Testing Technologies :: Robin Good's Latest News

AdSense Optimization: Essential Tactics For Optimizing Your Google AdSense Ads On Your Site

Mel Ann Chan — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 01:16:00 PST

AdSense optimization is a series of tactics to help you to improve Google AdSense performance on your blog site. One of the key issues you face when you decide to use AdSense is WHERE to place ads. Above the fold? At the Bottom? Left or Right column? The monetization power of your site depends on the choice you make.

Photo credit: Inside AdSense

To help you better understand WHERE to position your AdSense ads, The Inside AdSense team has released a series of three short videos, entitled "Optimisation Essentials", that can give you some good basic guidance on how to do ads placement, and how to increase your revenues with a rational design of your site.

In summary, here is what they recommend:

a) Use big ads.
b) Integrate your ads with the layout of your site.

c) Place your ads where users are more likely to see them.

Here all the details:

Intro by Daniele Bazzano

Optimisation Essentials (Part I - II - III)

Bigger Is Better - for AdSense Ad Units

Publishers often ask us what the best ad sizes are to include in their site's design, and we always point them to these three:

300x250 medium rectangle

728x90 leaderboard

160x600 skyscraper

These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers.

Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've receiving all ad types, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.

When you're considering how to design your site, our testing has shown that displaying at least one of these ad formats on your page can increase your AdSense earnings potential.

So remember, sometimes bigger is better!

Dress for Success - Impressing Your Audience

Over the years, we've seen some colorful ad unit designs.

Some publishers design ad units that contrast with their site so that they stand out. Although this can work in some cases, we've found that ad units that match your site's design tend to perform better in terms of revenue and click-through-rate.

Users are more likely to read ads when they're well integrated into your site.

When you design your AdSense ads, keep these tips in mind:

Use colours that either blend with or complement your site's colours. Make the ads a part of your site.

Use lighter colours for borders, or no border at all.

Try rotating colours or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.

Save sets of frequently-used colours as a palette.

So give your ad design and colours some thought, and you'll notice the difference!

Position for Performance - Be Noticed

We've also made a heatmap to show you where the best placements are on a typical page. Great positions include:

Above the fold of a page (the section of the page a user can see without scrolling)

At the end of an article

Aligned with content

But don't just take our word for it - every website is different. Make sure you use your judgment of how visitors interact with your pages to determine good ad placements.

Position your ads so that they're visible, but be careful of intruding on the experience of your site's visitors.

Most of all, think like a user and you'll be able to balance your website's content with a successful ad strategy.

Where Should I Place Google Ads On My Pages?

The best location for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when considering where to position your ads:

What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?

What do they do when viewing a particular page?

Where is their attention likely to be focused?

How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users' way?

How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Certain locations tend to be more successful than others.

This "heat map" illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.

While this heat map is useful as a positioning guideline, we strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad location. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them.

You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages.

For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads can answer that question for them.

Additional References

AdSense Placement Optimization: User Behavior

Improve AdSense Performance: Step-by-Step Video Guide From The AdSense Team

Online Ad Management And Optimization: The Google Ad Manager Is Here to Optimize Advertising ROI

Online Advertising Strategy - Ads Relevance Is The Key

Do you want to learn more about AdSense and other key strategies in professional web publishing? Check out POP, a new video blog site where Robin Good shares his expertise with "in-depth" video tutorials to help professional online publishers to monetize their sites.

Originally written by Mel Ann Chan for Inside AdSense and first published between November 3-18 as "Optimisation Essentials (Part I) - Optimisation Essentials (Part II) - Optimisation Essentials (Part III)"

Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself - Paul Edmondson Video Interview

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:50:42 PDT

Online ad optimization is the science of identifying on the basis of statistical data the best performing ads / ad network providers as well as the best performing ad position, layout, color and font style on your web pages in order to optimize online advertising revenue.

Paul Edmondson, Co-Founder and CEO of YieldBuild, an online web service designed to "take the guesswork out of ad formatting", has kindly agreed to have a good conversation with me to understand better how this optimization service differs from already established online marketing services that focus specifically on real-time ad network optimization (such as Pubmatic and the Rubicon Project).

Paul was in San Francisco and I was in Rome, when, a few days ago, I recorded this interesting video conversation.

Below is the complete recording and a full English text transcript of my conversation with Paul on internet marketing and online ad optimization. Check it out:

Interview With Paul Edmondson - CEO and Founder of YieldBuild

Full English text transcript

Intro

RobinGood: Hello everyone! Here's Robin Good from Rome, Italy and I am here today with Paul Edmondson who is the CEO and founder of a very interesting company: Yieldbuild.

I don't know if my Italian pronunciation is the best one, but the service is, to my eyes, really interesting because, at least in my superficial knowledge (I haven't signed up yet), just like PubMatic or the Rubicon Project, this is supposed to be a service that allows you to optimize different ad networks and make the best of money, while not fixing yourself with just one advertising partner.

From what I understand, Yieldbuild allows you to test out a number of things and in real time you can select for you what is the best solution that you should adopt. But let's find out from one of the fathers of Yieldbuild, Paul! How are you doing in San Francisco today?

Paul Edmondson: Doing very well, thanks for having us Robin.

What is Yieldbuild?

Robin Good: You're very welcome. Thank you for reaching out and asking to have a conversation. That's only what it takes indeed. Why don't you introduce briefly yourself and Yieldbuild. What is Yieldbuild, from your take, in a short one, and what do you do over there?

Paul Edmondson: Sounds good. You got it right, I'm one of three founders of Yieldbuild and what we really set out to do is to help publishers make more money and that's about helping them manage the monetization on their website through the various ad networks they choose.

To start, Yieldbuild it's really about text ad optimization and what that means is we help publishers to pick out the right combination of elements. For example, let's say you are a Google AdSense publisher. You wanna know: "should my background be white, should it be blue, should it be gray, should it have borders, what should font color be, what should the link color be..."

So what Yielbuild brings in is a set of heuristics that figures out, tests algorithmically, to find you the best combination of ads. Then after on that site it will also do your ad network management.

Easier Ads On Your Site

Robin Good: Good. I was not completely on-track, actually quite off-track and that is great that I didn't know correctly what you're doing because I'm much more curios now.

While you do have some of the ad optimization facilities, your key focus as is about understanding what is the best combination of components in a text ad to make it work, is that correct?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think that's a great way of summarizing it.

What we do is really specialize in the placement. There's the placement and the formatting of those ad. Think about your page and how a publisher may lay out the ads on it. For example, they may put a 720x90 at the top of the page, a 300x250 in the sidebar, maybe another 300x250 in the content footer ad, maybe another ad on the other side.

We'll find the best combination of the formatting attributes combined with the placement. Then, once we get a real good understanding of that, then we go into the ad network management.

A Solution For Publishers

Robin Good: Let me understand. This service is more targeted to an advertiser, who wants to understand how to best package his punch to an ad, or is it for a publisher to optimize the delivery and click-through of the ads he is carrying from his inventory?

Paul Edmondson: That's a great question.

It's a publisher solution.

For example, use AdSense. Most publishers that are getting started online use AdSense. It's very easy to get going, just a little JavaScript that goes in your page. What they don't know is really how to optimize their AdSense for the best performance for their site.

It's a publisher solution and what we do is we help them tune their ads for the best response.

Overcoming Competitors

Robin Good: In this respect there are similarities or overlaps with the options offered by apparently similar services like PubMatic, the Rubicon Project or even some of the Google's own tools that have been coming out in the last few months. I guess I'm thinking specifically of the Site Optimizer. What do you say?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, first technical problematic at PubMatic and Rubicon is that I can't speak for too much for those sites and those services. But I would say that what Yieldbuild does is it optimizes your entire ad layout of ads. It's aware of all the different ads that you have in your page. It'll do the formatting and the ad network optimization.

Our best understanding of Rubicon and PubMatic today is that they really focus on the ad network management behind one given spot.

We try to think about your page holistically and all the different ads that you have on your page and how they work as a ecosystem of ads for the publisher, so all the different rules that go behind their networks, all those types of things to give you the best monetization experience as a publisher.

The great question about the Site Optimizer for Google. One of the things that's really interesting about the Site Optimizer. It's built on multi-variant type testing. Let's say for example you have a landing page and you need to figure out does the "buy now" button here work better than "save 15%". Something like that. And what it does, it requires the publisher, requires the web site operator to go in it to find those tasks and set out those pages.

Yieldbuild is quite a bit different. In the sense that it goes in and sets up all the tasks algorithmically. It examines your site, figures out things that are about it and then it uses our optimization system to do all of that automatically. So no user setup for all the different tasks.

Placement Does Matter

Robin Good: That's very cool indeed. And that's something that had been bothering me about the Google Site Optimizer, so you're right on the spot in thinking a way that, even if I only read about it, it made sense and motivated me to try it out. And I'm indeed motivated to go after you and your service.

I'm a Premium AdSense partner, I use AdSense as my main resource of income for now. I'm opening new business lines, but as of now it remains my main one.

I have recently signed up with a major advertising network in the US and the issue of not only optimizing the different solutions but make them live together is part of our daily work. I mean, you just can't do it all by yourself. Secondly, I've even a person dedicated on a daily task of testing AdSense.

The idea that this AdSense testing time could be saved and put to use in other direction, while some software magically could think as well as he does and develop all the possibilities that we're trying out, is definitely interesting. I understand this is not Disneyland and the software can only do so much.

I suppose that if we contribute our help in defining where we wanna try out things, I'm now imagining your tool displaying the ads with different colors, different fonts and styles until it finds a better click-through and then stays on that set of options that it has found. Is that how he dynamically learns about it?

Paul Edmondson: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that you talked about:

First, when you set up a site to get tested by AdSense it requires you to put in a piece of ad code in the page and then to continually move it around to find the different placements that work best for you.

But, with our system is you can put all the snippets of code in the page that you wanna possibly testing an ad location for. For example, let's say you only want to show two ads at one time. You can put three or even five, or six zones in your page and then YieldBuild will look at those combinations of placements and do the best. Then it will do all that formatting placement, bold, all the different text options that you have for the given ad networks.

A Worthy Dish

Robin Good: Wow, well you know what, this is really exciting. I don't know if to trust you or not but I gotta go try it out!

In your words this is just godsend for a publisher. I'm glad I reached you without having tried the service, because I got the opportunity of you really opening up for me the idea of what the service is.

It looks like you said very clearly and we're gonna find out now that is clearly different from your competitors in some specific ways which are not insignificant.

Why waste more of your precious time and possibly sliding to the hyping part when you've just given the best facts and then what I'm gonna do now it's just go out and try it.

You know what? I think that the best video conversations are the ones that are like precious dishes at restaurants. They bring you this big dish with a small little thing on it and some fancy food decoration. You eat it and it feels like: "God, where's the rest man? This is gonna cost me 35 bucks and there was nothing here!" But you know you're not gonna forget that dish in that restaurant.

I think we got some jewels from you and I just wanna thank you. I don't wanna go forward with more, I wanna go sign up and try it!

Paul Edmondson: Great! Hey Robin, thank you so much for having us. It was a lot of fun being out here.

Robin Good: Alright, have a great day in San Francisco and I'll talk to you right after I try it!

Paul Edmondson: You too, take care!

Robin Good: Ciao!

Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on September 4th 2008 as "Online Ad Optimization: YieldBuild Explains Itself - Paul Edmondson Video Interview"

About Paul Edmondson

Paul Edmondson is one of co-founders and CEO at YieldBuild. He held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management. He also worked for MongoMusic and Hewlett-Packard after graduating from California Polytechnic University.

Video Metrics And Analytics For YouTube Clips: YouTube Insight

Robin Good — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:14:09 PDT

"Insight turns YouTube into one of the world's largest focus groups." (Source: Google Blog)If you have a YouTube account and you do upload video clips to it you may be interested in knowing that YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload, has been made accessible to all YouTube account holders who upload videos to the site.

Official demographics for viewers of the YouTube Robin Good channel - 5-2008

If you had not yet heard about it, YouTube now offers to all of its users a free video metrics and analytics service, which allows you to check traffic trends and statistics of your video clips on YouTube according to a number of variables which include world geographic area and relative popularity of the specific video clip you are interested in.

In essence, this new service, called YouTube Insight, gives you access to specific visual stats on the number of views per day your video received, where those viewers are in the world, and how popular your video is compared to other videos in a given period of time.

"For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

Here more details and a short introductory video from Google:

Overview

YouTube Insight is a free web-based tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account -- users, partners, and advertisers -- to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload.

YouTube Insight gives both publishers and advertisers an inside peek at the viewing trends of their videos on YouTube, and provides them with relevant distribution and delivery information that can help them increase video views and better target their specific audience traits.

Just to make a simple example, thanks to YouTube Insight you can now learn how different parts of your distributed identity on the web (via your Blog, Facebook or Twitter presence) is effective in driving traffic to your video content on YouTube.

Video publishers could also leverage this opportunity to reach out to form relationships with those sites who consistently point readers to their videos on YouTube.

Finally, since advertisers can now access reports detailing the search queries that lead viewers to their videos, they can make more informed decisions about the keywords and bids they select to appear on Google.com.

Key Metrics Offered

YouTube Insight video metrics show most popular videos for Robin Good channel

YouTube Insight video metrics show popularity of Robin Good's YouTube channel across different world regions (darker green more popular)

Viewing trends of Robin Good's YouTube

With YouTube Insight you can also see:

1. How often a video is viewed in different world geographic regions

2. How popular a video is relative to all videos in a market over a period of time

3. How much time it takes for a video to become popular

4. What happens to video views as popularity peaks

Some new metrics are also being rolled out now and will soon appear in your YouTube account as well. These include:

A discovery tab now shows how viewers found your video, whether by searching on YouTube or Google, browsing under "related videos", receiving a link to the video from an email or website, or watching it in an embedded player away from YouTube.

In this view you can also see a search results breakdown for YouTube and Google search queries that led to your video, as well as for the external websites driving traffic to your content. (Insight will show up to 50 inbound links.)

(You can find these new metrics under the "Discovery" tab within the Insight dashboard. Click on the "Insight" button under "Account > My Videos." )

Benefits of Using YouTube Insight

By using the YouTube Insight data, you can learn more about what works and what doesn't by doing a number of tests. Now that you have precise and detailed access to this data, you can gauge a lot better what factors may be influencing the most your successful videos.

By studying your video traffic trends you may also learn a great deal about which days and times may be most appropriate for posting or releasing your new clips. Though you may think this may have a marginal value, when you add up all of this factor and you plan for a strategic video viral campaign, each and every one of this factors has some tangible importance.

By knowing more you can better customize your video content, packaging and delivery to address the specific traits of your target audiences.

Where Do I See These Statistics on my YouTube Account?

Go to your "My Videos" page and then you will see an "Insight" button next to each one of your video clips.

Next to each one of your video clips you will find an extra button labeled "Insight", just like the one I am pointing at with my cursor here below:

By clicking on it you get to access the statistics for that specific video in a screen like this one:

To go and see all of your YouTube viewing trends you can also click first on your "Account" link. Once you are on your Account page scroll down to the bottom where you will see on the left a link to YouTube Insight.

Here is a screenshot:

More information:
YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool For All Users

Web Traffic Monitoring In Real-Time: Track And Interact Live With Your Site Visitors With Woopra

Robin Good — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:59:13 PDT

Woopra is a new real-time web traffic monitoring service which provides extensive visitors and traffic data, alongside some very cool analysis features and the unique ability to track and live interact with your selected site visitors.

Woopra, the new advanced real-time traffic tracker

As a matter of fact I have been looking for a new alternative to my now forever closed WebsideStory/ Hitbox account. Nonetheless all of the negative experiences as a customer I have had with Hitbox and which have forced me to take a critical final step only a few months back (Dec 07), Hitbox Professional was a great service, especially because it provided easy to understand web site traffic data in real-time in a way that, notwithstanding its own limits, I haven't found in any other traffic monitoring tool I have tried to this day. Too bad the company behind seems to have no interest in the small to mid-sized web publisher, has limited ability in fixing its own technical issues (they have not been able to ever resolve mines) and is clearly interested only in very large web publishers and corporate institutions who can pay them thousands of dollars per year.

Given the above and the disappointing alternatives available on the market I got pretty excited as soon as I was given early access to Woopra, this new web traffic monitoring service which really packs a hell of great features into a service that, nonetheless has its share of bug-troubleshooting and refinements to be made, is brand new and is definitely above the average in this small but rapidly growing field of real-time web traffic monitoring services, which will inevitably need to expand further.

(I am really appalled to see great sites and highly popular blogs tracking their web traffic via tools like SiteMeter or ShinyStats - I mean these are OK tools, and they do allow you to see your web traffic, but there is a lot more to traffic analytics than what these tools have been offering for the last few years... c'mon.)

As a matter of fact, nonetheless there is already Google with its Analytics service ready to capture a great part of this market, even Google's own service is still marred by lots of limitations, a significant delay on your ability to see what's happening (Google Analytics data is not in real-time), and, in my opinion, a great deal of improvement still to be made to the interface design and organization.

For all these reasons I am definitely excited to invite you to sign-up and try out this new real-time web analytics solution which I find full of useful data reports and sporting an interesting set of compelling data analysis features alongside a cool facility to filter, select, tag and interact live with individual visitors on your web site or blog.

This last feature by itself may be worth the whole price of admission, which for now amounts to nothing, as Woopra is fully in Beta and has only now started to accept sign-ups from the Internet public at large.

Head over to Woopra right now and sign-up for this valuable free service. If you have a small site in terms of monthly traffic (< 5,000 visitors) you will probably never have to pay a price to Woopra, who appears to be setting up a business model where only sites with a certain level of traffic or wanting more advanced features will have to pay a monthly fee.

To find out more about Woopra and how it works, take a short 5-minute tour of this new web traffic monitoring tool with me in the video clip I have just prepared for you.

Here the details:

Web Traffic Monitoring With Woopra - Video Introduction

Robin Good introduces Woopra and its key basic features

Full Text Transcription

"Hi guys, this is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and this is Woopra, the new real-time web traffic monitoring service that really goes a little bit beyond normal tools that we have available today to check out our traffic.
First of all you're seeing here in front of you the traffic as it is moving in real-time on my site: start looking from the dashboard on the left side here where you see actually traffic moving across the continents and coming from the different cities online and coming to MasterNewMedia.

Here the visitors are coming through and they're assigned a unique serial number but you can even "tag" them and give them a specific identification number.

For each one of them not only you see immediately from which country they're coming from, but you get all the data about the browser platform, operating system, screen resolution, what article they're looking right now and whatever navigation path they're taking and whatever referrers sent them over to your site.

There are a number of other very interesting things: if you go into the analytics section you can see all of the referring web pages, referring domains, the search engines, you can check up the specific searches, the queries and the keywords being used on the site, you can check out the outgoing links for example that are happening on your sites.

But the most interesting thing is that you can actually arrange for custom messages to be sent to selected visitors. You can create the so called Event Notifications, which allow you basically to say "hey, look, whatever visitor is coming from the country U.S. Virgin Islands, only those people, and when they come and check out one of my articles that talks about YouTube, then you may want to say to these guys check out my other videos about Caribbean Islands that I have over here and give them a specific URL". I mean you can create messages that will pop-up very discretely on the browser of your visitors when certain conditions are met.

But listen to this: there's more! While they're moving on your site, I said you can tag your visitors, that is, if I knew that now some guy that I just sent on the site was coming over, I can actually recognize him, I can tell him to go to a specific page and see him come through... I can tag him and give him a specific name and I will see him each time he will come back while I will see in front of me all of their navigation history on my site.

And not only that. I can actually start a conversation with them.

So, let me see, somebody coming from Italy...OK let's see...I can pull up this window and can actually say: "Ciao, I am Robin Good and I am testing un nuovo sistema per chattare live con i miei visitatori, scusa l'intrusione" that is "I apologize for intruding, I'm just testing it".

OK, so now the guy who's visiting my pages is receiving this message via a little pop-up window on the bottom right of his screen which he can decide to look at and can decide also to respond to or not. He's probably not going to answer it because I am really intruding in his experience and maybe he doesn't know what to do. I'm not really inviting him to react but if he does react I can have a direct chat conversation with this person at any time.

I can also filter visitors then in a number of ways, and not only track in real-time what they're doing but actually I can interact with them and create even special notifications that happen only when certain conditions are met.

Go out and check it out, Woopra at www.woopra.com and you can get all this wonderful information including the live number of visitors, your top referrers, the queries people are doing moment by moment on your site, and much more at absolutely no cost.

This is still in beta, they're having still some rough corners to be smoothed out but for the rest is definitely something you want to check out.

Woopra!

From Robin Good, for MasterNewMedia this is all for now.

Ciao guys."

More Information

Woopra key features

Woopra Sign-up Page

Woopra FAQ

Woopra Demo and Screenshots

Download Woopra (PC, Mac, Linux)

Analyze Your Web Traffic With Google Analytics: Video Tutorial

Robin Good — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:44:22 PDT

One of the most useful things you can do to better understand and improve the quality and quantity of web traffic on your site or blog, is to learn how to track, monitor, measure and make sense of the large quantity of data your web visitors leave on your server.

Comparing web traffic on www.MasterNewMedia.org via Google Analytics

Thanks to Google anyone can have easy, free and immediate access to one among the best and most powerful web traffic monitoring and analytics tool: Google Analytics. If you are not yet using it, I suggest you to give it a good try.

As a matter of fact, if you have no previous experience in web traffic monitoring and analysis, Google Analytics may actually scare due to the richness of its data sections and the good amount of new terms you are not going to be familiar with.

Even for more experienced professional web publishers Google Analytics may pose some challenges,
as some of the terms used may be different than what you have been used to elsewhere and getting to the hot zones of the traffic reports may not always be as easy as it should be.

To help you out on this front I have brought here for you two short video tutorials, produced by the official Goggle team and explaining clearly both the basics of analytics if you have never used it, as well as the fundamentals of how to go about doing some serious web data analysis on any site.

I must say, that even after many years of studying and using web traffic and monitoring tools I have learned a few new very useful things myself by looking at this two nicely produced videos.

Take a look yourself.

1) Beginning Analytics: Interpreting and Acting On Your Data (Advanced)

"If you've just started to use Google Analytics and aren't sure which reports to look at, this video provides a helpful 1st-time analysis walkthrough. You'll learn how to interpret what you see in these key reports and what actions you should take as a result."

2) Google Analytics Interface Tutorial (Basic)

"A brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. If you are new to Google Analytics or you'd like to pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different features, this video is a good place to start."

For more informationanalytics google help
on Google Analytics please see:

Getting Started

Account administration
- User permissions
- Other account issues

Reports central

Browser Compatibility Testing: BrowserCam Gets Better - Video Review

Robin Good and Michael Pick — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:03:27 PST

Browser compatibility testing is a web development practice that allows a web site owner to verify how her web site or blog, appears on computers utilizing browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions that are different from the one used in originally designing / developing a web site.

These visual differences is a critical element to consider when wanting to increase traffic, provide greater accessibility and allowing commercial publishers to extract the best from their online communication efforts.

BrowserCam puts a full range of browsers and operating systems at your disposal

With Linux, Mac OSX and Windows machines all accessing your website through a range of operating system versions, and even more web browsers, how are you going to know that your web site is going to look the same across all these other computer setups?

There are now a vast range of browsers on the market, from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Camino and Opera, to touch on just a few. If you then take into account the fact that more and more people are switching from Windows computers and over to Mac OSX and Linux operating systems, things become even more complicated.

But how can you hope to know what your website looks like on a Mac running an older version of the Mac OSX while using Opera?

Sure you could call your friend up and ask them to take a look, but there are only going to be so many friends with so many different machines, operating systems and browsers at their disposal.

One common way that web development agencies around the world have adopted is the one of having a range of machines all running different operating systems and browsers, and making use of them every time you need to check your website. This is far from being easy, inexpensive and speedy, and when you bring into the calculation the several versions available of all major operating system, the various versions of the major web browsers, and the infinite number of combinations that these two variables can generate when coupled with the myriad monitor sizes and screen resolutions that your readers may have, you soon realize that this amounts to a big headache that is not going to be that easy to solve.

So, while most (webmasters) simply resort to check IE and FF at their default resolution, on their standard operating system, this is a far cry from being able to serve a truly accessible web site that looks and acts the same no matter what computer, browser or monitor size your readers happens to use.

I don't need to add that given the increasing good interface design and usability of many commercial sites, if you have any stake in being commercially successful online, this is something to which you must give very serious attention.

Luckily, there are several services and tools out there, which can ease your pain within a few clicks.

Among them, we have chosen to go back to the one that did impress me the most when it was the first and only solution against this web riddle.

First reviewed in 2004, Browsercam, is a web-based solution exclusively devoted to provide webmasters with an semi-automated system to check your web site appearance across all the operating systems, browser and screen resolutions available out there.

Now, Browsercam has added some new and truly powerful features to its already jam-packed line-up.

In this video review I guide you through the ins and outs of this must-have cross-browser compatibility testing:

Video review

The video, which has five separate parts, covers the following aspects of the BrowserCam experience:

Selecting your capture parameters - A guide to the full range of compatibility settings available, and how easy it is to select from among them

Checking out the results - The great variety of ways in which you can filter and sequence the resulting screen captures, and the process of selecting and downloading your images

The addition of the DeviceCam tool - This new feature allows you to see how your website will look to those using PDAs

Remote compatibility testing - This feature of the service allows you to make use of a range of computers, operating systems and browsers via a remote connection

The addition of the new BC Virtual tool - This new addition to BrowserCam allows you to create a range of virtual machines configured to run the operating systems of your choice

BrowserCam's vast set of testing parameters

BrowserCam effectively puts a huge range of browser and operating system versions at your disposal, and gives you the opportunity to select from a vast range of parameters. Once you have decided which of these parameters you are interested in, it then systematically goes about taking screen-shots of your website.

With the ability to choose from Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems, and different versions of the various browsers available it then provides clear screen grabs of exactly how your website is going to look under the parameters you have set.

Furthermore, you can decide if you want to see the site with the popular (but not entirely ubiquitous) Flash plug-in activated or deactivated, and can select from a range of screen resolution sizes to get an idea of how your website pans out on different sized screens and settings. This truly comprehensive range can either be dipped into, to produce a limited number of images, or else used to test every single permutation available to you.

What's great is that once you've made your selection, and taken your captures you can filter and sort the resulting images that the service has created in a number of useful ways.

Checking your results

Once your screen-shots have been captured it is very easy to browse through them, even if you have taken a huge amount of images to truly cover yourself in terms of browser compatibility.

BrowserCam's interface makes it very easy to sort images by operating system, browser and a range of other parameters that make it quick and easy to locate the exact images that you're looking for at a given point in time. Any of the thumbnails provided can be clicked to give you an instantaneous full-sized version of the screen-grab.

Then, it is simply a matter of ticking the appropriate check boxes for those images that you would like to make a copy of, and clicking on download. Straight away you are given a zipped folder full of the images, to download directly to your desktop. Obviously, this then allows you to email them directly across to the people you are working with, if you haven't granted them access to your BrowserCam account.

DeviceCam and the handheld market

One nice new addition to the service is the ability to perform a browser compatibility check not only for home computer based systems, but also for the increasingly popular Windows Mobile and Blackberry PDA devices.

As an increasing amount of people are using these hand-held devices to access the web, it's a good idea to see how you are faring when your site is squashed onto a 320x240 or smaller screen. While obviously this great new feature to the BrowserCam service will be of most interest to those developing websites specifically for these devices, it is nevertheless a useful addition to your compatibility toolkit.

Remote testing functionality

Screen-shots are a great way of checking out how your website is going to look on other operating systems and browsers, but unfortunately they cannot tell you how it is going to perform.

With BrowserCam, this doesn't pose a problem, however.

In addition to being able to take accurate screen grabs, the service allows you to remotely access a range of computers, running a range of operating systems via VNC. In short, this means that you can take control of the exact computer that you need to test your website on, and use it from your own location.

This is a great way to test a particular system in hands on way, and it is possible to capture and save the results as you do so. Using this approach is a great compliment to the screen captures you can take with BrowserCam, and while the process is time consuming, it does allow you to look into the kind of issues a screen grab just won't show you.

If, for instance, you need to check for JavaScript browser compatibility, or want to work out the specifics of a Flash or Ajax interface, the best way to be sure that all is well is to get stuck in and have a quick play with your site.

BrowserCam makes this incredibly easy, and gives you the option of either using your own VNC client to access their remote computers, or else using their own bundled Java VNC client, which will allow you to get stuck in straight from your browser window.

BC-Virtual - virtual machines at your disposal

As if all of that wasn't enough the BrowserCam people have just added yet another supercool feature called BC-Virtual, which is currently in beta testing.

Put simply, BC-Virtual allows you to make use of dedicated server space to run private virtual machines, to which you are granted full administrator access. This effectively means that you can have at your disposal the ability to create machines with the OS, browsers and resolution of your choice, and tweak all of the finer points you don't have access to as a guest user of the previously mentioned remote machines.

This adds a whole new level of control, and the ability to truly customize a machine to your exact specifications. As it is stored within your allotted server space, you can obviously do as much compatibility testing as you need to, without having to worry about losing your configurations and data.

Every time that it seems that BrowserCam have reached a plateau, they pull something like this out of a hat and push the envelope a little further. With the addition of this new feature, there are now a number of options available for those looking to extensively test browser compatibility.

Pricing and plans

I am genuinely impressed by the flexibility of the pricing infrastructure of BrowserCam's service, which seems to have an option to suit every level of user. The range goes from casual users that might want to make use of the service on a once-only basis, right up to unrestricted, annual premium access.

The price range goes from a measly $19.95, which will buy you 24-hours of unlimited access to the service, right up to $999.95 for unlimited, annual, premium access. Between these prices there is truly flexible range that allows for different access plans and pricing structures that can be mixed and matched to suit your needs.

A list of the available plans is available on the BrowserCam website, and involves varying degrees of remote access, and additional features at the premium end of the scale.

Conclusions

Having extensively tested BrowserCam for this review, I can say with positive confidence that BrowserCam will make the task of testing your website on multiple operating systems and browsers a truly effective one.

While most blogging platforms have pre-designed templates already designed to work across the vast range of browsers and operating systems out there, anyone who has any kind of customized design or web site template needs to make very sure how her site is going to be seen on the browsers, monitor sizes and screen resolutions she can't see directly on her development machines.

Browsercam ensures your easy access to Mac, Linux and Windows previews, no matter whether you want to see these through the eyes of Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer or several other browsers and versions of the same.

Webmasters and website designers that do not make use of such a straightforward, easy to use shortcut to checking a website's compatibility could end up spending a lot more time (and money) finding alternative approaches to the problem. Nonetheless the apparent significant cost for buying yourself a yearly subscription (about $1000/year for the top level service) I can state with confidence that not only this is money well spent, but that if you take the time to evaluate how much time and effort it would have cost you or your webmaster to find out what BrowserCam does in a click of your mouse, you would rapidly realize that this is a tool that saves you a great deal of money and time too.

The BrowserCam service is also available on a monthly basis, and at different pricing levels, including a full one-day free try-out option.

Additional resources

If you are interested in learning more about BrowserCam, the following links might be useful:

BrowserCam's homepage has a lot more information about the service

A full list of browsers and remote access machines available via the service

BrowserCam's comprehensive forums

Video demos of the service in action

Medical Imaging Technologies 2.0: Portable, Disposable, Wireless - Pillcam Is Here

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:18:51 PST

The ubiquity of cheap, all but throwaway cameras is something we have come to take for granted. Web-cams and the advent of online video sharing have made broadcasting our internal lives to the world as easy and as commonplace as picking up the phone. But new medical technologies promise to make the literal broadcasting of our internal lives a reality, potentially changing the lives of millions of people.

Endoscopy is a word that strikes fear into anyone that knows its meaning. Should doctor's ever decide that they need to know what's going on inside your body, you will be faced with the extremely unpleasant prospect of having cameras fed into your digestive tract, from one end or another. Either way, it's no picnic, that's for sure.

Luckily medical imaging technologies are taking a radical turn for the better. Leading the way is an invention known simply as the Pillcam, a single-use, disposable micro-camera that can be swallowed as easily as a vitamin pill. The camera is able to take crystal-clear video images as it moves through the body, reaching parts of the digestive system even the most flexible wired cameras could never hope to record, without any of the discomfort and humiliation.

In many ways we are talking about medical imaging technology 2.0 - the shift towards the disposable, portable and wireless promises a giant leap in terms of the experience of patients and the results available to medical professionals alike. In this brief introduction, I take a look at how the technology works, and why it poses such radical hope for the patients and doctors in need of it.

The alternative

Medical technology is not always as cutting edge as the Pillcam, and the existing means of getting an accurate picture of a patient's internal health can be a gruesome prospect for all involved. Endoscopy, and its perhaps even less comfortable sibling colonoscopy, involve feeding a camera attached to a long tube either up the patient's nostril, and down into their stomach, or else directly up into the digestive system via the - well, you get the idea. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let me continue.

As someone unlucky enough to have been subjected to both, let me put you in the picture. From personal experience let me tell you that the experience of swallowing a greased tube that is being fed up your nose is not a pleasant one, and ranks among the most uncomfortable experiences of my life. The procedure seems endless, and the ever present gag-reflex doesn't make it any easier. Next time you want to give it a try, have a go at swallowing a meter of garden hose, and you'll get the idea.

An Endoscope - the alternative to Pillcam

I was personally, thankfully, spared full awareness of the alien-abduction treatment with a rather strong dose of anesthetic. But I can assure you that being wheeled into a room full of strangers standing around what looks like a gas pump with full knowledge of where the nozzle is going doesn't rank high on my must-do-again-sometime list.

In the age of wireless, portable, disposable technology these medieval torture devices really don't cut it. And this is why Pillcam offers so much hope to the millions that face these inhumane diagnostic technologies every year.

Pillcam - introduction

In this first video we are introduced to the Pillcam concept, and the main argument for its implementation - namely its ease of use.

As the video explains, rather than subjecting a patient to the procedures I briefly outlined above, they are simply asked to swallow the pill-sized camera. Then, wearing a receiver-belt, they go about their daily routine as the images are recorded to the camera's receiver, so that 24-hours later, doctors can analyze the entirety of the patient's GI tract using high quality images.

In addition to making the experience painless for the patient, the Pillcam also manages to bring back images that wouldn't be possible with the less flexible endoscopic tube-camera.

The Pillcam in action

So how does this lightweight medical technology do its job? In the following video, which is in the Portuguese language (translation coming soon), we see the ease with which medical practitioners can collect valuable information with this groundbreaking micro-technology.

While Pillcam is pricey at $300 a pop, this is not a procedure that is taken every day, and will hopefully find its way into mainstream medical practice, rather than being offered simply as a luxury treatment to those that can afford to buy into it. Nevertheless, as portable, wireless technology grows almost day by day in its power and ease of production increases there is some hope that Pillcam will lead the way in non-invasive, patient-friendly medical imaging technologies.

I for one am looking forward to that prospect.

Further reading

If you would like to learn more about Pillcam, you might want to take a look at the following websites:

Given Imaging - manufacturer of the Pillcam

Digg entry on Pillcam and images recorded using the device

Sales and Marketing Network coverage of Pillcam's software component

Patient experiences of the traditional endoscopy experience