Hi, all! I’ve put out a few research studies showing that Bing traffic converts better than Google traffic, and always the response from publishers has been: “Great, now what do I do?” How do you optimize your website to increase your traffic from Bing specifically?
Well, last week I attended SMX West in San Jose, and had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sasi Parthasarasy, one of the brilliant minds behind Bing, and asked him just that. Let’s see his response:
Thanks Sasi for your candor, and your advice. You heard the man, folks: secure up those sites, and blow readers away with awesome content!
Chitika has long been a fan of Dave Taylor, the tech guru behind AskDaveTaylor.com (among other sites). We’re very proud to introduce him as our first guest writer of the summer on the Chitika blog, answering the question “What numbers should I be tracking on my website?”
Enjoy!
“There are two types of people in the online world, the 72.5345% of people who are convinced that the world is a measureable place, and the other bunch of folk who don’t try to add things up. If you’re reading the Chitika blog, you likely have at least a passing desire to keep track of how your advertising efforts are doing, so odds are good (so to speak!) that you are a quant.
That’s a good thing. If you’re not tracking statistics about your site, then you have no idea whether it has more readers than it did last month, what topics are most interesting to your reader community, and whether any of those people are actually clicking on your ads and generating some revenue for you. Yeah, you could just look at your Chitika report at the end of each month and see if it’s non-zero, but hopefully you’re a bit more involved than that.
The problem is that there are so many different numbers to track that it can be completely bewildering. I mean, what’s the difference between an “impression” and a “page view”? Are “unique IP addresses” the same as “unique visitors”? Even the Chitika reports have impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and eCPM. What is all this stuff?
Let’s start by talking about how a Web page is put together: it’s discrete files. The HTML text is one file, and each graphical element is another. A typical page probably has 15-30 graphical elements nowadays, so for purposes of discussion, let’s settle on 20. When you go to that page, you’re requesting 21 files: the HTML file and the 20 graphical files. Those 21 requests are called “hits”, and the HTML request is typically called either an “impression” or a “page view”. If you get 300 visitors to a specific page on your site, that’d mean you would have seen 6,300 (300*21) hits versus 300 page views. A popular site can easily deliver up millions — or tens of millions — of hits per month!
Now let’s say that on average, everyone who visits your site actually looks at 3.5 pages. Some people, of course, dig in and read 25 pages, while others see one and immediately pop away. Now those 300 visitors are actually accounting for 1,050 (300*3.5) page views or 22,050 (300*21*3.5) hits. Make sense?
If you were to just count page views, you could fall into the trap of saying you had 1,050 readers, but that’s wrong. That’s how many pages you served up, but in fact you had 300 visitors. Since each computer on the Internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address, if you were to look in your log files you would see that the people who read multiple pages are recorded as coming from the same IP again and again. Ergo, when you want to talk about the number of unique visitors to your site, you look at “unique IP addresses”, and generally it is the same as talking about unique visitors.
Advertisements like Chitika ads are a special situation because not only do you want to keep track of how often the ad is shown, but you also want to keep track of how often the viewer does the desired behavior (click on it). So the number of times it’s shown are the “impressions” in the Chitika report. How many times does the ad actually get clicked on? That’s “clicks” and the ratio of one to the other is the “click thru rate” or CTR.
For example, let’s say that our site served up 1,050 ad impressions (since a user going from page to page will keep having the ads presented to them) and racked up 37 clicks. That means that it had a CTR of 0.035 (37/1050) or 3.5%. Pretty darn good, actually. Now let’s further postulate that these 37 clicks earned you $6.39. That means that each click was worth $0.17 (6.39/37). That’s your average cost-per-click (“Avg CPC”, though it should really be called your value per click, but that’s another story). Many big advertisers like to sell ads on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis (CPM, with the M standing for “mil”, Latin for thousand). In this scenario this is $6.08 eCPM (follow me here, that’s 6.39/1050*1000).
On my busy AskDaveTaylor.com site, I pay a lot of attention to my advertising performance. Truth be told, though, all I really look at is the CTR and the revenue figures. The CTR tells me how well the ads are performing, while the revenue tells me if I’ll be eating Top Ramen or a cedar-plank salmon filet for dinner.
I hope this all help you make sense of the complicated world of Web and advertising traffic numbers!”
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Dave Taylor has been online for 29 years now, and has been blogging since 2003. In addition to his Ask Dave Taylor tech support blog, Dave also writes film reviews at DaveOnFilm.com and explores parenting issues at AP Parenting.com. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc etc, by starting at DaveTaylorOnline.com
Rule 1 – Only show ads WHEN the user really wants it
Or: Thou shalt never annoy thy visitors
As you know, the Chitika | Premium units only show up when Chitika is sure about user intent (because we know what search term the user used to find you). For all of your regular users who are simply browsing your site, the intent is much lower. In these cases, the Chitika ad does not show, and you are not blasting another ad into their face. Due to this, you are not annoying your users with yet another ad unit.
Rule 2 – Tell your user WHY they’re seeing this ad
Or: Thou shalt respect thy visitors’ experience
As you can see from the example below, the user keywords are highlighted in gold yellow. This is to explain to the user that the ad is about what he is looking for (Psychobabble Joe says: Since the age of 2, the human brain has been taught to pay attention to that specific color of yellow). When you respect your visitors’ feelings and intent like that, they are more likely to look at the ad and read its contents (and, of course, click on it).
Rule 3 – Only show users WHAT they want to see
Or: Thou shalt give thy visitors what they want — in a way they want it
Chitika | Premium ad units have been designed to be hyper targeted, as the ads are almost always completely targeted to the exact keyword the user typed in the search engine. And in the new Mega Unit, ads flow naturally from top to bottom, rather than left to right. “Why is that,” you ask? Its because for the last 10 years, the Internet has worked very hard to train people to read its pages from top to bottom, not left to right. With the Mega-Unit, people’s tendency to read in that fashion helps your second and third ads get almost as much attention as the first.
Put all these three reasons together and you as a publisher/website owner will get from your visitors what you really want — i.e. clicks. More clicks equal more revenue and everybody is happy. By giving your visitors what they want in an ad unit, they’ll give you what you want in return! Isn’t sharing nice?
You can get the code for the mega unit here or signup if you are not already a Chitika publisher.
There are tons of different factors that determine how much money you can make from Chitika ads on your website. In fact, all of these factors can be very overwhelming when you are trying to work on improving your earnings!
To help figure out which factors are the MOST important, we looked at 50 high-earning Chitika publishers, and narrowed down the top 4 factors that they all had in common. By improving these 4 factors on your site, you should see a big difference in your advertising revenue [note: this exercise is using Chitika data, but these 4 factors apply to ALL types of advertising (AdSense, TribalFusion, etc.)].
Factor 1: Traffic
Let’s face it – to earn a lot of money, you need to have a lot of traffic. If you don’t have a lot of users coming to your site, then you probably won’t get too many clicks on your ads!
While having a lot of traffic is important, we can go a step further and say that specifically US traffic is ideal. It is well-known in the ad industry that the US market is the most developed and lucrative. Our 50 high-earners all showed more than half of their traffic coming from the US.
Suggestions: Know where your traffic is coming from! You can usually check this easily on sites like Spyfu.com, or in your Google Analytics (if you aren’t running analytics software yet, you should be!).
Factor 3: U.S. Search Engine Traffic/SEO
Search engine traffic is extremely targeted, and advertisers like this. People coming to your site from search engines are most often the people who click on ads. And specifically to Chitika, our Premium ads will only show to this type of traffic! Again, our group of 50 high-earning Chitika users all had over 45% of their U.S. traffic coming from search engines.
Suggestions: Work on your SEO to bring more search traffic to your site. Here are some great resources to get started – Problogger SEO article, Hubspot’s Website Grader, SEOChat, SEOBook (and their blog), SEOMoz (also has a great blog), and about a million other sites you can find on Alltop
Factor 4: CTR (Click-Through Rate)
This seems obvious, but it is worth looking into a bit deeper. For our group of 50 high-earners, their average CTR was 1.6%, so you should shoot to be in that range or higher if possible.
Suggestions: To improve CTR, the most important thing is placement – check out this guide for tips. Other items that will boost your CTR are customizing your colors, fonts, etc. You can read how to do that here.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Don’t! Take a deep breath, put on the new Bon Iver album, and start with just one of the factors. You don’t have to do them all at the same time – just focus on one of them and take it from there.
- Posted by Ryan Travis, Director of Client Services
