Like every serious publisher, Im forever logging in to check my stats to pick up any piece of information about my revenue flows that I can find. Without all that information, Im just working in the dark. Thats true for just about every business. Even a guy who owns a shoe store will want to know how many customers he gets on a Saturday afternoon, who they are, what made them come into his store and which brand of shoes they like to buy. If he could know all that, the owner could make sure that his business would always be focused on the best market and delivering just what his customers want. Of course, he cant know that. He can take the odd survey and look at his sales figures, but he can never get a real-time view of what his customers and potential customers are doing and where theyre coming from. Online, we can do that. Sure, we have to be careful not to respond to every blip and every jump in our figures that we see. Like bricks-and-mortar stores, we too get flows and sales spurts that we have trouble explaining. Thats why it pays to look over the long term and take an average. Of all of the stats we can see though, there are two that most interest me. The first is always going to be revenues. Thats the bottom line the figure that says how well my strategies are working. The other figure that interests me though is whos doing the clicking. Thats a huge advantage that online publishers have over just about every other business: we can see exactly where to find the customers who give us the most money. Some people, for example, are reporting that users who come from MSN and AOL deliver more clicks than those from Google or Yahoo. In fact, a lot of people are saying that visitors from Google are among the meanest of clickers. Now, I dont know if thats true for everyone. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that could vary from site to site. But it is quite possible that MSN users are indeed more click-happy than Google users. It is important to remember though that its not only the number of clicks that count but the quality of those clicks. The more your users buy from your advertisers, the more Google will pay you for them. When you look at your stats, thats another figure you have to pay attention to before you change your marketing strategy. |
