So it has been a little over a week and my conclusion about EntreCard still stands, it is a great concept with poor implementations. I did receive a good amount of traffic from it but it was trash traffic. When I say it is garbage I really mean it. The traffic that comes from EntreCard does not convert at all and serves me no reason to leave EntreCard on my beautiful blog. EntreCard can be far better than blugrush if done correctly with bloggers and webmasters in mind. Also, EntreCard users do not understand traffic stats.
They see their graph and they see amount of visitors visited from EntreCard. Do they look at other aspects like bounce, time on site, and even page views? A graph with a jump in traffic does not mean anything if the traffic is not converting in anyway or shows interest in your website. For example, my stats shows EntreCard has provide me substantial traffic - YES, NO! If I look at my other stats such as what I have mentioned above, I will see that this traffic does not do anything except look for the EntreCard Widget to drop cards.
Below is a snapshot of my total EntreCard visits. As you can see there is a high number of visits being most of them are new visitors. I should be happy right this is new traffic, but why are they staying on my blog for less than 30 seconds? Also, why the hell is my bounce rate higher than my percentage of new visitors? This means to me anyways that the traffic is not true. When I say true, these users or readers are more interested in finding the EntreCard widget than reading the content. Click to Enlarge.
Usually a reader stays on my site for at least 2 minutes; this is new traffic and true traffic. So when I saw EntreCard readers were only staying on my blog for 30 seconds I was a little annoyed. But my page views show that the readers were maybe somewhat browsing my blog since my page views were at less than 2 but just a little over 1. So this tells me there was some exploration for a little bit, maybe they were trying to find the placement of the widget? But at least there was some interaction with the blog.
So here are my hardcore stats, not very interesting I think. To the left are 3 graphs Card Drops, Advert Clicks, and Organic Clicks.
Card Drops shows the amount of cards that were drop on my widget. It is not that high, but comparing it to my analytics, the total number of cards drop almost looks similar to the total number of visits, interesting.
The second graph is the number of visitors that came to my website from a widget of another EntreCard user. Not very appealing is it. Matter a fact my EntreCard Referral was # 23 in my top traffic source according to analytics. Maybe this is due to the low traffic websites that I bought widget space from. I only bought 3 spaces from other users and the EntreCard credits were high for these low traffic sites. Why?
The last graph shows visits from EntreCard itself. It is pretty high and again is pretty close to the analytics image above. I am pretty sure users were arriving at my site just to drop their card. Readers were not interested in the website, but dropping their button.
So I will go into further detail as to why EntreCard is not a viable solution for traffic.
But first, here is a snapshot of my EntreCard adverts Stats:
Ugly right, well because I reject most of the crap that comes into my widget, its all trash that is not even relevant to my blog. Sorry, the website is not trash but there is no relevancy to my blog at all, music and mp3 downloads, let's be serious.
Also ton confirm my low image quality, you can read their post here at the EntreCard Blog.
For those who haven’t been uploading PNGs, there have been a few image quality problems. The reason for this is pretty simple, we’ve been re-encoding all the images that get uploaded.
Looking at the overall picture, I do not think EntreCard is a viable reason for traffic. As I stated in my prior post, the concept is great but the backends needs to be thought of on a more thorough approach. It seems the traffic is just there to drop cards, if you are liooking at traffic without conversion then this is for you. I rather find traffic that are not concerned about their EntreCard Points and looking for viable information that is useful, targeted and converting that traffic is what I am interested in.
What they need to improve or my 2 cents:
- Better organize the dashboard
- Allow Me as an advertiser to chose what websites can advertise on my widget by category
- Allow better rejection instead of a 2-3 step system, this is time consuming
- Credit determination, I do not know how it is done. How is a low traffic site more expensive than a high traffic site?
- Allow user (me) to set how many times a person can drop their card. I had one user drop their card to my widget 1 everyday - no life!
They hype of this widget and concept is all positive through out the blogosphere, but do these users or noobs know how to read their traffic? There are 2 instances of entrecard and the traffic source you want to look at is "entrecard.s3.amazonaws.com / referral" if you are using analytics. The other source "entrecard.com / referral" are users that are looking for your widget to drop their card. This source of traffic is useless because you have a HUGE high bounce rate. Noobs need to look at their traffic with a deeper eye and make sure you know what you are looking at. Just because you saw X amount of traffic from EntreCard does not mean that is good traffic - any traffic is usually not good traffic. I like traffic that converts in positive ways.
I am not hating on EntreCard as I said in my prior post, it is a great concept - just need a stronger back end and for all those bloggers looking a the nice traffic they are receiving, look at it closer and non converted traffic is bad traffic. Noobs. I just hate reading how much traffic they have received from entrecard and yet I do not not see any pictures or an in depth analysis of where that traffic is coming from. Ehh traffic is traffic, I guess? Too bad that doesn't mean anything to me.
So EntreCard will be soon removed and I feel bad for the users that I have approved to show their badges on my blog. So here are the runner ups that were suppose to show their badge on my blog:
So visit the top websites as they have patiently waited to be shown on the IanFernando.com EntreCard widget. I personally have no time to jump from website to website to just drop cards to earn credits so you may have noticed EntreCard is gone from IanFernando.com. As for EntreCard - Check Please! (Mark says it reminds him of an Entre) 😛
