Today the most common monetization of website traffic is advertising. This is obvious for many, but surprisingly many sites owners still do not know what type of traffic they have, does it mainly consist of web, mobile, or tablet traffic? Is there any other type of traffic on their site, which they currently are not monetizing and how much can they expect to earn from that?
In order to get the most revenue from a site it is important to keep track of where your visitors come from, how they act and what usually converts to sales.
In order to get the most revenue from a site it is important to keep track of where your visitors come from, how they act and what usually converts to sales.
By using tools such as Google Analytics, you as a website owner can for example see how many visitors came from Google, if they used a mobile phone, tablet, or any other utility and analyze visitors behavior on your site according to that information. This data is an important source of information in order to draw conclusions from the analysis of what type of advertising methods you should offer to your visitors, and how you can increase your revenue even more on a global level.
In September 2013, Google rolled out an update on a large scale causing Google Analytics users to no longer see which organic keywords delivers them traffic or conversions, instead now “Not provided” appears for virtually all organic traffic. With these types of changes, the analysis of your website traffic has become much more difficult, but with the help of Google Webmaster Tools combined with AdWords data, this can still be tracked reasonably well and you can still piece together the results of your organic search traffic.
While website owners can have access to tools which will allow them to segment their traffic entirely and have a great overview over what they currently have, this is of course only one small step in the monetization process. Actually finding buyers for each and every segment of your traffic, including buyers for traffic of different geo-targets, different devices, different ad methods, etc. can be a daunting task for anyone without the access to a large sales organization. This is where the ad networks come in, ad networks can help you reach that large pool of worldwide advertisers that are interested in your traffic, but who you might never reach on your own. There is a plethora of different ad networks you can use and you can basically use several at once as well (using alternative codes if your minimum CPM wasn’t reached). This is a feature that is quite popular among ADAMO’s publishers, allowing them to fully control their traffic and maximize their revenue.
While having an ad network in between you and your advertisers will cost you a certain percentage of your revenue, they also bring a lot of surplus value. Ad networks will always earn you more money in the end, because of their capabilities of working worldwide with local account managers, speaking the local language, which eases the process of selling advertisement on your site to local companies. Ad networks also make sure that you will not sell your inventory under the market price, since most of the ad networks have minimum prices per geo target, per traffic type and per ad method and these minimum prices are based on experience and a view of the bigger picture, combining price knowledge of thousands of sites other than your own.
On top of these minimum prices that are being used, most of the ad networks today have some sort of bidding platform implemented. These bidding platforms allow the advertisers to bid against each other for your traffic, essentially creating a fair market value price and earning you the highest rate possible by filling 100 percent of your available ad inventory with paying ads.
Another advantage of using ad networks to help you monetize your traffic is that they help manage the issue of complexity. Having to negotiate all the direct buys yourself, working through the deal and set up processes yourself will cost a lot of time and effort. Imagine that times twenty or thirty for the different types of traffic that you have to sell and having to run everything simultaneously per deal, splitting between different geo targets, devices, etc. you can easily imagine the huge amount of overhead and workload that this will generate. Ad networks will take away these cumbersome processes, taking on the negotiations with the various advertisers, which is an art in itself, allowing you to focus on building up your core business.
Choosing the correct partner to help you monetize your traffic can be a difficult choice, especially when there are so many possibilities out there. The best is to choose a couple of ad networks to test and compare, allowing you to also get a feel of the system and how much you can expect to earn with each of them. Also do not forget to talk to the ad networks, they know their capabilities and just by looking at your site they can advise you on the best solutions to maximize your revenue and ultimately grow your business.
Judy Shalom is CEO of ADAMO Advertising.
