Spyfu

Here's another useful competitive web analytics tool.

You may be curious about web advertising and what it could do for you. You may be even more curious about how online advertising is working for your competitors. How much are they spending? What kind of results are they getting? Well, there is a site that can answer these questions: www.spyfu.com

Type in any url to find out what they spend on key-word advertising. I typed in spyfu.com to see what they were doing themselves and here is what I got:

You can see what their daily budget is, how may clicks they get as a result and what this clicks are costing them.

Another interesting feature is that you can see what the search terms are that they are paying for. What their most successful AdWords are:

Try it out on your competitors. Try it out on your own company and let us know - is it accurate?

Holiday Traffic

If you ever wondered if the commercial real estate industry takes a break over the holidays, we have the answer for you! Over this past break we saw a dramatic drop in web traffic to our site. Starting on December 19th, traffic dropped to around half of the usual. During the time between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day the number of visitors never exceeded ten percent of what we normally get. Only on January 7th did the activity return to normal levels.

Open Office Shortcomings

I've been using open office for about a month now. In general it works very well, but I am experiencing three problems:

Gradient fills in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) do not display correctly. When I open a file previously created in PowerPoint, rectangles that contain gradient fills display in the wrong direction. For example a rectangle that contains a gradient of white to grey that goes left to right will display as grey to white. I can make the changes and save them, but when I reopen the file the problem comes back. I have not found a way to work around this.

Connectors in Impress diagrams re-route themselves in awkward ways. If I draw diagrams with connecting lines it seems to work exactly as in PowerPoint. When I

save, close and then reopen the file, the connectors are often moved into rather strange configurations. After I move them back and resave the file, the program still re-routes the lines when I open the file again.
I cannot seem to find the data analysis tools in Calc (the Open Office equivalent of Excel). By default the data analysis tools are not installed in Excel and it is not commonly used by most people. This module is used for statistical work such as regression, histograms, calculating standard deviation and so on. Unfortunately I have to revert to Excel to get these tasks done!

These three issues should not be critical for most people and I believe that the Open Office package would work well for the majority of users - and chance are the existing short comings will soon be addressed.