, that is so hilariously bad they should
split test not showing it on the site.

