Appreciating Web Business Analytics
June 1st, 2010 by kct from shrewdies | Filed under 7. Appreciate.Web Business Analytics
Why? So we can appreciate the contribution made by the best elements of the business, and improve the weaker elements.
How? There are many tools and procedures we can use. Today, I look at web business analytics, or more specifically, appreciating our AdSense revenue.
Please note that the techniques I am using here apply to established sites. This is all about improving AdSense income, so if you do not have any yet, come back later. Also, we are talking about 2 to 4 hours work for a few percentage points improvement in income. Think about the business Rewards you expect from your PROSPRA analysis.
This is not a traffic building exercise – it improves the Rewards we expect to Reap from existing traffic. If you are not meeting your expected traffic targets, then focus on new content and more incoming links. I’ll report likely improvements in a later article, but for now, think if the effort is likely to be worth 2% increase in your AdSense revenue.
Web Business Analytics Tool
Today, we have a quick practical tip that lets you easily improve your Adsense income. You can probably adapt these techniques to help improve all the Rewards you Reap from your online business.
The tools I use are Google Analytics and Google Adsense. More advanced analysis techniques can be built using spreadsheets, and these will be integrated into Freeche, but you do not always need complex tools. If you only have Google Adsense reports to use, I strongly recommend switching to Analytics for your page analysis. It’s much easier to manage than the limited custom URL channels. Your Google AdSense channels should clearly differentiate between different Google sizes, colors, and positions.
Web Business Analytics Process
In this process, we will focus on improving pages with very low Click Through Ratio (CTR). It is a very simple process that can yield very good results, or at least ensure that your performance is as good as it can be.
I use a one month analysis period as it makes it easy to get into the end of month habit. You can choose a different period if you wish – just remember we are focusing on pages with reasonable traffic but low CTR. Where can we find the pages with most potential for improvement?
Always keep in mind that there are some pages that simply will not generate revenue. In those cases, we can delete the AdSense code completely, or replace it with internal links to our best home Internet pages. I’ll cover at least one idea for appreciating the best pages in a later article – you are simply linking to pages where you most want to improve traffic.
OK. now for the step-by-step process:
- Go to Google Adsense reports and view your last month by channel.
- Click the Page CTR column to sort by CTR. This will give you a good view of the advert formats that work best.
- In a separate browser window go to Google Analytics Top AdSense Content report. If you are not doing this on the first day of the month, change the date range to the previous month.
- Create an Advanced Filter, setting AdSense Page Impressions greater than 100. As your site improves, you can increase this number.
- Click Adsense CTR column head twice to sort by ascending CTR.
- Review pages starting with the top, until you have spent your alloted time on the process. Either improve your AdSense layout, or replace it with links to high performing pages. On some pages, especially hub pages, or pages monetized with different revenue sources, you should remove the advertising completely.
- Log your improvements in a Rewards Appreciation journal. This should be a page based record, preferably linked to your site blueprint.
