Tag Archives: advertisement

Analyze your site’s traffics

by on May 22, 2007 in 3. Online Marketing

Identify who comes to your site

It is crucial to analyze the users who come to your site because you can use this data to evaluate and customize your site to better serve your users and maximize the ad income. For example, you may find out that a lot of users from Asia is reading your posts related to immigration laws in US. Then, you may want to start writing more articles related to this topic and join some ad networks in Asia for geo-targeting ads like immigration office located in Hong Kong. Those ads may have much higher chance for users to click. In this article, I will go through some of the free web analytic tools that I use for my wedding company – JustProposed.com

Who are our users? Tool: Demographic prediction – Microsoft adCenter Labs Finding: It confirms me that our target users are brides instead of grooms :)

demographic prediction

 

Find out how they find your site

What do our users search before and after they search on the keyword I targeted?

Tool: Search Funnel – Microsoft adCenter Labs Finding: It gives me better idea what keywords I should target (from pre search result) and whether I should cover some areas that my users may interest (from post search result). From the diagram shown below, I should provide a wedding planning tool for the brides. pre search funnel result from keyword: wedding websites post search funnel result for keyword - wedding websites What is the trend for the keyword or service I am working on? Tool: Keyword Forecast - Microsoft adCenter Lab Finding: Looks like there are more search for wedding websites at the beginning of the year. May be couples tend to plan their weddings at the beginning of the year and have their weddings at second half of the year. keyword trend Now I have some ideas of the targeted users. I know it is mostly female (ie. bride) at the age group 25-34 and they may use wedding website to plan their weddings. The data also indicates that I should focus my marketing campaign at the beginning of the year around March. It makes a lot of sense to me. OK, what is next? The tools I showed you before do not give you a good picture of the users actually come to your site. However, you may want to answer the questions below:

  1. How many unique visitors come to your site per day or per month? What is the trend?
  2. How do they find your site?
  3. Which regions are they located? If your service open globally, you may want to know that for geo-targeting campaigns.
  4. How effective the marketing campaigns you just executed?
  5. What are the sign up and conversation rate?
  6. What pages your users mostly visited on your site?

How to find those information? Your Apache access log! If you want to visualize it, try Google Web Analytic Tool. Avinash has written a nice article to walk you through the V2 of this tool. Take a look and see what information it provides that you cannot find it from access log.

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Boost up your advertisement revenue

by on May 21, 2007 in 3. Online Marketing

Targeted Traffics is the Key

To boost up your ad revenue, first you need to bring in targeted traffics to your site. How? The keys here are great content and effective marketing strategy. I will have another articles to talk about this. For now, let's focus on how to monterize and then optimize the revenue from your traffics. Here is the summary of the important points I got from a nice article authored by Pat McCarthy.

  1. Sell targeted ads
    • Provide "Advertise with us" link on your site and gives out statistics and uniqueness to attract advertisers in your industry to sign up. This help you to eliminate the middleman like Google. The problem for this approach is the effort needed to reach out the potential advertisers in the first place. You may consider to hire a company to do this for you or use automated services like Adbrite, AdEngage, Adster and Adify.
  2. Work with multiple ad networks
    • AdSense is good but it doesn't tell you the math behind. You have no idea whether you already maximize the revenue. You may want to try out more ad networks to see who gives you the most. However, it is always a headache to manage them. RightMedia looks like provide a good solution because it establishes an open marketplace for ad exchange. On top of that, it helps you to determine which ad network to use on the fly based on the statistics generated from your site.
  3. Pick the right type of ads (contextual ads, display ads and etc)
    • Experiment it yourself because there is no fixed rule here. To me, video ads may indirectly enrich the content of your site if the video ads are related.
  4. Test different ad location and size
    • This is more the result from the user behaviorial studies. The guidelines that you may hear like ads should be above the fold, integrated in content, or placed according to an advertising heat map. However, the result varies with different layouts of your site. I suggest you find the best combination from experiments.
    • You can create your own heat map for your site using the services from ClickDensity and CrazyEgg.
  5. Work with different ad pricing models (CPC, CPM, CPA and etc)
    • This helps you earn more money by opening your site up to more advertisers, and more competition from advertisers can drive your overall rates and revenue up. It's easiest if you use an ad management tool that allows you to accept multiple types of pricing deals and allocate your inventory appropriately.
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