Hi there, I'm just starting to get into affiliate marketing and adsense. I've gone through various calculations in my head - what the potential earnings are for various levels of traffic. Its kinda mind bending... For those that are successfully making money through your sites from these sources (affiliate marketing and ppc) - could you give what you see as some idea of the relationship between traffic levels and earnings. For example: 100,000 page accesses x ctr .015 x c payment 0.2 = $300 for adsense. 100,000 page access x ctr .015 x conv rate .01 x $50 = $750 for affiliate product with $50 commission. so these i just made up. What is your experience on your sites? What sort of traffic, click thru rates do i need to make to make decent money? Another relationship is the relationship between number of pages on your site and traffic. interesting one too...
Well, I think it has to do with targetting. In my experenice, it all depends on how well targetted the traffic. I do advertising where I do affiliate programs that end up averaging .50c in revenue per click. With adsense I would get at the most .10c per click average (based on the keyword). I have always been a bigger fan of affiliate programs over adsense, simply because the people advertising with AdWords are advertising because they are making money... ie more then they are paying per click. A lot of these advertisers aren't the actual company. They are affiliates. So if they are paying .25c per click, you as an adsense publisher are only getting a portion of that, maybe .15c per click. So the affiliates are making money paying more for traffic then you are getting paid. Therefore, it would be most profitable to be an affiliate, since you don't have to pay for the traffic. At least that has been my experience.
Ok, on my end of things (I do only seo), if I had 100,000 uniques into my pages per day (if you were talking about per day) I'd be one happy dude. Right now, without giving too many numbers, I'm averaging about 16 cents per unique. Which is decent - could be better, could be worse. With 100,000 page views, I'd be looking at just under $17,000 per day. At least I could buy dinner with that
I am currently averaging .15 1/2 cents per unique on my forum. My site is pretty targeted in certain forums. If I can increase my site to 100,000 uniques a month I'd be a happy boy.
There is a good blog post at shoemoney.com about "income per unique": http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/02/01/is-your-website-makeing-what-it-should-be/
Wouldn't google ban you from breaking their TOS. This is because I have quickly checked your stats and if you get just under $17,000 per day of 100,000 page views then you must be receiving a clickthru rate of about 100% or more, which is not really that realistic. Maths: $0.16 x 100000 = $16,000
No. That is why this is in the affiliate program forum, and not adsense. He is not specifically talking about adsense.
Sorry. The first post mentioned Adsense, so I then thought he may have been on about Adsense aswell. But anyway, he still must be getting about 100% or so for every page impression, which seems a little impossible.
not quite sure how you figured that I need to be getting 100% clickthrough to get 17 cents per unique. For instance, if I have: 100 uniques, 20 click through, 1 buys and I get a commission for $20. That's .20 per unique with a conversion rate of 5%. A very likely scenario. I do promote some good programs with targetted traffic. however I WISH I was at 100% clickthrough
I understand how you thought that since you are an adsense publisher. This is the exact reason I don't understand why people love adsense so much. The advertisers are making money, so why not cut out the middle man and be an affiliate...
I am an adsense earner, but I also take part in hundreds of affiliate programs. I currently earn about the same amount per click from both types of programs on average though.
Yeah, after I posted that, I saw the affiliate programs directory link in your sig... then wandered if I had been wrong about you thinking solely adsense. Guess I was...
Thanks guys for all the replies! I thought this thread was going to die a death! This IPU is very interesting - thanks for the link Matt - it really clarified what you guys are talking about. IPU is a great measure - super simple! So far I'm at IPU $0.0000 - can only go up from there! What about costs? Do you subtract costs from the original income or not? A cost-per-unique is probably another interesting figure. Another thing when you talk about uniques, is that the same as unique sessions? 15 to 17 cents per unique! You guys are doing amazing. Now I have some targets!
Well I take what Shoemoney describes as gross income per unique. Once you have a network of sites, it becomes easier to promote them, which will bring costs down per unique. I think uniques is just the total unique visitors you have to your site. If you have 1.2 million uniques a year (100,000 per month), then you should have a yearly income from that site of $192,000 with 16c per unique. I think .16c is a little steep, but you get the general idea. If you have a financial related site, you could get .25c per unique, but getting lots of traffic would be very hard. Then with a game site for example, you may get .01c per unique, but getting visitors is much easier. It's all relative.
I use urchin statistics (v5) and I don't think it gives me unique visitors. It does give me sessions though. Might have to look at this again. I guess it makes more sense for the measure to be based on the number of people (unique visitors) rather than sessions. Yeah, need to figure out uniques...
What stats packages do you guys use? I just looked at webalizer too - don't see uniques on that either?
I just did my IPU and am at $.045. I think that is pretty good for my 42nd day of blogging. According to shoemoney I am about in the middle of his discription. Goal is $.09 by end of year.