Use your logs to make more money on line and especially if you use PPC search engine marketing approaches

Seoza News September 09 2004 Number 414.  There is a good and simple test of any email newsletter in my opinion ... does the reader probably (maybe should be possibly) learn something new or get a clue on how to approach some aspect of their work differently by spending the time reading the content?

Content should also be unique and not some re-expression of another person's work ... blogs and RSS are the best for disseminating other people's work I think and this is why you do not see see many links out to other articles in WII-FM.

 Very few readers unsubscribe from WII_FM and this is my feedback which suggest some value is being obtained. If you have any suggestions I am happy to hear from you email me from WII-FM

The information in today's article is based upon actual data from one of my own websites and covers data gathered this year right up to date. The analysis I present is based upon total impressions (page views) of 1,922,893 and total click-throughs of 150,200. Each of those click-throughs earned me money ... yes every single one. The overall CTR (click-through rate) was 7.81%.

Of course not only is this useful information it is vital if you run PPC (pay per click campaigns). However it is not good enough just to work with totals to optimize profit and maximise revenue. To do this needs an understanding of the habits of consumers on the net. This is where your logs are a goldmine of information literally.

Let me explain using my own situation and real data. Here is a table showing daily totals of impressions and clicks by day for this single website for the last 8 months ...

This overall pattern or distribution is the same every week as you would agree if you saw my actual daily stats in graphical form ... characterized by a mountain range type distribution of Monday peaks and Friday or Saturday troughs. If you look at your logs you will see a similar pattern I am sure assuming you have a reasonable amount of traffic to make the analysis statistically significant.

This has the following practical implications for me ... I can expect more traffic on Sundays and Mondays so I need to be prepared to spend more and promote more on these days to increase sales volumes for example. I can confidently expect lowest traffic on Saturdays and Fridays.

How To Increase PPC sales and profits

Lets say you have a PPC campaign with a similar distribution to the above site and you pay $0.20 per click and you have an average Googleads position of 4 then on Sunday through Wednesday you might want to pay more to get exposure to higher traffic not only because traffic is naturally higher on those days but click-through will increase if your position on Googleads goes to say position 2 or 3 which it will do by increasing the click to say $0.25.

On Thursday you would possibly reduce the rate to say $0.20 again.

This priniciple applies also to time of day ... discover from your logs when maximum traffic applies then vary your PPC bid to get maximum exposure to maximum traffic volumes at different times of day.

Imagine trying to structure a classical approach to off-line advertising and promotion in this way. It would be impossible. On-line advertising and promotion is scientific and this kind of approach makes a BIG BIG difference to cost and success ... because you have TOTAL control and IMMEDIATE accurate feedback. What more can any business ask for?

Coming back to the above table ... if you add traffic on the 3 days Sun to Tuesday you will find in my case I get 47.5% of a full week's visitors on 3 days. What is your situation like? In fact are you even able to find out? If you cannot then you need to change hosts

If you also do the arithmetic on the table above you will find that CTR also is much better on Sun to Monday than it is on rest of 4 days.

Create your own shopping cart ... surprise yourself. Amazingly easy & sell lots & save lots

I completed my first attempt at an ecommerce website http://www.focusgarden.co.za just before I left on holiday and mentioned that I was working on it in the last WII-FM. Do take a look and you will see how simple and effective it is to create a fully fledged working ecommerce site just using FrontPage. This site has already paid for itself many times over after only 4 weeks through the sales made.

The site is also in a dominant position across the complete search spectrum on Ananzi for the market niches identified ... all gardening topics related

Here are just a few ranking positions for important keywords on Ananzi already ...

• gardening 3
• garden 3
• gardens 3
• lawn and gardening 1
• plant food 1
• lawn seed 1

• gardening 3
• garden 3
• gardens 3
• lawn and gardening 1
• plant food 1
• lawn seed 1