I read a great post the other day on DailyBlogTips.com. Daniel Scocco wrote an insightful article called 4 Tips to Maximize the Advertising Earnings of Your Website, which included four great ideas to optimize advertising revenue.
It got me thinking about the metrics you should be tracking to make sure your ROI is where it needs to be. Here are the four I believe are most important:
1. Total Revenues per Month
- Self-explanatory. Obviously if this is increasing, you’re doing a good job.
2. Revenue per Visitor
- Formula: RPV = Revenue divided by Unique Visitors
- If revenue is increasing but it’s because you’ve gotten a surge in new traffic, you can still optimize further. What you want going up is Revenue per Visitor View.
3. Revenue per Page View
- Formula: RPP = Revenue divided by Page Views
- Revenue could be increasing since you’re getting more page views, which is good of course. However, if Revenue per Page View isn’t going up, you know you need to improve the content of your pages to generate revenue.
4. Percentage of Repeat Visitors
- If you choose to over-saturate your site with ads, you may maximize revenues in the short-term… but if visitors have a bad experience, they may not come back and you’ll lose future revenues. So, watch this key metric, and if visitors aren’t returning, you know you need to re-prioritize customer experience over maximizing revenues.
What are your thoughts? Please leave your comments below.
