Making Sense Of Stats, Logs And
Reports…
Stats are a vital part of your
success. If you can’t follow the results of all the changes you’re going to be making
to your ads and your pages, then you’re never going to maximize your revenues. But
reading your stats can be confusing. You’re going to be staring at all sorts of
tables filled with all kinds of numbers which can be rearranged and reorganized
in all sorts of different ways. That’s why it’s crucial to know how to read your
stats and understand the figures.
The Most Important Stat Of All
There’s one figure that’s more
important than any of the others. Know which one I’m talking about? Revenue If you aren’t making money, no other stats matter.
If you are making money though, the next stat you want to watch is your CTR. The
higher the percentage of clicks to page impressions you receive, the higher your
CPM will rise — and the higher your revenues will become. When you make a change
to your ad placement, to your keywords, to your ad colors or anything else, wait
a week and check your stats to see the result. And look first at your revenues.
Bear in mind too that when you have multiple ads on a page each ad unit counts as
one impression — but you won’t be able to get three clicks from them Multiple ad units then can reduce your CTR while
still giving you good revenues. You might also want to translate your results into
charts. If you do want to do that, the most important things to look for are trends
in CTR and in earnings. Tracking impressions too will also let you see any radical
fluctuations in traffic.
Optimum CTR
Much of your success will depend
on lifting your CTR as high as possible. Obviously, the more people who click on
your ads the more money you’re going to be make but it’s not always easy to know
when you’re inviting as many people as possible to get clicking. I’ve gone from
less than 1% CTR to over 8% on some sites but I know of some sites that are getting
over 30% CTR Your CTR will depend on a number
of different factors, including:
· Site Content —
Some types of content get more clicks than others (but don’t necessarily make more
money per click...)
· Site
Design — We’ve already talked about the importance of where you place your ads and
how you place them.
· Number
Of Links — Why give your ads competition? If people want to click away from the
page, you should get paid for it.
· Ad Relevancy —
If you’re not getting served ads that are relevant to your content, you’re going
to have a low CTR.
AdSense Arbitrage
Once you get to grips with
the numbers that you see on the stats pages and your logs, you might notice something
interesting. You might see for example, that you’re getting 5,000 ad clicks on a
page each month and that page is generating $1500. Divide $1500 into 5,000 clicks
and you’ll realize that each click for that type of content is bringing you 30 cents.
That means that when you come to buy content, as long as you spend less than 30
cents for a click to that page, you’re going to make a profit. And one way to do
that is to open an AdWords account and buy advertising space on Google’s search
pages. You could pay as little as 5 cents per click, giving you a profit of 25
cents each time your 5-cent users click on your 30-cent ads. That’s AdSense arbitrage
and it sounds like a foolproof way to increase your revenues. If it were that
easy, everyone would be doing it. The first problem with arbitrage is that you can
never get a 100% CTR. Not every 5 cent click you buy is going to give you 30 cents
back — and every impression that doesn’t result in an ad click is going to eat into
your profits. With these kinds of figures (and obviously, yours are going to be
different), you’d need a 16% CTR to break even. (If every ad click costs 5 cents
and gives you 30 cents, you can afford to lose five out of every six clicks or 16%).
So if you can see that you’re getting a 16% CTR, buying advertising on AdWords to
send traffic to your AdSense ads could be a good deal. Or not. The second problem
with arbitrage is that your CTR rate is based on users coming from your current
traffic sources. The users you buy through AdWords might behave differently. They’ve
already clicked on an ad once so they mig ht not want to click on an ad again.
or alternatively, because you know they’re the type who do click on ads, it’s possible
that they’re exactly the type who’ll click on the ads on your page. Results from
using arbitrage vary. Some people report that the clicks they buy on AdWords give
them less revenue, others report that they’ve increased their CTR.Some people are
making SERIOUS money with AdSense arbitrage. The real key to arbitrage success is
buying traffic based on the right keywords. And to do that you need...
Keyword Elite
is a great way to find
keywords to target for arbitrage. The idea is simple: if you can find popular keywords
that few sites are targeting, you can increase the CTR of the ads you buy and improve
the chances that users will click on the ads on your page. It’s those keywords
that will give you the best revenues for arbitrage—and the most clicks from search
engine listings. Keyword elite actually helps in four different ways. First, you
enter a keyword—say, “football”. Keyword elite will
then give you a list of
hundreds of different keywords related to football—words like “stadium” and “team”
and “football player”. Some of those words you’ll probably have thought of, but
lots of them you won’t. Now you’ve already got more keyword options than when you
started the next step is to see how popular
these keywords are. Keyword elite looks across all of the main search engines and
tells you how many people
searched for each keyword in
the last 60 days. That’s certainly interesting information in itself but there’s
not much point in targeting a word that 1,000 people sea rch for every couple of
months if a million Web pages are already targeting it.Your ad would appear on page
fifty-something of a search engine listing and get very few clicks. The next stage
is where things get really interesting. Keyword elite compares the number of searches
that people are making for each keyword with the number of sites targeting that
keyword. It even awards each keyword a score that indicates the size of the opportunity
for new pages that want target that particular keyword. It then becomes easy for
you to see which words are likely to give the best search engine listings—and which
will get the most clicks for the lowest prices when you pay to advertise. For example,
if you asked Keyword elite to look up the word “football,” you might find that
3,474 people look for “shoulder-pads” each day but only 2,375 Web pages are targeting
that word. If one of the pages of your football site targets that keyword, you’re
almost certainly going to find yourself high on the search engine listings, giving
you plenty of free traffic. But if you also choose to pay to advertise your site
on a GoogleAd, you can be confident that you’ll get plenty of clicks—and great revenues.
Keyword elite is a fantastic tool. It should
definitely be in your money-making toolkit.