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Recently, I have been using Fullstory to view how my visitors behave on my landing page - and boy does it make a huge difference when that visitor comes from Google or Facebook ads.
Regular visitors from an email that I send out, or from a mailing list, reddit, forums, among others - actually read the content on the landing page. You can see the mouse move across the text as they read in some instances. You can see how they scroll, the breaks they take to digest. Though the clip is 3X faster than usual, below you can see how the scrolling and mouse movements make sense. [Ed. note: Clips are on source page.]
This visitor is very different - it feels like its a paid slave somewhere, or a bot that has clumsy intelligence, or a person that does not read. The mouse rarely moves, it does scroll - though mostly in one direction, and the pace is as if the visitor is not reading the content. Mobile users just scroll and scroll until the bottom and then they leave.
As a result I have stopped all my Google and Facebook campaigns and have focused on growing the service more organically via social sharing and friends. Has anyone else experienced this as well? I'd be happy to share videos or more details, but the difference is clearly noticeable. I'd be interested to see if Fullstory has any high-level analysis of this or if they can verify this behavior.
[...] I am not sure if this is true, but does anyone else experience very, very, very, different click-through and conversion rates on Google and Facebook relative to other organic means?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:44PM
This brings up an interesting point though. How would javascript blocking affect this guy's invasive metrics? Otherwise, I can't see someone running bots to do this, unless it's Google or Facebook themselves, or perhaps it's other advertisers trying to defame Google and Facebook.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:21PM
I don't use any tracking tricks on my site. I can see how many people visited which pages and how long and where they surfed in from with AWstats, but I would NEVER use crap like the submitter uses. That kind of bullshit is just evil. There's a tiny bit of javascript on three of my pages; the three pages that don't work in a phone. The javascript loads a phone-friendly version.
But he sounds like he's describing bots; specifically, spiders and other such bots that search engines use. As far as ads go, I have none. My site is a service, not something to earn money with (my other site is a blog, also with no javascript or ads).
Pages like this guy's that take longer to load on a high speed connection than in 1997 on a 33.3k modem because of all the ads and scripting piss me off. If I landed on the guy's site, I doubt I'd return.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:39PM
If you can tell how long someone spent on a page, then you are doing some sort of active tracking.
No, it doesn't count just to see that someone moved from one page to another; I might leave my desk for a few minutes to take the dog for a walk, and that intervening length of time doesn't mean I've found a particular page engrossing.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:40PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:33PM
One of the ways I block these fuckers, is on a DNS level. That request from my browser never makes it to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @08:31PM
unless it's Google or Facebook themselves
Ding ding ding ding... now who stands to benefit from when it looks like you are getting a visitor on your site because they clicked on one of your ads? Follow the money...