10.1 Making Sense Of Stats, Logs And Reports…

Stats are a vital part of your success. If you can’t follow the results of all thechanges you’re going to be making to your ads and your pages, then you’renever going to maximize your revenues.

But reading your stats can be confusing. You’re going to be staring at allsorts of tables filled with all kinds of numbers which can be rearranged andreorganized in all sorts of different ways.

That’s why it’s crucial to know how to read your stats and understand the figures.

10.2 The Most Important Stat Of All

There’s one figure that’s more important than any of the others. Know whichone I’m talking about?

Revenue! If you aren’t making money, no other stats matter.

If you are making money though, the next stat you want to watch is yourCTR. The higher the percentage of clicks to page impressions you receive,the higher your CPM will rise — and the higher your revenues will become.

When you make a change to your ad placement, to your keywords, to yourad colors or anything else, wait a week and check your stats to see theresult. And look first at your revenues.

Bear in mind too that when you have multiple ads on a page each ad unitcounts as one impression — but you won’t be able to get three clicks fromthem! Multiple ad units then can reduce your CTR while still giving you good revenues.

You might also want to translate your results into charts. If you do want todo that, the most important things to look for are trends in CTR and inearnings. Tracking impressions too will also let you see any radicalfluctuations in traffic.

10.3 Optimum CTR

Much of your success will depend on lifting your CTR as high as possible.Obviously, the more people who click on your ads the more money you’regoing to be make but it’s not always easy to know when you’re inviting asmany people as possible to get clicking. I’ve gone from less than 1% CTR toover 8% on some sites but I know of some sites that are getting over 30% CTR!

Your CTR will depend on a number of different factors, including:

• Site Content — Some types of content get more clicks than others (butdon’t necessarily make more money per click...)

• Site Design — We’ve already talked about the importance of where youplace your ads and how you place them.

• Number Of Links — Why give your ads competition? If people want toclick away from the page, you should get paid for it.

• Ad Relevancy — If you’re not getting served ads that are relevant toyour content, you’re going to have a low CTR.

10.4 AdSense Arbitrage

Once you get to grips with the numbers that you see on the stats pages andyour logs, you might notice something interesting. You might see forexample, that you’re getting 5,000 ad clicks on a page each month and thatpage is generating $1500.

Divide $1500 into 5,000 clicks and you’ll realize that each click for that type of content is bringing you 30 cents.

That means that when you come to buy content, as long as you spend lessthan 30 cents for a click to that page, you’re going to make a profit. And oneway to do that is to open an AdWords account and buy advertising space onGoogle’s search pages. You could pay as little as 5 cents per click, giving youa profit of 25 cents each time your 5-cent users click on your 30-cent ads.

That’s AdSense arbitrage and it sounds like a foolproof way to increase yourrevenues.

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

The first problem with arbitrage is that you can never get a 100% CTR. Notevery 5 cent click you buy is going to give you 30 cents back — and everyimpression that doesn’t result in an ad click is going to eat into your profits.

With these kinds of figures (and obviously, yours are going to be different),you’d need a 16% CTR to break even. (If every ad click costs 5 cents andgives you 30 cents, you can afford to lose five out of every six clicks or16%).

So if you can see that you’re getting a 16% CTR, buying advertising onAdWords to send traffic to your AdSense ads could be a good deal.Or not.

The second problem with arbitrage is that your CTR rate is based on userscoming from your current traffic sources. The users you buy throughAdWords might behave differently. They’ve already clicked on an ad once sothey might not want to click on an ad again.

Or alternatively, because you know they’re the type who do click on ads, it’spossible that they’re exactly the type who’ll click on the ads on your page.

Results from using arbitrage vary. Some people report that the clicks theybuy on AdWords give them less revenue, others report that they’ve increasedtheir CTR.

Some people are making SERIOUS money with AdSense arbitrage. The realkey to arbitrage success is buying traffic based on the right keywords. And todo that you need...

10.5 Word Tracker

WordTracker is a great way to find keywords to target for arbitrage. The ideais simple: if you can find popular keywords that few sites are targeting, youcan increase the CTR of the ads you buy and improve the chances that userswill click on the ads on your page. It’s those keywords that will give you the best revenues for arbitrage—and the most clicks from search enginelistings.

WordTracker actually helps in four different ways.

First, you enter a keyword—say, “football”. WordTracker will then give you alist of hundreds of different keywords related to football—words like“stadium” and “team” and “football player”. Some of those words you’llprobably have thought of, but lots of them you won’t.

searched for each keyword in the last 60 days. That’s certainly interestinginformation in itself but there’s not much point in targeting a word that 1,000people search for every couple of months if a million Web pages are already targeting it.

Your ad would appear on page fifty-something of a search engine listing andget very few clicks.

The next stage is where things get really interesting. Wordtrackercompares the number of searches that people are making for eachkeyword with the number of sites targeting that keyword.

It even awards each keyword a score that indicates the size of theopportunity for new pages that want target that particular keyword. It thenbecomes easy for you to see which words are likely to give the best searchengine listings—and which will get the most clicks for the lowest prices whenyou pay to advertise.

For example, if you asked WordTracker to look up the word “football,” youmight find that 3,474 people look for “shoulder-pads” each day but only2,375 Web pages are targeting that word. If one of the pages of your footballsite targets that keyword, you’re almost certainly going to find yourself highon the search engine listings, giving you plenty of free traffic.

But if you also choose to pay to advertise your site on a GoogleAd, you canbe confident that you’ll get plenty of clicks—and great revenues.WordTracker is a fantastic tool. It should definitely be in your money-makingtoolkit. Take a look at it at www.adsense-secrets.com/wordtracker.html