I received a ton of nice comments from Rob, John, Scott, and Phil related to my previous post, What Software Bloggers Do Girls Like Better? Phil even did a nice follow up post, with some good humor gloating, until the end where his wife let the air out of his sails; like only a wife can do.

The day I posted the article, Scott instant messaged me to say good job on the article. During the conversation he mentioned that I should compare the stats to Oprah.com as a base point for the other statistics. So naturally I thought this would be a good follow up article.

Usually to gauge the effectiveness of a relative score, like the percent of girls that visit your site, you need at least two points that fall on opposite ends of each other. These two points need to be based on similar vectors, in this case women, but are based on an outside source. Obviously Oprah is huge with women, so oprah.com is a natural choice for the high end, but I had trouble thinking of a super-nerdy site that would be suitable for the low end, but have enough traffic to give a good basis point. I finally settled on World Of Warcraft, worldofwarcraft.com, as my low end. Mostly because every time I think of WoW, I think of this South Park episode:

The results of this, non scientific, study was very disturbing. Mostly because about 3 out of 25 people who visit WoW on the internet is a female, which blows me away because I was expecting something like 1/50.

This means means the World of War craft beat out Jeff, Joel, and Scott, and Phil is slightly above the WoW site at about a 5% lead.

The numbers for Oprah was about what I expected, and probably align very closely to her TV numbers with about 85% of her viewers being female.

If anybody has a better website, than World of Warcraft, for me to compare these guys against please let me know.

Tags: Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman

Posted in Programming, Review | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Today I received an invite to Google Ad Planner.  As I was playing around with this new tool, I was really blown away by how much information Google has collected on specific websites.  So much so that I wanted to share this tool with my readers, but I couldn’t come up with an interesting way to demonstrate the capabilities.  Until I started looking up some of my favorite bloggers and saw the almost embarrassing balance between females and males.

So today I am going to analyze

• Scott Hanselman
• Phil Haack
• Jeff Atwood
• Joel Spolsky

with Google Ad Planner, to find out who is more popular with the ladies, Scott, Phil, Jeff, or Joel.  I know this is one of those questions that has been hotly debated by nobody, but I thought it was a good mechanism to demonstrate what kind of information Google Ad Planner can show.

Please note that I wanted to also analyze, Rob Conery and Jon Galloway too, but their data was yielding results that I don’t think was accurate.  Possibly because Google didn’t have enough information to classify them yet.

What is Google Ad Planner?

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

Get to it already, which blogger is it?

According to Google Ad Planner, from least likable by the ladies to most likable by ladies…  drum roll please… is…

3rd Place - Jeff Attwood

2nd Place - Joel Spolsky and Scott Hanselman

1st Place - Phil Haack

I am not sure how Google Calculates these metrics, but if I had to do an analysis, purely on speculation of why Phil Haack won.  I would conclude the following:

1. Phil has a very nice and ascetically pleasing website, where the other 3 candidates have more of a utilitarian design.  (much like mine)
2. Phil and Scott had pictures of them self on their frontpage and seemed to do better than Jeff and Joel who didn’t.  By a pure numbers game, Jeff and Joel should have been leading the pack because, they had a broader reach, and thus higher page ranks.
3. The last one, which I think is most important for attracting the ladies to your blog is: Phil was the only blogger to post a picture of himself with his son, on the front page.

Hope you enjoyed this preview of Google Ad Planner, it has some really nice analytical features that will help anybody doing a high level comparison of demographics for different websites.

Note: I didn’t include my self in this analysis, because Google Ad Planner didn’t actually have an info sheet compiled for coderjournal.com.

Tags: Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman

Posted in Programming, Review | | | View blog reactions | 14 Comments »