Guide: Maximize your revenue by finding your best performing content

Introduction

If you own a typical website, then your homepage features some direct links to a portion of the content you have available. Your navigation pages link to the rest of the

content in a certain order. The bulk of your content pageviews go to whichever pages are features on the homepage and high up on the navigation pages. But how do

you decide which content to feature? Maybe you link to the newest content fisrt, or maybe you just chose what you think will perform best.

If you're interested in maximizing your revenue you first need to find out which content on your web site performs best*. I will show you how to use hard data to pick

your best performing content and increase your revenue by making it more accessible.

*Best performing content is one that brings in the most ad revenue and repeat visitors.

Who is this guide suited for

This guide is suited for anyone who owns a web site, uses Google Analytics and

Google Adsense (the information is also relevant to webmasters using other revenue/statistic programs but the

step-by-step guide featured in this guide relies on Analytics and Adsense) and is interested in maximizing their revenue.

Analyze your content - part 1 (Google Analytics)

The first step is to analyze how well your content performs using Google Analytics. To do this, log into your Analytics account and go to Content -> Top Content and

configure the report according to the following screenshot:

1. Click the bars icon to change the report type
2. Choose "Pageviews" for the main column
3. Choose % Exit for Individual URL performance
4. Filter the results to only show content pages (what you need to type here depends on your individual site's URL structure)
5. Change the show rows drop down menu to show 500 instead of 10.

If you like working with Excel you may want to export the results to CSV using the export button at the top of the page.

What we're interested in is the exit % of the different content. This tells us for each content page how often people leave your web site after viewing this content. High

exit rates typically mean the content is boring or irrelevant, or maybe even broken. Write down or export the information.

Analyze your content - part 2 (Google Adsense)

Now that you've identified your most popular content and the exit rates for each individual content page, it's time to see how well these content pages produce

Adsense revenues. We'll accomplish this by adding URL channels to Google Adsense. Log into to your Adsense account and go to Adsense Setup -> Channels -> URL

channels and click on Add New URL Channels.



Currently, Google only allows 200 URL channels. If you have more than 200 content pages you'll need to choose which ones to analyze first. I recommend going with

the pages with the most pageviews first. Enter the URLs for each content you want to analyze and click add.

Once you setup your channels, you'll need to wait for data to be gathered. The amount of time you need to wait depends on how popular your site is. Ideally, you want

each content page to have at least 1,000 impressions to enable proper statistical analyses. However even 100 impressions may be sufficient for some sites.

Once you finish waiting, you'll want to check the eCPM of each one of your pages. CPM measures how much revenue is generated (on average) per 1,000 impressions

and is an accurate measure of a page's revenue generating potential. To measure your eCPM for all your custom channels simply go to Reports -> Advanced Reports

and generate a report based on the following screenshot:

1. Choose a data range for the report that starts from before the day you added your custom URL channels and ends at the day you produce the report
2. Choose Channel data and check all the channels you wish to report on (typically everything you've added)
3. Group by Channel data

You can now see the eCPM of each content page you've added. You now have all the data you need to measure your content's performance and decide which content

to make more accessible

Analyzing the data

Now that you have your content's CPM and Exit rate data, you're ready to decide which pages to make more accessible. I use the following formula to give a "score" to

my pages:

Score = CPM / (exit rate / 100)

The reasoning behind this formula is that a pages with a low exit rate actually generate a lot more money than is indicated by their CPM as they cause users to visit

more pages that generate additional revenue. So a page with a 10% exit rate and $2 CPM is better than a page with 30% exit rate and $3 CPM.

Using the data from the screenshots, we can calculate the following:



Using the data

Now that we know which pages perform best, it's time to make the high scoring pages more accessible. There are many ways to do this:

• Add direct links to the highest scoring pages from your home page
• Make you the highest ranking pages show up at the top of navigation pages
• Highlight high performing pages in navigation pages
• Skew search results to display high performing pages higher in the results page

Misc. notes

1. It's typically recommended to keep high exit rate pages away from users even if they happen to score well due to an unusually high CPM. This is because in the long
   
   run you want your users to return to your site and help promote it and that will just not happen if they don't like the content they see. As a rule of thumb I keep content
   
   pages with 50% exit rate or more away from my users (or I try to improve them).
2. Exit rates can sometimes differ because the source of the traffic is different. If you have a page on your site that a massive amount of people find using a direct link
   
   from another site or a search engine - the exit rate for that page may be skewed. You can compensate for this by drilling down into the page and checking the exit rate
   
   for only certain types of visitors.
3. It's good practice to make sure your CPM data is taken using the same date range as your exit rate data. So after you gather CPM data you might want to update
   
   your exit rate data with the same date range.

Closing comments

Using this technique I have increased my Adsense revenue by 40%. Also, by increasing your revenue per visitor you turn more marketing techniques from negative ROI

to positive ROI.

Comments and feedback are appreciated.

* This guide is copyrighted. Please do not distribute without written permission from the author (Korzon on DigitalPoint)

 

Thanks so much for this guide

 

Can you please tell from where did you copy pasted this

 

I hate to disappoint but this is original work. I had a few hours to kill at the airport lounge so I decided to put them to good use. You'll notice the screenshots show my website (PlayedOnline.com)

Hope you enjoy the guide.

 

Looks like a good guide. I have been using similar techniques except the last excel sheet idea that you came up with.

will look into it

 

Feel free to rep me then

 

Thanks for the tips... Time to login to google analytics

 

Great read! If I could +1 rep you I would!

EDIT: I could and did.

 

Hey is your signature written with creating shock or is it a msitake.

 

good info!!

 

Korzon, This is a studenpous information. I love working with numbers and wonder why your idea never struck me! and it's good you included that copyright ;-)

 

Hmm, why are there random extra carriage returns throughout the guide? I can't edit it now

 

thank you that is help full

 

Thank you for this help full information

 

Great article. Good info and easy to follow. Thanks.

 

you're welcome - wish I could get rid of those extra carriage returns.

 

This is an excellent guide for many webmasters who haven't already started this

I'v used a very similar technique for awhile now, it's good advice + rep added.

 

Nice one for the guide it is awesome
Must of taken you a while
congrats

Will.

 

hey awesome guide for webmasters like me man really learnt a lot for analytics also learnt some basics for adsense also.

Thanks a bunch for sharing this lovely article. !!

 

Would you please create summary of all that information.