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How to read the charts on Project Wonderful (and elsewhere!)Throughout Project Wonderful, we use charts to show data and its trends clearly. While most of these charts are pretty straightforward, some of them may be of types that you're unfamiliar with.You must have Flash and JavaScript enabled to see the charts below. bid chartsThese charts show you the average bid value of a spot on an ad box for a day has been, over the past 30 days. This lets you know what others have been willing to pay to have their ad shown here! This chart shows that spots on this ad box have been increasing in the past few days. The average cost for a day of advertising on 5/31 (May 31st) was $16.95. Currently, the bidding on the ad box is at $20/day. display chartsThese charts show you the traffic levels of an ad box has been, over the past 30 days. This lets you know the kind of exposure you can expect. They show two kinds of data: unique users and page views. Unique users are the number of different IP addresses accessing the site: you can treat this as the number of people that are visiting. Page views is the total number of impressions the site has made on these people. For example, if a certain website is accessed by people who visit it only once, then unique users will be the same number as the number of pageviews. But if a readers tend to visit multiple pages on a site, page views can be much higher than unique users. Using these charts, you can not only see how many people have been visiting a site, but can measure how often you can expect each person to be shown your ad. On this particular chart, we can see that we can expect people to see our ad twice, as on average page views is about twice the unique users. We can also see there was a dip in page views and unique users on the 26th. The "currently" column shows the number of unique users and page views so far today. This will usually be smaller than the historical average, since the day isn't over yet! As you get closer and closer to midnight they should get closer and closer to what things have been like in the past. stacked chartsStacked charts show you the same kind of data you've seen above, but let you compare multiple parts to the whole. In this chart, we are looking at the bid values of three bids: bid A, bid B, and bid C. Every column shows the current bid of each of these bids: bid A in light blue, bid B in yellow, and bid C in green. At a glance, you can see that bid A, in light blue, has been the most expensive, since its bars are bigger. You can also see that bid C, in green, as been getting more expensive lately, as the size of its bar has been growing over the past few days. You can also see totals easily. If we look at the current bid values by looking at the right-most column, we can see that, taken together, all spending on these three bids is almost $1.50 a day. By clicking on the individual segments, we can see that precisely $0.69 of that total is from the green bid C, $0.09 is from the yellow bid B, and $0.71 is from bid A, in light blue. Stacked charts can be viewed when examining the performance of your ad boxes, bids, ads, or campaigns. advanced stacked chartsThe last stacked chart we saw showed one kind of data: bid values. This chart actually shows two kinds of data: unique users and duplicate displays. Unique users are what we saw before: the number of different people viewing the site. Duplicate displays are similar to the "page views" we saw earlier, but slightly different. While "page views" referred the total number of impressions made, "duplicate displays" is simply the number of impressions shown to somebody more than once. In other words, duplicate displays equals page views minus unique users. The reason for this difference here is to keep the charts clear: if we plotted unique users and page views on top of each other, the total size of the column would be misleading, since the unique users would be counted twice: once in unique users, and once again when measuring total page views! So instead, we show unique users (the number of people viewing the ad) and duplicate displays (the number of displays shown to these users more than once). In this chart, we can see that bid Y is doing really well: a lot of unique users (in yellow) along with a lot of duplicate displays (in cyan). We see that Bid X (in light blue and red) is, comparatively, not performing that well: unique users and duplicate displays are both small. Finally, it've very obvious that on the 26th displays dropped quite a bit for all these bids, and that we haven't had any displays since the 27th! It turns out that these three bids were outbid early in the morning of the 26th. That's why they haven't been displayed since then. Duplicate displays are always plotted on top of unique users: this lets you easily determine how much of the data reflects unique users and how much is duplicate displays. In this chart, green represents the number of unique displays for bid Z, the last bid plotted. All data stacked above these green bars represents duplicate displays. Click and hover your mouse over the segments to see! As you click and hover over any of the "duplicate display" segments, you'll be shown both the number of duplicate displays for that bid, as well as the total number of displays that bid recieved. This total (duplicate displays plus unique users) is equal to page views. that's it!And that's pretty much it! If you have any questions about reading the charts in Project Wonderful, please feel free to drop us a line. |
