“It Doesn’t Add Up: What Numbers to Track on Your Web Site” by guest writer Dave Taylor

July 15th, 2009

23 comments

Posted in: A Publisher Speaks, Chitika | Premium, Front Page News, Publisher Tools

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!”

————

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

23 Responses to “ “It Doesn’t Add Up: What Numbers to Track on Your Web Site” by guest writer Dave Taylor ”

1. 
   chris Says:
   July 17th, 2009 at 2:36 am

   I must remember this for the Adsense Forum you cant believe how many times this has been asked so I may bookmark this page to explain the next time i see it in a help forum thanks Guest not Dave he is just a Name

2. 
   amirrudin Says:
   July 18th, 2009 at 9:53 pm

   I have alot of people to view my site, but the ctr is so low. How can we get monetize my traffic ?

3. 
   chris Says:
   July 18th, 2009 at 10:48 pm

   I don’t see anything only another wordpress blog there is no content on that page.Improving CTR can only be done by better ad placement you should go to the forum to ask.

4. 
   article questions Says:
   July 19th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

   Very important to track your site stats and visitors, google analytics has a cool adsense tracking section.

5. 
   Anna Says:
   July 19th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

   I agree, the Analytics Adsense tracking feature is great. It helps a lot to see which pages are performing the best without having to set up million channels.

   This was a great article, very helpful as I am trying to improve my monetization right now and finally looking into some stats a bit more!

6. 
   Louis Vuitton Says:
   July 24th, 2009 at 2:01 am

   really good

7. 
   Umardin Says:
   July 25th, 2009 at 12:43 am

   I like this post, it’s realy bring me about chitika smart knowledge.

8. 
   Unique Visitors vs Hits Info here Says:
   July 25th, 2009 at 2:11 am

   Yes; some sites will say they can drive a Million Hits to your site. Well as Dave says Hits doesn’t meen very much, (except how much bandwith it may be costing).

   Dave’s infomation here gives a good details.

   Now you know this you can carry out some Split-Testing to see if Convertions, (into cash), can be improved on your site :)

9. 
   Ravi Ahuja Says:
   July 25th, 2009 at 2:38 am

   If its just about CTR then right ad placement can increase your CTR. Even you are getting good CTR it is not important you are earning good money as many webmaster finds that there eCPM is very low and they are earning very few amount per click.
   You must also look for your eCPM.

10. 
    What Numbers to Track on Your Web Site Says:
    August 1st, 2009 at 8:59 am

    Interesting post. Now it is more clear to me what “Avg CPC” is.

11. 
    Crude Oil Trader Says:
    August 6th, 2009 at 11:12 pm

    Great article Dave, this is exactly what most of us need and the other “How To Blog” sites aren’t covering. Keep up the good work.

12. 
    mark taylor Says:
    August 9th, 2009 at 10:31 am

    Doesn’t it really come down to the number of visitors. More visitors, more ctr, more profits? Good content to result in more traffic.

13. 
    zisya Says:
    August 14th, 2009 at 12:30 am

    nice info

14. 
    kamidi Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

    I’m newbie nice post and i need more to learn about this

15. 
    jignesh patel Says:
    August 24th, 2009 at 11:06 pm

    why no code in my website.

    how i generate traffic on my website.

16. 
    funny about Money Says:
    September 4th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    Thanks!! I’ve been trying to understand what these things mean for a long time. Now…to figure out how to make Google Analytics work…

17. 
    analogstuff Says:
    September 10th, 2009 at 3:27 am

    I have been watching askdavetaylor website for quite some time now. What i can say is that his thoughts are really constuctive and i leaned lot of things from him.
    Thanks Dave

18. 
    joels Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 10:33 am

    Google analytics still the best tracker for my website.. theres alot of feature that i can use as a report for web owner how and why about their websites..

19. 
    ravi Says:
    September 29th, 2009 at 4:20 pm

    I have been watching askdavetaylor website for quite some time now. What i can say is that his thoughts are really constuctive and i leaned lot of things from him.

20. 
    Brian Says:
    October 1st, 2009 at 10:52 pm

    Well, I’ve tracked everything for years with Google Urchin (now Analytics) and complimentary local tracking scripts.

    I’m running Chitika/Google ads/alternates on a site that averages about 250k page-views from 60k unique visitors/month. Obviously it’s a Vortal, not a blog. The Chitika Premium CTR runs around 4.5%, the Google around less than half that at 1.8% CTR.

    Both are well over the Net average CTR of less than 1 percent globally.

    Yet the Google account routinely produces roughly twice the return on half the actual click count.

    For instance, on Monday, Sept. 7 Google’s clicks numbered 103 and paid $28.40. On the same day, Chitika’s clicks numbered 158 and paid $11.58.

    But that doesn’t mean that I’d automatically double my money running nothing but Google ads.

    My point is that CTR doesn’t have a lot to do with ROI sometimes. It all depends upon what the advertisers are paying to broadcast on any given day or month, and to whom.

21. 
    Gina Says:
    November 5th, 2009 at 9:07 am

    Brian, did you know it’a against AdSense rules to publish your figures?

    I’ve just been warned about this myself.

22. 
    Brian Says:
    November 9th, 2009 at 5:58 am

    It would surprise me only if Google warned you.

    They took off the non-disclosure restrictions a couple years ago after they went public.

    They understood that it was senseless, since the ad market is so focused upon niche promotions and completely dependent upon the whims and budgets of hair-brained Marketing Managers around the globe.

    That, and the fact that it’s unenforceable secrecy made them back off. I mean, it’s fairly silly to punish someone for telling you what they made in a day, when tomorrow could change dramatically anyway.

    Too much to chase is what makes it moot.

23. 
    John Says:
    November 14th, 2009 at 1:26 am

    @ BRIAN:

    Just to clarify are you saying that with about 2,000 unique visitors a day (60,000 per month) that you earned about $40.00 from the 260 clicks. This seems low but of course I don’t know your business and your type of advertisements may well carry a low click pay rate. I am new to this business hence my question.

    Regards, John.

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