I built my first web site/blog a couple of weeks ago, and I've been experimenting with advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, etc, and I have to say it's been a

I built my first web site/blog a couple of weeks ago, and I've been experimenting with advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, etc, and I have to say it's been a really interesting experience. Basically the most important thing I've learned is that I have to understand why my users are coming to my site, and from there tailor my site around that. I have a very high bounce rate of around 75%, but most of that is due to smartphone users and the fact my site is pretty hard to use for them. Creating a simplified page is my #1 goal over the next couple of weeks. Looking at logs, I also realized that my landing page was hard to use for a significant percentage of my new visitors. I could see from the logs that they were getting confused, trying it out a couple of times and bouncing. I was working on this last week, and tried a couple of GUI changes, but decided that having unintrusive error boxes would probably help better. Hopefully that will help those users having trouble. But from the ones that stick around, I do have a few pretty regular users, and that leads to what I think is a kind of nice ad clickthru rate. I've paid a good chunk of all my costs in the first two weeks (of course, my costs are only around ~$30). Thanks for the pointer to Mixpanel. I was looking for a better type of analytics than Google Analytics which doesn't offer me a great deal of information. The only hesitation I have is whether or not having all this javascript client-side tracking will cause users to question their privacy. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.