Articles by Ian Lurie

“Your father’s quite the character”. That’s what someone said to my son last year while he was getting his acting debut (he’s the boy you see swinging upside-down at the video’s start). She was referring to my habit of yanking his shoes off while he was on the swing set, and then trying to put [...]

If you use the KeywordDiscovery API, and Python, my pain is your gain. It took me a few hours to get this to work. You can grab it and go. Here’s the function, written in my usual Python Pigdin. I don’t recommend using it without a passing knowledge of Python, but that’s up to you: [...]

I lie at the beginning of this video. I say that there are some things I love about Google Analytics’ new ‘in-page analytics’ feature. Truth is, I hate it. You know I’m a fan of all things Google Analytics, but man, this one stinks up the joint like a rotting pig carcass. Watch the video [...]

Yeahhhh I have no idea what to blog tonight. But I happened to take a peek at my referring keywords report in Google Analytics. Here are the weirdest of the bunch: Monster trucks. I know the post that draws the traffic, but how the hell do I still rank for this phrase? Snidely Whiplash. Again, [...]

Soooo, a few readers asked me why I don’t use PageRank as a statistic. I thought about writing a long, angry, ranty post about Toolbar PageRank, bank bailouts and the moron on NPR today who said the USA has reduced its carbon emissions since 2000, etc. etc. but stopped myself. Instead, I’ve got a nice [...]

What’s a good bounce rate for my web site? I get that kind of question a lot. What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate? A ‘good’ time on site? The answer, I’m afraid, is: Better than your current bounce rate. Better than your current time on site. In web analytics, it’s best to focus on your own [...]

Update 12.13.10 Big changes to the crawler code: Switched from urllib, which left sockets open and created memory leaks, crashes and other computer higgledy-piggledy, to httplib. Now fetching mime-type and using it to separate images from text pages. Better URL handling. Cleaner output – removes domain name from output for smaller, easier to handle files. [...]

I’m on #seochat tonight. I’m super-excited about it, so I’ve been scribbling notes for anticipated questions. The topic, which I’ve actually talked about before, is SEO analytics. For me, there are five crucial SEO metrics. If you don’t have these, hang it up: Key phrase diversity. The number of unique phrases driving traffic to your [...]

Last week, I went to Tokyo to speak at ad:tech. 20 hours of air travel so I could be there for about 48 hours. I worked on the plane, both ways. Everyone around me sneezed and phlegmed like there was no tomorrow. I was exhausted while in Tokyo, exhausted when I got back on Saturday, [...]

I’ve spent 3 days now in a vicodin-induced haze, trying to recover from a kidney stone. Yesterday at about noon, the vicodin stopped working and I spent 6 hours curled up in a ball. Now I know why: The folks at Wappow! stole my vicodin and replaced it with sugar pills. It’s the only possibility, [...]