Looking to monetize your website? Take a look at your data. Do your analytics indicate that your website traffic is high? I ask because website traffic is a good indicator of whether or not your website is ready to be monetized. Certain ad partners, like Sortable, have specific thresholds for your website traffic to meet before working with them.
Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website. Web traffic is measured in visits, sometimes called “sessions,” and is a common way to measure an online business’s effectiveness at attracting an audience.
As a publisher, website traffic is important because it impacts your ad revenue. You cannot use programmatic advertising to monetize your website without traffic, and you cannot monetize it well without a lot of qualified traffic.
How is Web Traffic Measured?
In Google Analytics, these are the metrics that you should be looking at:
- Sessions – A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame.
- Bounce rate – Bounce rate is a metric that measures the percentage of people who land on your website and do not interact with it before leaving.
- Time on page – This is the amount of time that a visitor spends reading the content on a single page. This number is calculated by dividing the total amount of time that visitors spend on your site by the total number of site visits.
Ad Ops partners like to take a look at these metrics to see how many people are going to your site, how long are they viewing your site for, and together, this data can indicate if the content on your site is valuable for the user. It’s important to note that you also want returning users — it means that you’re providing valuable content and you don’t need to spend as much time and resources acquiring new users constantly.
Here are more in-depth metrics you can use:
- Conversion rate – The percentage of users who take a desired action, like making a purchase or downloading an ebook.
- Cost per acquisition – This is a metric that measures the aggregate cost to acquire one paying customer on a campaign or channel level.
These metrics aren’t easily found on Google Analytics and usually require calculating them yourself using a spreadsheet or building a report in your platform to calculate. These metrics are especially important if you’re spending money on acquiring and maintaining users. You need to see if what you’re doing to acquire them and the type of content you’re producing is attracting and retaining them.
How do You Increase Traffic?
These are a few methods you can implement to get more traffic to your site:
Advertise: Get traffic to your website through paid search or display advertising and promote your website and/or content by launching strategic social advertisements campaigns.
Boost referral traffic: Consider guest blogging on other sites to build backlinks, ask other sites with complimenting content to link back to your site, and share your content across your social platforms redirecting back to your website.
Engage with community: Create a sense of community by engaging with followers on all platforms. Promote comments and dialogue. Host webinars, post videos, and attend conferences to gain more reach.
Optimize website: Ensure your site speed is fast. Focus on user experience through responsive design.
Optimize content: Pay attention to on-page SEO. Target long-tail keywords. Get others to guest blog on your site to attract their users. Write eye-catching headlines.
Analyze data: Take a look at your competition and target their top content pieces. See what works and what doesn’t to make data-driven decisions.
What are Other Factors to Consider When it Comes to Website Traffic?
Content on the main domain vs subdomains: Some publishers may organize their content by separating it by their main domain and a subdomain. By using subdomains to streamline your website hierarchy, you help users find the information they seek more efficiently, improving your website’s SEO performance. The downside of this is that Google will recognize your subdomains as sites separate from your main domain, and rank them individually. That means your main domain won’t benefit from any positive impact your subdomain would otherwise provide if it were a subdirectory instead.
Language barrier for Google monetization: Despite thousands of languages being spoken around the world, Google only uses a handful — 44 to be exact. If you’re a publisher and your website uses an unsupported language, you won’t be able to monetize your site with Google unless you convert it. You can see Google’s available languages here. It’s also important to note that though Google may support these languages, there isn’t necessarily a high demand for all of them — English continues to be the dominant language.
Invalid traffic (IVT): Invalid traffic includes any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser’s costs or a publisher’s earnings. Invalid traffic can have a negative impact on your reputation and overall ad revenue. If a demand partner observes high levels of invalid traffic or is unable to verify the quality of traffic on your website, they may suspend or disable your account to protect themselves. Ultimately, it is the publisher’s responsibility to ensure that the traffic on your website is valid.
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If you have any questions about your website or monetizing your website, please contact our team today by emailing team@sortable.com or booking a demo.