Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm trying to do some calculations for a new service that is pretty targetted. It helps users manage their email and voice messages. We'll know the users zip code, address, city, mobile phone #, phone carrier, and possibly more.
How do you come up with an estimate for what your click through rate and earnings per click will be with AdSense?
I know you'd say just put it up (but I need to put together some numbers for the BIG CHEESE)!
Thanks,
BrookinMT
If your site is being used for a purpose and people have specific tasks they will be performing I would expect CTR to be on the lower side (< 2%). My CTR seems to be directly related to how distracted a visitor may be when they hit that page. If the site has lots of interesting content or a user will be drawn to a specific action the adsense will suffer. If however the content is not real sticky and the user may not really know what to do the adsense does better.
EPC is also a shot in the dark. EPC definitely seems to drop as traffic scales up. Sometimes I have a site that may only get 5 clicks at an average of .75 cents each. That EPC never happen on a site that gets 1,000 clicks IMO.
If I were just gusessing lo to hi then:
Low: 1% CTR at 5 cents per click
Hi: 10% CTR at 25 cents per click
You probably won't really know until you put the site up and throw some traffic at it.
You don't know what your site traffic will be
You don't know what ads will be targetted
You don't know how many visitors will click on the ads
You don't know what ads will pay what, nor what you will actually recieve per click due to Smart Pricing placing a value on the clicks.
I'm sure there are many more variables.
I think the only advice is to suck it and see. The danger in making commitments on figures to the big cheese is that he/she/it will hold you to account at some later date if it all goes pear shaped!
I definitely understand the need to provide estimates and numbers to the "big cheese". Typically people need to see something on paper and some goals even though they are VERY crude estimates.
I've probably had to put 20 proposals in front of various cheeses that were nothing more than educated guesstimates. But those have always turned out much better than telling them I can't provide them anything at all.
All executives and managers are forced to make estimates and projections without all the facts and variables in place. Just do the research you can and put together a target that is not over optimistic.
Good luck.
Then... trying to mix it with AS earnings - give up hope.
I gave up trying to have an educated guess at what future stats with AdSense would entail - it's up and down like a freakin' yo-yo. Save your sanity, and tell the boss man to crunch the numbers himself.
I understand what you are saying but the same issues about lack of information or too many variables can be said about practically any large project. Look how many big government projects start out expecting to only cost $10 million and end up costing $30 million. Too many variables, too little information, rose colored glasses, etc. all add up to bad projections. The point however is if you want to provide executives with the information they need to make decisions, at some point you have to put some numbers on paper.
The trick is to frame your estimates in a way that is realistic and provides for the most likely of scenerios. To suggest that this guy walk into his boss and tell him/her to find out the estimates for him/herself is simply bad professional advice for anyones career IMO. Next time his boss will find someone that has some balls and is willing to make some predictions.
As a manager I've had countless employees complain they can't give me estimates or projections on projects because they won't be accurate. It's as common as calling in sick on Mondays. It's also just as lame. Thats part of the reason I took the time to write this. When I ask for estimates and numbers from an employee, I expect their best efforts without a bunch of excuses.
For example, we know it's unlikely that CTR will reach on average above 20%. That's information that this guys boss may not know. We also know it's very possible CTR will be as low as 1% on some sites. This is information that bosses want to know. While it seems like invaluable information to you, these ranges can help in decision making. We know he won't average $2 per click and we know that it's possible he could see averages of 5 cents a click. Are these "estimates" perfect? Of course not, I've given wide ballpark numbers on purpose to demonstrate the difficulty in nailing down an exact number... but these estimates are better than nothing and give executives a picture in their head of what is at least possible.
Not everything is black and white and I believe this guys boss will appreciate a good faith effort to give him some estimates of CTR and EPC. That is the way the business world works.
