Futher Evaluation of BuildTraffic com and Adwords

On my site, I don't have that great of a bounce rate. I attribute this partially to the Ajax programming that does not require page loads to view further content.
Regardless, it is one of the few ways that I can see whether people are using the site. I tried to setup a goal in Google Analytics to measure how much I am converting in click throughs but it is a little bit tricker than I had anticipated.

Regardless, After running my ad campaigns with BuildTraffic.com, the Bounce Rate is 86.94 (How many people only load 1 page).

However, if I look closely, the bounce rate for just my build traffic campaign in and of itself is 98.53%. This means that hardly anyone clicked through or used the site as a result of the campaign. The average pages per user is a low 1.02. I suspect that some of this might be the same user getting the same advertisement rather than actually using the site. I kept a close watch on my stats and I am sad to say that although the traffic was targeted as promised and the numbers were fairly impressive; the conversion rates are so bad that its probably not worth it.

Now to be fair, any marketing campaign might change for you. You might have the midas touch. For instance, my campaign with build traffic would probably work better if I offered something for free rather than getting people to use my site and come back to it. At worst, I wasted my money. At best, I gained some web presence - but I cannot verify that ny of my sales through affiliates came from buildtraffic.com traffic. Again there was nothing wrong with the targeting of the users sent our ways, but I did find that our stats differed greatly from what they said that they referred to us. Even though they told us to check the server logs, I was suspicious that their javascript based system would not show up in our counters. I am not sure what, if any, limitations there are to statcounter.com or google-analytics.com (i'm running both to try and get as much info as possible), but our 3rd party counters did not match up. In one case about 1000 users didn't show up for a campaign which I found highly suspect.

I have started using adwords a bit to see whether that is worthwhile. Although I try to make money from adsense myself, I have a few affiliate programs which have higher payouts for conversions. I will try some experiments with adwords as I have already seen that the conversion rate is much better than anything with build traffic. Bottom line is if the ad is being pushed to you, chances are the user will do their best to ignore it. If you entice a prequalified user directly to a targeted landing page, you will have much better luck. That is all the time I have to post tonight. I must get some sleep now.

Save Money with My Mashup/Coding Project (Featured on Programmable Web)

My Coding and Side Project, SaveOnAtoZ.com was recently featured on Programmable Web a few weeks back. It simply appeared on the front page. I did not have time to write a blurb on it then, but I wanted to write it down as one of my accomplishments. Programmable web features a list of API's and their corresponding web "Mashups". Mashups are defined as

a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source.

- Wikipedia

What is Save On A To Z? Well the goal is to save money on everything. Simply speaking, the site connects to various apis and helps you conduct product searches based on keywords. The different result sets are segmented and / or listed on the same page according to your preferences. You can bookmark and compare the items side to side. The result sets can be loaded in to the same page via ajax.

The results are drawn from Amazon, Ebay, Half, Shopzilla, Buy.com, Best Buy, Shop.com, Google Base (Formerly Froogle), Nextag, Sortprice, MSN just to name a few of the engines. You can seriously check across all these sites within a few seconds. In addition, I am always expanding the result sets.

My goal is to provide you one of the most comprehensive resources for comparing prices and saving you money. With today's economy in a downward spiral and gas prices rising, we need to be sure that we are saving as much money as possible.

I hope you find my project useful. You can visit it here. If you can bookmark it on a social site, share it with friends, or link it in your blog, i would be most grateful. Thanks for reading. Hope this saves you a lot of money!

How Much Does Google Pay - Unique Visitors, Pageloads, and the Traffic Circus

Simply put- I want help others (and myself) find the best way to monetize their website. I figure, maybe if I share some my information, I will gain some insight into my own methods and perhaps you will reciprocate if you have found a better solution. Simply speaking, for my last pay period (not that long) until today I have received

132,423 page impressions
504 clicks
0.38% conversion
net: $102.85

This equals out to approximately 20 cents a click on average. Depending on your ad positioning and your conversion rate (and the topic of your site), you can expect to do more. But with these stats, you can easily see that it takes quite a few page loads and views in order to actually convert into real money. Now let's try to take that into the context of trying to get this done in one month: 132,423 page impressions/1.3 (average page views per visitor) = 101,864 unique visitors.

Now to achieve this in 30 days => 101,864/30 days = 3400 users a day!!
Please check my calculations - and I hope they are wrong, but that is a lot of users to accomodate a day just to make $100. There must be easier ways of making money. It seems people have learned to ignore them in many cases.

Even if your average payout for each click is 40 cents, you would still need 1700 users a day. Well the first thing you can do is put multiple Google Ads on the page. I have heard that, on average, it takes a person 6 exposures to finally convince them to follow through. So put those ads on Top, side and bottom. To increase the conversion rate, try making your ad relevant in design to your site (e.g. use the same colors of your site).

In addition, as we all know, video is hot - try integrating the new Youtube Video Ad Units into your site. There are some great advantages to this unit as it is extremely interactive, dynamic, and outright fun. I have had some luck with it, but honestly - the most successful Google solution almost always come from the Google AdSense for Search which pays about the same per click but gives me a 10% conversion rate. This is the searchbox that will take you directly to Google search engine with Google ads displayed at the top. Here is an example.

I hope you will find this information useful for your own website. Perhaps you can leave me some tips for my own. Thanks for reading!