I’ve been doing this blog I feel like forever. This is my 200th post & well it’s just going to be new 2012 development ramblings.

1. Traffic from shortening services is displayed in Google Analytics as Direct traffic even though it isn’t. You have to make a plan to anylize referers seperatedly.
2. BITLY shortners have an issue with IDNs this needs to be fixed. Only one person so far has contacted support about it. Support notices are public & people vote on it. If you use the API it’s no problem but if you paste in an IDN punycode or not it doesn’t go to the link.
3.  Traffic from Social Facebook & Twitter mobile devices. I was surprised to find that one of my sites the bounce rate from links on Social Media are an incredible 7%. Yeah no mistype. I’ve never had a segment of referrals anywhere near that low.
4. I spoke to one of my former coworkers who heads a major ad technology in Tokyo. He told me currently it’s good to revisit Adsense. I’ve taken adsense off my sites but he told me that the quality of inventory matching has improved since years back. He also accredited to introduction of remarketing by Google. I’m not advising anyone to create cheap looking sites at all. I do recommend starting small at first & growing your site. Try to create quality.
5. Buying traffic. A lot of people believe buying advertisements is just trying to buy clicks to ads. It’s not. For example later I’ll launch a Facebook campaign for one of my domains. I will pay for users to join the Facebook page. The reason being is that I want to grow the audience. That page is updated with content from the site. If I pay $3 to capture that user to my page & they frequent that site for a year or more, share the info with their friends etc. Isn’t this worth it? Advertising for publishers is about expanding your user base.
6. Ads are not just Clicks.
Seems like many forget with advertising you don’t just get paid per click. There’s also CPM( Cost per Impression) . I’m trying to hire 2 writers by April on a weekly basis. Increase the content, increase revenue even if no one clicks.
7. Dot Com in katakana
Lately I’ve had a few referrals come to my site with searches with dot com in katakana. As some are reading this I know you are thinking “We told You”. I want to explain to you WHY this is happening. I started testing strong Twitter marketing. Twitter doesn’t allow you to put .com in your username. As a result with strong Twitter marketing I’ve started to get Japanese users searching for the name I put on the Twitter account. I’ve ONLY gotten search referrals like that AFTER I started Twitter marketing. My point is users will search for dot com in native languages for existing sites. Especially for sites that has been branded that way.
8. Traffic Origins
Some may say that I’m wrong about where traffic comes from or basically about anything I would say in general. I’m making assumptions based on doing testing of the traffic. If I’m wrong about redirects, traffic being mostly mobile, etc do the research to prove it invalid. I’m not doing the testing to be right. I do the research because I hope others would too so we can have accurate information about IDN domains. If you truly believe that the average educated Chinese, or Arabic parked domain user gets to the site because they append dot com to any keyword they are search for, & will do so for dot com in their language in the future do proper research & display the results. Even if you loose revenue for a week place your parking page in an iframe & put Google Analytics in the code. This will give you 100% insights to exactly where your traffic is coming from. Imagine if we had at least a sample of 5 domains from each language that would do this test. We don’t need exact traffic numbers just the percentages.

In ending I’ll make it firm that I like developing with IDN Domains. If they are not selling why not invest in developing your property.  Times are hard I realize many people have invested in IDNs because of something I created in 2005. We would all be stunned if Apple’s Safari browser changes that redirect. Other browsers have.