Traffic Rich Revenue Poor

MrMedia

MrMedia

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Mar 27, 2015
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I have been working on my paid social media game and I have hit a wall. I am hoping that @Tavin or any other revenue expert looks to the sky and sees the bat signal I am shining in the night sky...

My numbers can explain much better than I can.

I am running FB ads to pixeled audiences and I am getting crazy cheap, targeted traffic and great engagement. My problem is the revenue generated.

For example...

dKJ0Rvs.png


This was a small test on one post to see how it would engage my audience. As you can see the audience loved it and the ctr was around 22%. Post engagement in this example was clicks to my web page.

My CPC was £0.01 and that excluded the additional traffic I got from some likes and shares which added another couple of hundred visitors to the page.

All good so far...

But wait...

My revenue for this (monetized with adsense and taboola) is minimal so even at £0.01 or less CPC I am still running at a loss close to 90%. Scaled up this would never stack up.

Using the above numbers lets say I get 1000 visitors to my page at £0.01 cpc which is equal to £10 CPM.

My av CTR (any ad on the page) is like 2% and the cpc to me is around £0.15 cpc.

Using these numbers I would need the page to achieve a ctr of 10% to make clear profit. To me 10% ctr on adsense seems like it would trigger a red flag, especially when scaled up.

I have got the traffic part nailed I just need this sorted before I can unleash the volume.

How can you ever hope to get close to that RPM to make it profitable?

What am I missing bros?
 
What is your time-on-site and bounce rate looking like? I'm not a revenue genius like some of the other guys...but it seems to me that your ad is performing great - but the actual page/content may not be what your visitors are expecting.
 
hey man :smile:

Time on page - 4.03 mins - they are sharing, commenting and generally loving it.

Its exactly what the ad copy is pre selling so they dig the content for sure.
 
Nice! That's awesome.

I'd maybe guess that the next step is setting up a heat map and split testing ad placements. CrazyEgg is great for that.

Also make sure you're customizing the colors of your adsense blocks to fit in with your text and site colors.

You could also try including some interactive content on the page and place ads near it to try to grab some clicks that way. Those accordion content boxes come to mind for something like that.
 
Perhaps play around with your ad placement or try running specific affiliate offers that would fit your traffic.

In a lab thread I saw that Tavin suggested using pagination (<!--nextpage-->) to increase page views / RPM.
 
I should say I have ads within the post which are based on a lot of testing. I seem to cap out at around 1-2% ctr which is frustrating but what really makes me wonder is the massive gap between where it is now and where it would need to be to get close to positive roi.

I see people doing this all the time and I cannot believe that they are all getting clicks to site for sub £0.01 and an RPM of £10+

Know what I mean?
 
You know I asked for advice in your thread some time ago about monetizing my visitors. Since then I had success with display advertising.

Why don't you ditch adsense and cpc based monetization for a week or two and apply to two or three ad networks like sovrn, tripalfusion, tripplelift etc. There is ton of them. GumGum is also big for me. Set a small waterfall of ads, put adsense to load if any other networks don't fill and test stuff. If visitors don't want to click ads just monetize their views?

Obviously, there is no universal solution for everyone, I am just sharing what works for me at the moment.
 
Thanks man and if you ran your scenario with my numbers would it result in a positive ROI for you?
 
MrMedia said:
Thanks man and if you ran your scenario with my numbers would it result in a positive ROI for you?
Click to expand...

Well I earn $150 a day from 20k pageviews. That mean that I make $7.5 per 1k pageviews. If you pay £10($15) to get 1000 pageviews than no, I would not have positive ROI. :D

The thing is that I didn't even start optimizing my ads and I expect to easily triple that cpm with optimization in near future. That would put me in bracket that tavin talked about in other thread (between $500 and $1000 a day from 1mil pageviews). And that optimization includes premium networks that accept publishers over 500k pageviews and offer higher cpm. Also ditching waterfall and put networks in doubleclick for publishers (or apply to premium services that manage your ads in DFP) which can increase revenue significantly by making networks compete for you impressions AND having taboola and adsense (you can put it also in DFP to compete and get higher cpc).

I don't even know is my math good or not in that example and I am still a newb that is trying things out and yeah, I don't know. I will report you in month or two when I optimized my shit to see were my predictions were good or not. :D

Also, I don't know shit about Facebook but as I understand you send traffic directly to your posts? Why not grow official page so you can monetize those people multiple times? Or am I missing something.
 
I have been messing this up. Badly.
Based on your numbers I should be making around $300 a day just on display.
 
MrMedia said:
I have been messing this up. Badly.
Based on your numbers I should be making around $300 a day just on display.
Click to expand...

Wait, where did I screw up with math then? I still don't get cmp, rpm stuff very well.
 
I mean your figures make me realise in total I should be pulling $300 p / day on display.

Are you using all those networks you listed and then adsense as a fallback?
 
At the moment I am using just sovrn with google adsense as fallback and GumGum. I just got approved for two more premium networks, did not even put them in the mix yet. I will do that at the start of next month when I finish some other stuff. For example yesterday I had $40 sovrn, $20 adsense and $80 gumgum.
 
First the RPM someone else makes does not matter - it's very dependent on your traffic. The basic demographics as well as the intent matter quite a bit.

Is your cumulative ad CTR only 1-2%? Because that's very low. Adsense CTR of 10% for a page is not uncommon at all. Think about it this traffic come in from FB and now needs to go somewhere - focus that somewhere towards targeted txt ads if the niche fits and you can do great. The goal at the end of the content should be either ad click, share or click to other content on your site so they can share that or click and ad there.

What country is most of this traffic? What age/gender? Is it mobile/desktop dominate? Is your content about a mobile game?

If this is mobile traffic mostly with content about a mobile game Taboola and such are not going to do very well unless you have an older demo.
 
Good advice above. One sites demo is not the same as another.

Traffic will be valued based on the type, category, geo and responsiveness of your visitors.

Also, be careful with your Adsense account playing the arbitrage game.
 
@miketpowell - agreed - I ask about other peoples RPMs because I have always had the feeling mine is very low so its a somewhat useful benchmark for me.

In terms of my traffic - I am generating around 25-35k impressions p/day from 70% US / CA / UK / AU traffic. 80% is mobile or tablet and the profile is female aged 25+.

This should be an ideal audience to monetize imo. That said the content is broad female focussed entertainment types. This is not a viral type site but more of a lifestyle brand approach.

My page CTR for this month (adsense only) is 0.98%.

I have tested adsense placements and the best placements are 3 300x250s in the post.
 
@dsoul - I think my feeble CTR keeps me out of the arbitrage game and even if it didnt I am driving traffic to build my brand.
 
As I read this, I had a few different thoughts...

Since you're fetching the cheapest clicks possible and not ROI positive, I'd say the issue could be one of the following:
  • It's not the right demographic, it's too broad.
  • The content and lander is too broad, not inspiring action.
  • The product (in this case CPC clicks) isn't worth enough.
  • You're not activating and putting your entire funnel to use.
I'm thinking that because you have such a killer low-cost traffic source, you should keep running with it. But since it's a loss every time, and it's not re-couping on the most shallow layer of the game, can you...
  • Drop a retargeting pixel on them.
  • Get them into your email list.
  • Get them to become your followers on social sites.
  • Get them to agree to push notifications in their browser.
Something along those lines, which would allow you to hit them 2 and 3 times or more for the same penny per click. This would bring you to ROI positive, and allow you to eventually warm them, turn them into brand fans that keep returning and possibly purchase more expensive offers, or fill out CPA surveys, or SOMETHING to boost you into the black. Because penny traffic is pretty killer. (or whatever the penny is in Pounds... pence?)
 
Hey man,

Good thoughts appreciate them. I have a whole other side to the site which is funnel and product based and it is mainly centered around email.

It is very profitable for me and is a core part of the brand.

The reason I have become so obsessed with display revenues is the need to diversify. I am aiming for a high 6 figure flip in 12 months max and I need a range of revenue streams.

This fact plus the fact that I see sites all around me killing display ad revenues yet I make such a pittance from my very solid, demographically attractive traffic.

Figuring out FB has been a major milestone for me but it just seems so massively low on my RPMs that it doesnt make sense.

I should say from other traffic sources (seo, email, leaks, etc.) the same is true - great time on site, great engagement with content, likes, shares, comments, just piss poor revenue on display...

And yes... pence :smile:
 
The first thing I'd do is take your FB campaign and set it to desktop traffic only and see what the RPM is from that traffic.

I've had a hell of a time getting FB mobile traffic to engage with typical ads in a normal website layout. The responsiveness was just pushing the ads below the fold where no one ever even scrolled to. I've never found a solution I loved but interstitial style ads with a mobile network or with a Taboola style ad unit in it have done best for me there.
 
MrMedia said:
@dsoul - I think my feeble CTR keeps me out of the arbitrage game and even if it didnt I am driving traffic to build my brand.
Click to expand...

Fair play.

Just what you see, and what Google decides might be two different things. Just be careful is all I'm saying.
 
Try running some affiliate offers rather than using adsense and tabooleh. Something that will pay out more than your total spend combined, that way if you get only one sale, then your good to go!
 
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