Last year, Google launched the function of integrating Adsense accounts in Google Analytics, allowing users to view more detailed Adsense statistics in their Analytics accounts. I immediately bound the account. Now I look at the data carefully and it is indeed very enlightening.
Below I will use the statistical data of June 2009 from a website at hand to share some of my own experiences. The conclusion may be common sense, but it is often ignored without being confirmed by data. As for this sample website, it was built using the WordPress system. The content language is Spanish. It was built in November 2008. The current Adsense monthly income is US$500.
The 80-20 principle of website Adsense income
I believe many people have heard of the 80/20 principle. The entry on the 28/20 principle on Baidu Encyclopedia says this:
The 80/20 principle was proposed by Italian economist Pareto in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This principle is very simple: in any group of things, the most important ones only account for about 20% of them, and the remaining 80%, although they are the majority, are not is secondary. For example, 80% of wealth is in the hands of 20% of people, while the remaining 80% of people only own 20% of the wealth. For another example, 20% of your life determines 80% of your achievements, while the other 80% of your time is wasted on 20% of things.
Through statistical data, we can also find that most of the Adsense revenue of the website is created by a very small number of pages.
I have not strictly calculated whether 80% of the site's revenue is really generated by 20% of the pages, but here is a chart to confirm: the site's top 10 revenue pages have a total revenue of 17.68% of the entire site's revenue. Coupled with the three following pages, the revenue ratio exceeded 20%. There are more than 2,600 pages with Adsense ads on the entire site. This means that pages that account for less than 0.4% of the total generate 20% of the total revenue.
Further detailed investigation revealed that out of more than 2,600 pages, more than 1,900 had zero revenue. In other words, all the revenue of the entire site is generated by only 27% of the pages. You can be sure that the 80% of pages with the worst performance create far less than 20% of the revenue.
A precious page: eCPM 680 US dollars
In Analytics, in addition to sorting pages by revenue, you can also sort by clicks, impressions, CTR and eCPM. eCPM is an important standard for measuring the performance of Adsense. It means the income obtained per thousand impressions, which can be called the return rate of display.
For example, on the website we talked about before, the usual eCPM is around US$15. That is to say, every time Adsense ads are displayed 1,000 times on the entire site, the average income is US$15. Compared with Chinese websites, this may be considered a relatively high value. Although important, this data really doesn't serve much purpose other than to predict future earnings. Now, through Analytics, we can get a more valuable eCPM data: single page eCPM.
When we sort the Adsense pages by eCPM in Analytics, we can easily discover the pages with the most potential for nuggets. In our example site, the eCPM of the top-ranked page is $687.2. In other words, if this page is visited 1,000 times, we will get almost $680 in revenue, which is really a lot of money.
Personal inspiration:
The content is expensive but not expensive.
Of course it is possible to collect a large number of salivating articles, but if you work hard and make some high-quality articles, the rewards will probably be better. Especially when it comes to blogging, many of my friends may have been confused like me: It’s so difficult to write something by yourself, and you only have a few articles a month after hard work? How can it be compared with collecting?
Facts have proved that you don’t have to have a lot of articles to do it. If you insist on doing it seriously, even if you have fewer articles, there is still something to be done. In the example just now, the top 13 performing pages contributed $100. The only problem is that without testing a large number of articles, it is difficult for us to know what kind of articles are likely to create better returns. This needs to be explored.
SEO may wish to refine.
The process of improving the weight of the entire site in search engines may be a bit longer, but it is much easier to break it down and focus on improving the search engine performance of a few pages. Taking the site just now as an example, the 10 most profitable pages all get traffic from search engines, but the queried keywords are not always at the first place. If all relevant keywords can be ranked first in search engines, the traffic brought should be doubled, and the revenue of the entire site should increase by more than 17%. As for a single article, these keywords are relatively long-tailed and have little competition. It is not difficult to rank first.
Discover pages with more gold-mining potential
In the example of a page worth of money, we further looked at other data on this page and found that it was not among the top ten with the highest returns. The reason is that its access is too low. The problem of low traffic can definitely be improved. We only need to implement some SEO measures specifically for this page. Then with the high number of visits, this page will definitely bring us good returns. Of course, when its traffic increases, it is still unclear whether it can maintain the current high eCPM, but it should not drop very seriously. Because, by analyzing past data, we can know that the value of ad clicks on this page is very high – this is one of the reasons why it has a high eCPM.