Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I think, though, that a number of things I've learned would be useful to others, if only to make you feel as though you're not as obsessive as I am. So I'll share some metrics I use to determine more and less profitable areas of my business, where to invest and dis-invest, and where to focus on improvements.
Assumptions
I'm not going to mention my field(s), and I won't mention any actual numbers of clicks, dollars, urls, anything like that. I, (meaning an LLC of which I am a member) run a number of sites.
Site Design
My sites are gorgeous in terms of look, feel, navigability, ease of use & ease of loading perspective. I can say that because I didn't design them, my partner did, and he's awesome. The sites all have a brand name, not a blue-widget-world.com name.
Traffic and Demographics
I operate a number of sites, primarily consisting of 5 "medium" sites of around 500 pages each, plus 20 smaller sites. The 5 medium sites are on a similar theme, and the smaller sites are all around a second theme. All sites together receive a bit less than a million unique visitors (unique ip addresses, let's say) annually. About half my traffic is "natural", built via insight from smart folks here on webmasterworld, and the other half is generated via an assortment of ppc and ppi. Most visitors are not, and by virtue of the industry I'm in will not be, repeat visitors.
Revenue
My revenue is comprised of hosting, affiliate sales, direct sales, and adsense. My business' overall profit, of which adsense is not insignificant, is less than 100K USD per year, but not a whole lot. I am not in the UPS club, but it could be possible in a couple months. We'll see.
Costs
I pay less than 1K USD annually for hosting, and the rest of my costs are ppc. These costs run in excess of 20K USD annually.
PPC engines
I do or have at one time used the following PPC engines: FindWhat, Overture, Adwords, goClick, 7Search, SearchFeed, Kanoodle, ePilot, LookSmart, eSpotting, and probably half a dozen more than I forgot about after dropping $25 on. I recently focused 98% of my analysis efforts at rooting out low-ROI-ppc and as a result I now exclusively use Overture (multi-country, partner sites on), Adwords (multi-country, partner sites on), eSpotting, goClick, 7Search and SearchFeed. These last 3 I still have some doubts about. On my bigger sites I continually mine my server logs (using proprietary scripts, not commercial packages) to find cheap, infrequent keyword combos, permutate them if possible, and submit them as additional ppc keywords. I rarely pay more than the minimum bid. I mean, why compete with everyone else and pay $2 for "blue widget" when I can be the #1 (and only!) bidder for $0.05 on 10,000 terms like "where can I find a blue widget online"? You'd be amazed at the stuff I find in my logs. I usually can generate upwards of 1000 good new keyword phrases a month from my logs.
SEO techniques
All clean stuff. I generally followed Brett's famous recommendations, try really hard to get quality, topical backlinks while avoiding the BS ones, and try to diversify the number of phrases that occur on my pages. That's it.
Adsense
I love it. Turned a hobby (that my wife didn't approve of) into a good source of income (that my wife now definitely approves of!) Using Adsense, I follow G's top 10 recommendations. In fact when I got the little booklet in the mail a few months ago I laughed because I was already doing all 10 of their points.
Adsense stats
Ok, here's where I spend my time. Here's a list of some of the things I analyze on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis, by site, for all my 30-ish sites:
- Click through rate (CTR)
- Earnings per click (EPC)
- Earnings per impression (EPM)
- Clicks
- Impressions
- PPC by source (ie Adwords, Overture, etc)
- Profit
- Profit / Revenue (ie Margin)
- Graph: clicks vs impressions (with moving averages)
- Graph: CTR vs. EPC (with moving averages)
- Graph: PPC Advertising vs. Profit (overall and per site)
- Graph: CTR vs Profit
- Graph:EPM vs. Profit
- and more....
The Bottom Line
Here's what I've discovered:
- EPC and CTR are interesting, but EPM is more interesting. In other words, the most important stat is profit per visitor, not profit per click or earnings per click.
- From the above, CTR can go up but earnings down
- Also, EPC can go up but earnings down
- EPM and Profit trend together, especially view in a 20- or 30-day moving average window
- Mondays rock
- Sundays don't (traffic and earnings are often 50% of Mondays)
- Everything varies day by day, week by week. Get used to it and look at it from a month by month view. If everything's going up, you're cool.
Rants and Raves
- Seems like lots of people think to make money on the web you need to be a junk-affiliateer or a spam-monger. I think you need to find a topic that people are interested in, make a quality site about it that generates real quality traffic, and then if you want, monetize that traffic via adsense or whatever program (or direct sales) that works for you, your visitors, and your advertisers
- Junk PPC engines. I have wasted too much money on 'em
- When the G stats are delayed (or Overture's, for that matter), it causes me angst.
- People who say you're a crook if your CTR is higher than 1%. I mean, come on, these are supposed to be targetted ads!
- Rave - the conversion tracking script on another thread has been a godsend. I root out my own crap traffic.
In essence, My site takes raw, on-topic, keyword targetted traffic from the major SEs, "cleans" it via several pages of additional topic specificity, and then converts some of this "improved" traffic to my advertisers. Visitors get what they're looking for, my advertisers get high quality ROI-improved traffic, and I pick up earnings along the way.
Seems like lots of people think to make money on the web you need to be a junk-affiliateer or a spam-monger. I think you need to find a topic that people are interested in, make a quality site about it that generates real quality traffic...
Good post NotMyRealNick. You are right on with this statement. We'd all be much better off if these spam-mongers worked to build quality sites instead of trying to game AdSense.
...you're not as obsessive as I am
Thank for sharing your experience but you're over-analyzing the stats.
