They are out of their mind! Yes! I want to save on one domain and pay $99,999 for 100 years!
Archive for November, 2005
We’ve just released a brand new version of our conversion tracking software and one of the major new features in this release is IP-based tracking.
Usually cookie-based tracking is considered to be good enough for tracking visitors and advertising effectiveness. But as we’ve found out ourselves less then a month ago there is one big reason why you urgently need your conversion tracking/web stats software to support IP-based tracking. And it is:
Safari on Mac
This doesn’t seem to be widely known or discussed on the web, but Safari browser has a default setting to reject all cookies that are coming from a 3rd party domain. And this is a real disaster for cookie-based tracking!
To illustrate the concept of a 3rd party domain and the problem that a Safari browser imposes here is a small story:
0. Once there was that wonderful person who liked to create cute stuffed puppies and kittens. Her name was Jill.
1. Jill had her own site www.stuffed-animals.tld. Visitors were coming to this site from the advertising and some of them even purchased her wonderful handmade stuffed doggies and kitties.
2. At some point Jill had realized that she needed to measure effectiveness of her advertising and understand where her purchases are coming from.
3. She has singed up for a conversion/ROI tracking service called www.bestconversion.tld which was costing here around 30 bucks a month. They gave her a special javascript tracking code and said that she should place it inside the pages of her wonderful site all filled with joyful pictures of stuffed doggies and kitties. And she did just that.
4. After sometime she discovered that www.bestconversion.tld reports do not give her any valuable information. She could see that people are coming to her site, she could even see that most of them use Macs and Safari browser (she already knew that her cute stuffed doggies are popular in the Mac community, so there was no surprise), but she didn’t see the conversions. Jill knew that in the last week she has got more then 100 sales, the reports showed her almost that number of sales tracked, but they didn’t show her the advertising source from where the converted visitors originally came from. It seemed that the service software actually saw the sales happening, but couldn’t connect them with the advertising source.
5. Jill thought that something was wrong and called up the www.besconversion.tld support, but they’ve said that there were no problems with the service from their side and that she was the one to blame. Jill stopped paying for the service because it didn’t bring her any value (and because the support people were rude).
End of the story.
So why Jill was not able to track conversions? The reason is simple.
The tracking code that www.bestconversion.tld has given to her was calling up the software located on www.bestconversion.tld domain, which logged information and tried to set a cookie in the visitor’s browser in order to identify this visitor later when he/she will make a purchase. But since most of the Jill’s visitors were using Mac and Safari that cookie was immediately rejected because it was coming from a 3rd party domain and Safari browser has a default setting to reject such cookies.
The original Jill’s page was loading from her own site - www.stuffed-animals.tld, but the cookie was being assigned from www.bestconversion.tld - a completely different domain (a 3rd party domain in this case).
If only www.bestconversion.tld developers were smart enough to use IP-tracking combined with cookie-based tracking, then the end of this story would probably be completely different.
By using cookie-based and IP-based tracking combined you get the best of the two worlds. When cookies are working properly in the browser, the visitor is tracked with a cookie. If cookies can not be set for some reason, the visitor is tracked using his/her IP.
And this is just how our Stuffed Tracker now works.
First of all, in Factory Nova we are showing thumbnails for all uploaded images. So, for example, a designer can upload mockups of the design that he/she is creating to a task and everyone can see them as thumbnails, not just as a name of a file.
But we have gone even further with this. If you will click on a thumbnail you would get to a page where a bigger version of the image is displayed and you can discuss it, posting comments right under the image. We use this feature ourselves quite often when working on the new Factory Nova interface.
Wait! There is even more. The image on this comments page is dynamically resized to fit the size of your browser window. If the window is smaller then the image then the image is slightly decreased to fit (and of course at any time you can simply click on the image and see its original version). The resizing is done on the server side (not in the browser) and thus the quality of the resized image is quite good.
I’ve just added one more feature to this functionality. When you resize your browser window, the image is resized as well!
Here is a video of how this works (please ignore the interface of Factory Nova that you can see in the movie — this is our current interface, it is all in Russian, and we are working on completely changing it).
QuickTime movie (3.3 Mb).
