May 23
Running the numbers on a developed site can be a little confusing but understanding how they work can really help you value a site and determine where to spend your time and money.
We track Adsense on quite a few sites. Here’s how I parse the data:
- Make sure you set up channels for each site and ad unit. This is absolutely essential.
- Look at your thirty day totals by channel/site to determine highest performing site(s)
- Remember that Google measures by impression not page view. Three units per page (the max they allow) means 3 impressions per page view
- Google eCPM rate is your earnings per 1000 impressions. If you have three units per page then you have to triple that number to get your average revenue per page view
An example: We have a top performing site that, using the tools above, returns 4.8 cents per page view or $48 per 1000 page views. This was surprising to me but the knowledge meant that we needed to focus a lot more attention on driving traffic to this site since even a slight daily bump adds up really fast.
The same site averages 2.9 page views per visit so a visit is worth an average of $.14. A thousand visits a day is worth around $140 so spending anything up to that amount daily to drive traffic is worth it, remembering that sites generating $50,000 in annual revenues (which is about what those 1000 visits per day gets you) are worth a multiple of those revenues to a buyer, probably at least $300k. You could argue that spending far more to drive traffic makes sense because you’re losing in the short term (aka, investing) but building equity in the long term.
Know your numbers- you can easily set up a spreadsheet to track them.
BTW, the site I’m using as an example is in an enormous, information-hungry consumer market involving a lot of spending. I’ve also left affiliate revenue out of the equation to simplify things.
May 07
Supernatural Agency is a virtual company. Both of us have full time jobs at Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. Mike works at a hosted email company called BlueTie and I have recently joined Techrigy as Director of Marketing. We run Supernatural in our ’spare’ time, (not a lot of that) which fits our business plan of no customers, no employees, 8-10 hours a week of work.
Techrigy is a social media search and discovery company. Our SM2 service allows brand marketers and PR pros to track conversations and sentiment across blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs like Twitter and other social media in real time. As a domain owner, entering this vast universe of user-generated content (UGC), brings up something very interesting. This social media eco-system has millions of participants, members and users and very little of it rests on unique domains. In fact it is an entirely different iteration of the web. Nothing is static, communities form and dissolve constantly, opinions and ideas spread way too fast for conventional search to index and track, and these trends and memes can make or break a candidate, a product or a reputation overnight.
Unlike sites on domains, social media resides in a sphere of reputation that is fickle at best. Concepts like the social graph which (as I interpret it) attempt to map where you and your ideas reside in a three axis grid, are not fixed- they change as relationships change. Other concepts like semantic search attempt to understand the context of a query so they can improve the relevancy of results, the never-ending Holy Grail of search.
As you might understand the challenge of marketing this new universe of ideas is both irresistible and daunting. It took me months to be able to write the sentences above and feel that they made sense to me. Now I have to explain them to others and help them see why they should care about what people are doing and saying in that universe. Pretty cool or should I say Dyson?
May 04
Aaron Wall has done it again with a very detailed analysis of the value of a top ranking in both organic and paid Google search results. This is a long read but should be required for anyone working to drive traffic and conversions via search
Apr 25
I’ve been a number of conversations lately about data-mining and semantic search (or ‘discovery’ as one company’s CEO told me she preferred- not sure I know the difference…). In one of those exchanges I brought up the idea of tracking ‘habitual information’, a phrase I’ll take credit for originating (my five minutes of fame?). The idea struck me- there are many kinds of information I track on a habitual level: certain stock prices, weather, environmental economics, usability, etc. I am sure that there are many others who share a similar pattern of habitual information.
As a marketer I see behavioral targeting potential in this information. In a previous post I wrote about iGoogle as a potential source of behavioral data for Google. This idea of habitual information takes that model further. If you know my information habits, as opposed to simply tracking what I do while surfing, then you could target me more precisely when I do surf. So if go daily to Techcrunch, NYTimes Business section, Science Daily and have a Google Alert set for Apple Inc., I’m guessing there’s quite a few people like me out there. The ads served up on these sites collectively could target my interests.
I haven’t quite got my arms around how this might work but I’m guessing the data-miners at Google and the ad networks have got something like this on their radar- I’ll be watching for it.