clicks

I thought I would share with you the results of an analysis I did of my (historically low) efficiency at monetizing my web site via Amazon Associates.

• Google Analytics page views 1/1/2008 - date: 26032
• Associates clicks 1303
• Associates unit sales 14
• conversion rate 0.0107
• Associates referral revenue $10.04
• revenue/month $2.26
• NB after royalties revenue for referred titles 40
• Total imputed revenue (referrals + publisher comp)= 50.04
• Imputed revenue/month $11.29
• imputed $/page view $0.0019
• imputed $/1000 page views $1.9222
• imputed $/click $0.0384
• imputed $/conversion $3.5743
• bandwidth used (GB) 56.259
• GB/month 12.69
• max GB/month 200
• days covered 133
• months 4.433
• Imputed revenue/GB $0.89
• overage charge per GB $1.99
• Cost of High Volume Plans per GB $0.19
• possible ^ in usage w/o incurring additional bandwidth charge 15.76044129
• possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ usage x15 w/o additional BW charge =15 x imputed rev /month = $177.89 /month
• possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ conversion rate x 5 = $889.46

what all this tells me:

* I could increase the usage of my website by a factor of 15.7 before I hit the bandwidth threshold for my account at Pair
* assuming that revenue increased in linear proportion, and that I could improve the conversion rate, I could increase my Associates & Associates-driven revenue into the several hundreds of dollars per month
* increasing usage by x 15 would be hard work, there are other things I could do that would increase revenue more (i.e. publish more or better books)

My website has always been a bit of a mess because I use it as a combined blog and bookstore. It would be better to have a single purpose store. Right now the website is under construction as I experiment with new Amazon Associates widgets.

For those interested in the business side of Google Book Search, here are some cumulative statistics for my Google Book Search publisher account from 2005 to June 2007. I now have a total of nineteen titles live.

impressions: 421,886
unique page views: 576,836
book views: 106,486
buy this book links (all vendors) 1,767
BTB clickthrough: 1.1%
Ad clicks: 3,645
Ad clickthrough: 0.9%
Total ad revenue: $314.68

About half of the impressions, BTB links, and ad revenue are associated with my best-selling title.

We focus on a set of marketing activities that have proven to be cost-effective in our online context.

• Product. Only products available for purchase make money. Planned, delayed, conditional, and hypothetical products generate no revenue.
  
• Positioning is always key in any type of publishing, and even more so online, where Amazon’s publicly released statistics show that “category browsing” is extremely important. As a rule of thumb, a book needs to be in the top five of Amazon search results on its topic to sell well online.
  
• The author should have a platform that can drive readers to the book: remember the 3 “Bs” — byline, blog, broadcast..
  
• Editorial quality is almost as important as positioning, and equally indispensable.
  
• Keyword and title surfing — we use Amazon search traffic data and search optimization techniques to make sure that title and subtitle have the most commonly used keywords and title phrases for the topic.
  
• Generating positive, “real name” customer reviews for your book at Amazon. These are far and away the most cost-effective online marketing since they are free, at the point of sale, and affect all subsequent transactions. Authors: every time a reader gives you a compliment, ask them to write a review!
  
  • We’ve observed that when a book reaches the milestones of 1, 5, 10, and 20 or more reviews, each step seems to increase its sales performance. This can be measured by watching the percentage of “customers who purchased this item.”
    
  • Interestingly, negative reviews don’t seem to hurt that much, especially if the book is on a controversial subject. Some of our books that were not especially well reviewed nevertheless have sold quite well!
    
  • But there’s no reason for authors to put up with unfair or ad hominem reviews; Amazon will promptly remove negative reviews unless they are actually focused exclusively on the content of the book, which is unusual, since there’s usually some spite involved.
    
• Review copies are still the most cost-effective method of generating demand for a book. We do try to be cost-efficient and only send them out to reviewers who have expressed a specific interest in the particular book. We also require authors to use our online system for entering contact information for review copies. This greatly expedites what can otherwise be a time-consuming process.
  
• Targeted e-mail to reviewers and opinion shapers. We normally include a text attachment with the description of the book, early reviews, and a sample chapter.
  
• Author blogging. We can show you how to pipe one feed of your articles to your Amazon Connect page, the Nimble Books website, and your own website. We highly recommend that authors participate in Amazon Connect, as it offers the only way to update a book’s detail page in near-real-time.
  
• We provide the author with the PDF full text of the book for email distribution at the author’s discretion.
  
• Excerpts of one or two chapters length are available to relevant online publications: deep content for free!
  
• Wiki. We encourage authors to use the Nimble Books Wiki to create a “living edition” of some or all of their manuscript.
  
• Foreign rights availability is announced at Publishers Marketplace and pursued through our agent and direct contact with publishers.
  
• Our Pay-Per-Conversion Marketing Program: pays participating websites (including the author’s) a substantial bonus over and above the Amazon Associates program. Call it a “kickback,” if you will: easy money!
  
• Keyword advertising via Amazon’s ClickRiver system. This is most cost-effective when cost per click is low and click-through rate is high. Since ClickRiver customers are already on Amazon shopping for something else, we think of these clicks as “saves” that get qualified customers to the book’s detail page.
  
• Amazon Search Suggestions and Listmania
  also “save” active book-shopping customers who would otherwise be elsewhere in Amazon, and put them on the book’s detail page.
  
• Direct discounted sales from the Nimble Books website powered by Google AdWords Website Optimizer. In the past, we’ve spent a lot of money on Google AdWords campaigns, but this is the only way that has proven to be cost-effective.
  
• Direct discounted sales by the author. We will sell to the author at a favorable discounted rate so that authors who wish to do so can “hand-sell” to their heart’s content.
  

Things we don’t usually do, because they are not cost-effective for us:

• Place our books in traditional bookstores, where the terms of trade require as much as a 55% discount and nearly unlimited returns.
  
• Buy newspaper, magazine, or online banner advertising.
  
• Buy spaces in PMA mailings.
  
• Pay author promotional or travel expenses. Occasionally we may be willing to chip in with a nominal payment to help with a worthy project.
  
• Print or PDF brochures, flyers, and posters.
  

Things we’d like to try:

• Podcasts
  
• Youtube-compatible book trailers
  

We are open-mind but data-driven in our approach. Any and all ideas are welcome.

Automattic Stats for self-hosted WordPress « Andy Skelton

The new Automattic Stats plugin is available for download. It lets self-hosted WordPress bloggers use the exact same traffic metrics system we provide to WordPress.com users. It tracks post and page views, referrers, search terms, and clicks on your external links. It takes moments to install if you already have a WordPress blog and a WordPress.com API key. And it’s totally free.

Switched from StatTraq and Google Analytics to this plugin. It does a far better job than either Google Analytics or StatTraq at providing blog-specific stats like hits per post. Neither GA nor StatTraq provides that info accurately, and this service (hosted by Wordpress.org) also avoids the database load of self-hosted stats packages, which have always eventually had to be “zeroed out” of my PAIR-hosted service.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress stats, Google Analytics

Taschen: publisher of beautifully produced but crassly pornographic “art” books.

Nimble Books readers seem to enjoy buying paraphernalia related to Diana, Princess of Wales. My review page about the Taschen book has generated more AdSense clicks than almost any other article on my website.

Brave New World of Books observation #001: books with paraphernalia are better than just plain books.

Gee whiz … according to the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator, AdSense clicks related to Enterprise Rent-A-Car yield between $6.38 and $10.52 a click! Maybe I should be spending more time working on my Politically Incorrect Glossary of High-Paying AdSense Keywords! I am still determined to figure out a way to publish AdSense-sponsored books.

What do I have to say about Enterprise Rent-A-Car? Well, the local Enterprise Rent-A-Car here in Ann Arbor, Michigan has been a great help to me and my family on numerous occasions. The local Enterprise Rent-A-Car on Washtenaw is the first place we go when we have car trouble that sends our van to the shop, and we’ve found that the staff there is generally young, responsive, and pleasingly nimble. They live up to their reputation as energetic and well-managed.

This is pretty impressive!

Coremetrics
Coremetrics™, the leading provider of hosted web analytics and precision marketing solutions, today announced that Alibris, the premiere destination for used, new, and out-of-print books, is using the Coremetrics A/B testing platform to improve visitor conversion and site usage. One of Internet Retailer’s “Top 100″ largest online retailers, Alibris is the choice of millions of book lovers looking to buy rare and used books.

“When you have over 50 million books, helping a customer find a signed copy of an out-of-print book can be a challenge. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our user experience and make Alibris the easiest place to buy used books,” said Brian Elliott, chief operating officer at Alibris. “A/B testing lets us manage risk by measuring customer demand earlier in our development process. Rather than rely on subjective evaluations, we can use Coremetrics to quantify the impact on visitor conversion before committing additional resources.”

Coremetrics offers the only hosted web analytics and precision marketing solution designed to meet the marketing, merchandising, and site-design needs of online retailers. Alibris used Coremetrics A/B testing and real estate reporting to see if changing the presentation of its Narrow your results search functionality would increase usage. Moving the option to a more prominent position had a dramatic impact—500 percent more clicks and a 400 percent increase in sales. Before the change, only a fraction of Alibris customers used the powerful search tool. Today, far more customers use the tool to refine their search results by book attributes such as signed, hardcover, or first edition. Coremetrics reports also uncovered the need to refine the search tool’s language to help customers find that special hard-to-find book.

Platinax Internet � Links are dead - long live links!:

The insidious part is that Clickstream [user behavior-based ranking technique employed by Google] is very difficult to manipulate – the most effective way to manipulate clickstream data is to sweat it out and build the best quality websites.

“Insidious”?

November 2005 was a busy month. Net book revenue was down due to product life-cycle issues, but ancillary revenue from Google Book Search and Google AdSense increased appreciably.

THE SOLOMON KEY AND BEYOND and UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK 7 NEWS were the two leading topical revenue earners across all media (books, e-books, AdSense, Book Search, and Amazon Associates).

After quite a bit of waiting I got Google Analytics working on my website, together with the terrific asclick utility. Now I can see exactly which pages generate the most AdSense clicks (which turns out to be less thrilling than it sounds, because my consumer-oriented content only averages about 16 cents a click).

Track Google AdSense Clicks via Google Analytics - Free AdSense Tracker : SEO Book.com

There have been 3rd party javascripts that track adsense clicks out for a while, but no free ones to my knowledge that track clicks on Firefox. Until now.

This free script integrates with Google Analytics to allow you to track your adsense clicks.

This tracking is done through “Goals”. A goal is a way of tracking when a website visitor does something you want - Buy an item, submit a contact form, or in our case click an adsense ad.

Create a goal: To create a goal you assign it a URL. This url doesn’t have to exist, as the javascript will trigger it.

In the Goal URL field, enter “/asclick” and “AdClick” for the goal name.

This is insanely cool.