We’ve gone into major analysis/assess/revise mode, and I started using Crazy Egg again as it freely offers extensive visibility into our customer clicks on any page we want to track. Their newer feature, Confetti, is a great addition. Of course you could cull all this data on your own, but we have better things to do than write our own weblog parsing/storing/visibility tools. The GoogLytics ‘ClickTracker’ offers related functionality but with a fraction as many views and metadata.

In this entry I’ll skip the barking and just use screenshots to show you what you can do.

Here you can see a Heat Map showing click density of our new Breeds homepage.

Here’s a Heat Map showing where people are clicking NON-CLICKABLE areas in our new Dogster homepage.

Here’s a Confetti view of the logged-out Catster homepage. In this Confetti view each colored dot represents 1 of 15 top referrers. We can see where Google visitors click vs. Stumble Upon vs. Dogster visitors.

Here’s a time-specific Confetti view of the logged-out Catster homepage. The red/orange/yellow dots represent clicks made within two seconds of page load. The blue and purples represent clicks between 30 seconds and five minutes of page load.

Here are some other tips:

• » In your footer you can control when the CrazyEgg JavaScript should be invoked, so it’s a good idea to do lots of testing on distinct visitor types and see how it differs. Logged in vs. logged out. First time vs returning.
• » Store your tests so you can run identical tests at regular intervals and compare results over time.
• » CrazyEgg can’t scrape logged-in screens. They can track clicks, but not show you the logged in page as part of the overlay
• » CrazyEgg can’t distinguish dynamic content. It can track the click but, for example, does not know which image you clicked in a slide show.

Our fun-loving members decided to name the last week of January “Dogster & Catster Rocks Week.” It’s pretty epic. People are rockin’ out on their profile pages right and left.

Check out Lucy’s photo. She’s feelin’ it!

Not a week goes by where I don’t assess our SEO status. And many weeks, during periods of significant content change, I’ll assess on a daily and sometimes even hourly basis.

Here are the web-based tools I use.

1. Shoemoney’s Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP) Tool. This scripts simultaneously queries all search engines’ APIs and returns how your site ranks for any term. It’s a huge time save time if you tracks lots of keywords or sites on a regular basis. (Note: API results differ from browser queries and browser query results vary on a country by country basis.)
2. Webconfs SEO Tools. Webconfs, like many other SEO sites, offers a number of tools to reduce guesswork. Ones I commonly use are:
     »Keyword Density Checker to see how visible our most important keywords are or aren’t. Then I test competitor sites to see their densities. Very illuminating.
     »Spidered-Text Simulator shows the text and links that they think search engine spider see when it parses a page. Compare your pages to your competitors above and below you.
3. Compete.com’s Search Analytics. This is a new Compete service. I’m still determining its value to us. It provides detailed competitor data, and thus it could be very valuable if you use it and they don’t. They are able to show for any given keyword or phrase, all the top sites that rank for it, who does the best in terms of appearing in result sets, who does the best in terms of clickthrough, and how many matches a site gets for that term in a month. (You know Compete.com, right? They aggregate and parse request logs of major ISPs. They then know, on an anonymous basis, exactly what is being queried, what is being clicked, visit lengths and other standard web log info. It’s the data Alexa wishes they had and ComScore will no longer be able to charge a lot of money for.
4. Google Webmaster Tools. You use them right? If not, get on it. Google shows an awful lot about how they are indexing your site. Which pages are indexed, which aren’t. What’s returning 404s, what robots.txt files are blocking. It will also let you control your site links if you are big enough to have them displayed.

I’ll also save you some time. Making small changes such as a 5% tweak will not change your business model. So time well spent is only time that creates 25% change or more. Significant change is all that matters… everything else is, well, insignificant.

After reporting that he did not create the profile on Friendster that used his name, biography and photos, Philippine National Police Director General Avelino Razon Jr. also stated:

he was glad he had no account on ‘dogster’

We’d like to confirm that the Director General does not have an account on Dogster, but we’re greatly pleased he is aware of our online community and invite him to post his dogs or cats at his leisure.

On January 12th Dogster.com turned 28, or 4 if you count in human years. Work on Dogster first began in April 2003 (an era cheerily referred to in our industry as the nuclear winter) when I realized that for all the photos of dogs online (and on people’s phones) there was no place to display them along with all of a dog’s other information.

In that time Dogster (along with Catster, which launched in August 2004) has grown from a one-person side project with modest revenue expectations to a 15-employee, break-even business with 550,000 members, 500,000 uploaded pet profiles. What began as a whimsical way to post and share dog photos and stories is now a global phenomenon that supports all four quadrants of the online community experience: information, resources, sociality and entertainment.

What enthralls us, however, is planning where we’ll be four years from now, in January 2012. We very much expect the online pet sector to he huge and for us to be at the forefront. Currently the pet market in the United States is bigger than the music, video game and movie industries combined. ($41B for pets, $30B for the other three). Sector industry leaders today such as iVillage, WebMD and BabyCenter are all eight years or older, and we see no reason why the online pet sector won’t have a comparable presence, which we expect will be us. From that perspective, is the idea of Dogster, Inc. becoming a publicly traded company all that far-fetched? We really don’t think so, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride!

It’s around this time we’d also like to offer birthday wishes to some of our peers. Del.icio.us turned 5 recently; Flickr is about to turn four; and lolcat curators I Can Has Cheezburger turned 1 on January 12th.

Mashable highlighted research completed by eMarketer that indicated massive spending changes in targeted social networks.

Spending on social networking sites is expected to grow 75 percent next year, to $2.1 billion, according to eMarketer, a research firm that tracks online advertising.
…
Smaller sites’ share of that money is growing. Of the $920 million spent this year to advertise on social networks, 8.2 percent went to niche sites, up from 7 percent in 2006, according to eMarketer. Next year, niche sites’ share of ad revenue is expected to grow to 10 percent.

Dogster, Inc.’s advertising revenue doubled in 2007 from 2006 and will more than double again in 2008.

Also last week, Auren from Rapleaf, a career-centric community platform, shared some of their data on adult male and female usage of social networks.

The fastest-growing demographic on social networks are moms between 35 and 45 years old. These women are putting up pictures… and using these social networks to essentially make family home pages and share them with friends and relatives. They are decorating their pages, making RockYou slide shows, and using lots of widgets.

On both our sites we see very heavy usage by woman age 25-45. Most return daily and have made Dogster and Catster their hub of sociality.

Finally if you had any doubts as to the value of highly focused vertical online communities, Monster Worldwide (the job company) weighed in last week when they acquired the career-centric community sites of Affinity Labs for $61 million.

Congrats to Chris Michel and the whole Affinity Labs team.

Yesterday we launched an entirely revamped homepage. It feels really great to be able to offer so much. We made the page about 200px wider, condensed the height to two screen views, increased the font size and designed a much cleaner page.

There are very different experiences now if you are just visiting or are a logged-in member.

Screen shots are below, or just link over (Dogster.com or Catster.com)

New visitors get very helpful directions to guide them to get information quickly, find sociality and entertainment or adopt a pet of their own. We also added a scrolling info box to allow visitors to explore what interests them faster. We made it really easy to search for breeds or anything else. We’ll have polls and locally relevant info in a new module, as well as a view of the most recently created profiles.

Logged-in members get everything. They can see a newsfeed of their friends’ activities, mail status, recent gifts they’ve received, who is online, their pals and their saved favorites, as well as the scrolling info box.

Click the below thumbs to see full-size screen shots.

Dogster Homepage (Logged In)	Dogster Homepage (Logged Out)
Catster Homepage (Logged In)	Catster Homepage (Logged Out)