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You are if you’re advertising blindly. You get some level of reporting from Entrecard but it really doesn’t tell you what you should be looking for. It only tells you the number of clicks as a result of placing your ad on a particular blog.

There is a more valuable measure if you scroll down the page and it’s called best value by widget. It tells you the number of credits per click from each ad that you’ve placed. This let’s you compare apples to apples when you’re comparing advertising on one site versus another.
For example, let’s say you place a widget on Site A for 300 credits and one on Site B for 30 credits. When you check your stats, you find that Site A brought 30 clicks while Site B brought only 10 clicks. Which ad was more efficient? Look at the Clicks/Credits ratio and you’ll see that Site A gives you 30/300 = 10% while site B gives you 10/30 = 33.33% return on your credits. So obviously advertising on Site B is a more efficient way of spending your credits.
If you want to dig even deeper, you can use an analytics package like Clicky which I just reviewed in the previous post.
You can track based on the referring domain and actually see how much time each visitor sent from that domain spends on your site.

The difference between the “entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com” and “entrecard.com” is that the first one is from clicks from widgets you placed on other blogs. The other referrer is for clicks within the Entrecard site, i.e. other bloggers who are checking out your site as a potential place to advertise.

You can get the same sort of information from Google Analytics but what you can’t get is the ability to identify how many actions or pages a visitor viewed after coming from the referring site. Clicky shows you the time sequence of each visit, so you can actually track this.
What I’m really interested in are the visitors who spend more than a few seconds on my site. This tells me that they aren’t the surfers who are just trying to rack up credits. These people are actually curious about my site and are potential repeat visitors and subscribers.
So the bottom line is, even though a lot of visits from Entrecard are useless, there are a few that are actually worthwhile for me to keep on advertising with my widget. Also, don’t be fooled by sites that require lots of credits to advertise. It doesn’t really mean that they will bring you more traffic than sites with lower number of credits to advertise.
You should ask yourself when you evaluate a potential blog to advertise on what kinds of visitors that blog attracts and whether those visitors are likely to be interested in your blog.
Want more Entrecard tips?
Technorati Tags: Entrecard, measuring your widget performance
Popularity: 10% [?]
8 Responses
Matt Ellsworth
February 12th, 2008 at 9:33 am
1Very good write up. I’ll have to start paying more attention to this.
Janet Butler
February 12th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
2Thanks for the info. I use RaSof, I think I will stick with that. Entrecard seems a little too iffy.
Hock
February 12th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
3Janet,
I took a look at RaSof. That’s something completely different. Go to Entrecard.com if you want to read more about it.
Thanks for stopping by.
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February 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
4They could use a lot more stats or users will continue to not use it.
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Graham Langdon
June 26th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
7Hey you forgot to mention the other reporting on the stats page “Best Value by Widget” where it gives you a Credit-Per-Click breakdown of your best ad campaigns.
Hock
June 26th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
8Hey Graham,
Thanks for dropping in. You’re right… I think when I wrote this, maybe that feature wasn’t there yet. But in any case, I do like that feature of finding out the best value by looking at the sites I previously advertised in to determine which sites are giving me the best bang for my buck… err I mean credits. :)
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