How do people on here measure the success of having their site in the Coop network? I'm trying to attract more members for one of my forums so I've switched from using Adsense (which was making me a bit of money, but nothing to write home about) to the Coop in the hope of exchanging a few cents in ad revenue for more incoming links/clicks. However, I can't really see any obvious way to see whether I'm getting any extra visitors from this or whether I should try a different scheme instead. My current weight is just over 1100 if that makes any difference.
Method 1. Watching backlinks inncrease in MSN Method 2. Looking at stats in regard to ad impressions. Method 3. Comparing your statistics pre co-op to post. Remember it takes several days before your ads are fully deployed in the system. Good luck. Shannon
I have noticed a huge increase in backlinks, but not so much in SERPs...hopfully that will follow soon.
What stats? I can see how many ad impressions I get when I'm running Adsense but I don't see any way to measure how many times my ad is being shown on the Coop network.
Oops, I thought co-op now showed impressions. Question for someone who knows, what do the stats show? Sorry if I mispoke. Shannon
Because I don't want to bombard my visitors with lots of advertisements. I've found a tiny graph that shows a line of ad impressions, but nothing detailed.
It's a bit disappointing that clicks don't get counted with Coop though, seeing as I do want to see how many extra visitors I'm getting, but I've written a little PHP script that updates a counter and then forwards to the real URL instead.
I always just look at my server logs. Most of the time it's pretty obvious where the coop traffic is coming from. No exactly a science I know... It would be cool if clicks were counted though.
It's pretty easy to see that the coop increases traffic which is all that matters .... I don't care where it comes from. When the ads are running my trafic increases, when for some reason the weight drops to 0 and I don't revalidate for a couple of days the traffic drops by half. The traffic is not just from the ads, when the weight is 0, terms I follow, particually on MSN drop until the weight is restored.
The best way to measure success for the coop in my opinion is by tracking your SE rankings for targeted keywords. My site doesnt have alot of weight either, but when I can go to google and see my site ranked 4th for "nfl training camp", ahead of sites like fox sports and yahoo sports, its obvious to me this is working rather well when used with a combination of constant static link building through link exchanges and directories.