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.
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.
Official Google Blog: The circle of analytics:
We’ve integrated it with AdWords, it’s easier to use – and it’s free. We hope that Google Analytics will help improve the overall web – one site at a time.
I hope a future release includes tools to integrate Google Analytics with Google AdSense. It should be possible to associate actual and possible AdSense channel revenues with Google Analytics directory and page tracking.
Given the present feature/function in Google Analytics, one could do this in a crude way by assigning a fractional $ value based on historical eCPMs to each page. For example, my index page on this blog gets some hefty % of the traffic to the blog and pulls about a $2.30 CPM last I checked. I could give each hit on the index page a valule of $0.023 so a thousand clicks would be “worth” about $2.30.
Stats whizzes: Make sense? Am I missing anything?
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