During the last 10 years Mataf was my playground. I worked with search engine optimization, online marketing, community management, creating orginal content… I think Mataf was unique in the forex space, most of the trading tools were done before for my personal trading. I developed content I didn’t find somewhere else. And it worked very well, last year I welcomed almost 1 million unique visitors per month in january and march.

The number of visitors was enough strong to take a risk without endangering the future of the site. I decided to build a brand, as the domain name mataf.com was not for sale I completely changed the brand name for ForexTicket. I was aware that this change could drop the number of visitors.

And the number of visitors dropped by 30%. But, thanks Internet’s God, the fall was stabilized and 2012 started -very- well.

Forexticket is a worldwide website. Europe represents more than 50% of the whole visits but Asia (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India…) become more important every week.

The mobile version of Forexticket is growing very fast. In december more than 6% of visits are from a smartphone or a tablet and I could reach 7 or 8 percent in january.

So, today we have a new brand, the website should recover all its visitors in the following months. We are strong on mobile and web.

And tomorrow we will be better on mobile and I will try to enhance the brand. We have one distinct website per country, ready to be compliant with all the regulations… And to become an independant broker! … okay, it’s probably a joke, I didn’t plan to transform ForexTicket as a forex broker, I lack some skills and motivation to do that.

I thought it was an other change in a search engine’s algorithm. But I looked closer where I lost visitors and I can easily concluded that it’s localised in muslim countries.

It’s “Eid-al Adha” from november 6th to the 9th. An important religious day celebrated by muslim.

Eid al-Adha or “Festival of Sacrifice” or “Greater Eid” is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isma’il) as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a sheep— to sacrifice instead. (from wikipedia)

Today I learned a new thing… I love web analytics.

Sometimes I should concentrate myself on “non-quantifiable factors” instead of opening Google Analytics.

You vs. The Data: When to Stop Optimizing and Start Thinking.

The availability of data drives us towards optimization. We push towards our goals with pinpoint precision based on specific metrics, relentlessly focusing on squeezing every percentage point out of the online experience. But is there a point where external factors outweigh the direction in which the data pushes us? When these “non-quantifiable” factors like brand values, aesthetic, staff retention and corporate strategy (to name just a few) bump up against what the data is telling us, what should we do?

Spain leading the smartphone revolution in Europe

Did you know that 33 % of the Spanish population actually has a smartphone (Ipsos GmbH & TNS Infratest)? Through the recently released research site ourmobileplanet.com we have seen that among major European countries Spain is now leading the smartphone revolution. The study reveals that in terms of parallel media usage, 50 % of Spanish smartphone users are actively browsing the Internet while listening to music and 35 % of users are in fact using the Internet on another device simultaneously.

Although we have these great examples of companies who are embracing mobile, our internal data shows that only 10 % of large companies in Spain have developed a mobile website.

Coming Soon: Mobile Intel Series: Finance
Finance is a vertical with a variety of subsets (i.e. banking, insurance companies, stock trading firms, etc.), and the report will contain an in-depth look at what the industry is doing in mobile.

Some initial findings from the data really stand out:

• 80 percent of mobile financial users own a smartphone, which is more than double the overall mobile population.
• The mobile finance audience is 76 percent more likely to own a tablet or e-reader, when compared to the mobile audience.

This shows that mobile finance consumers are looking to engage with content on next generation devices, and there is an opportunity for brands to reach consumers through apps or the mobile web. The stat about connected devices also shows that mobile plays a huge role in these consumers’ lives, as many mobile finance users have both a tablet and smartphone.

I noticed a divergence between the estimation and the real numbers. With the following chart I wanted to measure the divergence.

I use the numbers of Mataf and Fxstreet. I don’t share my data but fxstreet does.

Since last year the spread between the real numbers and the estimation is growing month after month.The difference between real and estimate numbers grows even if we share our datas.

If I use the average spread to correct Adplanners’s numbers I have the following statistics (statistics without correction can be found here):

• Forexpros continues to grow and seems to be now bigger than DailyFX
• I don’t know if the numbers provided by google are correct but, for the global statistics, march was not as good as I expected.
• My “real” numbers were 1.5 million visits, 985’000 unique visitors and 4.3 millions pageviews. The numbers given by Google Adplanner were 750’000 unique visitors, 1.2 million visits and 4.6 millions pageviews

• more than 10’000 followers on my twitter account
• 2’000 traders who receive my alerts on their iPhone after only 6 months (via our fantastic application)
• almost 25’000 newsletter subscribers
• Mataf.net had almost 1 million unique visitors last month

• The global number of visits has grown from 14.5 million to 18.9 million in one year = +31%
• Forexpros has grown +184%, Forexcrunch +150% and myfxbook +169%.
• Global social networks has grown 68%, the growth is done by myfxbook and currensee (27%). mt4stats : (-39%)
• Other winners are trader-forex.fr (+25%), mataf.net and forexmagnates (+20%), forexfactory (+17%)…
• The losers are fx360.com (-41%), forex-tsd (-26%) and babypips (-13%)

Don’t forget that those numbers are just an indicator, they are not real numbers -Mataf didn’t grows from 1 million visits to 1.2 million (+20% ) but from 1.12 million to 1.46 million (+30%).- but it’s interesting to compare our website with the same tool.