It shouldn\’t be a difficult question. If you want to know whether your site is a success, you don\’t have to look further than the last line in your AdSense stats.
If you\’re happy with the amount that\’s going to appear on Google\’s check this month, you\’re successful.
But what if an advertiser asked how successful your site is. What would you say then? You wouldn\’t tell him how much you\’re earning each month, would you?
You could tell him about the number of page views you have, but that\’s not always an accurate reading of the value of your site to users. If you\’ve got a news ticker running on your home page, for example, your users might leave your site open all the time. You\’d get one page view but an advertiser would be showing his message for a very long time.
So maybe you should look at the amount of time people are spending on your website. That\’s one of the stats you can find easily about your site and it\’s one that\’s often ignored.
But there\’s a danger that you can create a false impression here too. Create short posts and people could read them quickly, giving you short duration stats. But if they\’re clicking quickly through the ad links after they\’re done then those posts are doing their job, your ads are optimized and your advertisers can expect some good results.
So maybe clickthrough rate (CTR) then? That tells you how efficiently your site sends users to advertisers — it\’s a useful measure for you and it might tell an advertiser how quickly he\’ll burn through his budget. But it might not tell an advertiser interested in paying on a cost per mille (CPM) basis whether his message will get across or to how many people.
Sound confusing? It is. As publishers, we\’ve got lots of stats at our disposal to share with advertisers, far more than any other media can offer.
The important point is that you understand what each of those stats tells you — and what it doesn\’t. You need to know which to share with which advertisers. And you need to know how all your figures contribute to your bottom line.