How To Read Your Visitors Like A Book

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 should 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 might 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. The real key to arbitrage success is buying traffic based on the right keywords. And to do that you need...