How Much Is a Blog Visitor Worth to You
I always wondered how much a blog visitor is worth to me. Well, I did calculations, and depending on different circumstances but in general, it is almost 6 cents. How did I calculate this? It is pretty simple.
Let’s say you have 30 articles on your site and 1,000 views per article, so you have 30,000 views a month (30 x 1,000).
CPM is what an ad agency is paying for 1,000 ad impressions and it varies. Let’s say your average ad CPM is $8.00 per 1,000 ad views (impressions) and you have 7 ads per page (3 in the content – one in the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end of article and 4 in the sidebar), so:
- 30,000 page views / 1,000 = 30– because they pay per thousand. And page views is different than page visitors because 1 visitor can view multiple pages during 1 site visit.
- 30 x $8 = $240($8 is your CPM, can be lower or higher)
- $240 x 7 = $1,680 (because you have 7 ads per page)
- Total revenue is $1,680
So, your total revenue is $1,680 per 30,000 page views per month. Not bad! In the perfect word, of course, because Fill Rate comes into play. Ads are not displayed on your site every time.
Divide $1,680 / 30,000 views = $0.056 per page visit.
So, your visitor is worth about ¢5.6 if he views only 1 blog post on your website. If he views 2 posts, the value doubles. If he or she buys a product from your affiliate link, his value to you is even more; when he buys your digital product, such as an e-book, his value is skyrocketing.
Take care of your visitor; he is most important to you in this business. Make your site mega interesting to him, so he stays longer viewing more pages on your site and absorbing more ads, generating you more income.
Well, you are wondering, as you have a Google Adsense and they allow only 3 ads per page, how I came up with 7 ads per page? Read on.
How to Have More Than 3 Ads Per Page
Well, Google is a giant and like every giant, they think that they can dictate terms to everybody around, including how much you can earn with your website. They are very, very wrong. This is your site, not theirs, and you decide how many ads you want to display and much money you want to earn with them. But please do not overdo it because nobody will come to visit. I have seen many sites that are so jammed with advertisements that it is very difficult to find content to read. It is like going through a jungle, not able to see a path.
There are other companies that are ad providers to publishers like you and me. So, you are welcome to shop around. Is it worth it to shop around? Well, here is math to explain if it is worth it or not. Google (until recently) let you put 3 ads per site and they pay, let’s say, 1 cent per ad impression. So that is 3 cents per page. Other companies usually pay more than Google, but let’s say they pay less than Google, and they pay only 0.75 cents per ad. But you can put as many ads as you wish on your page. Let’s say you keep your site with 7 ads and each ad pays only 0.75 cents. That is 7 x 0.75 = 5.25 cents. That is almost double, even if they would pay less per ad, what you would earn with Google. And other companies usually pay more than Google. So, it is your call, you decide which ad provider you choose.
You decide how much money you want to earn with your website, not anybody else!
Now if you want to learn how to earn even more per visitor, there is a trick you can use to serve even more ads to your visitor but without the look of spam. Because 7 ads per page is plenty. If you put more, then your page would be a jungle of ads. How to do it elegantly and without a reader being suspicious? Read on…
Ad Rotation – Income Multiplication Explained
You put a lot of work into your blog. People visit, enjoying your content, so they need to pay for your content one way or another. So, you have set up spaces where you decide you want to implement ads on your site. Let’s say you have only 7 spaces available for rent to an advertising agency to display their client’s ads. If you put more spaces, your site will contain ads only, and the content will disappear. So, you’re kind of out of options as far as designating space for ads. That is not a lot of income if you sell your ad spaces very cheap. And ad spaces are valuable. But who said you have to sell your ad space cheap?
Your space – your rules!
Most bloggers set up their ad spaces and they let an ad agency display one ad per page visit. That is a waste of space! So, let’s multiply our ad space!
How to multiply the valuable ad space you sell for cheap and multiply your profits? That is pretty simple…
So, we have 7 ads on the site (lucky number). We know that a visitor coming to your site in a search of an answer to his question or problem spends some time reading your answer. You better make sure that you answer his question very well if you want to keep him on your site as long as you can!
Let’s say your article is 1,200 words long. That takes an average reader approximately 9.2 minutes to read. Now, imagine that during that 9 minutes, you can change your ads every 45 seconds. If you divide this 9 minutes into 45-second blocks, you end up with a number 14. Now, you are not renting ad space once, but 14 times! So, if you have 7 ad spaces, multiply this 14 times. That is 98. Your reader, without noticing, just got served not 7, but 98 ads! That is amazing!
You will get paid not for displaying 7 ads but 98!!! That is a significant difference because you get paid by an ad broker for 1,000 ad blocks. So, without rotating ads, you would need 143 visitors because:
1,000 page views / 7 ads per page = 143 visitors to see this 1 page
I would say that is quite a lot. But now when you sell your valuable ad space multiple times during a one-page visit or session like some are calling it, to reach 1,000 ad views, you need only 10.2 visitors. That is significantly less and easier to achieve.
The Power of Math and Multiplication!
So, you might be thinking, Is it all legit?
Well, first of all, this is your space, and you can sell it to whomever you want and on your terms. That we established already at the beginning of this article. Second of all, I have this set up that way on all of my sites and I asked SOVRN, my ad provider which you might know or have heard of, and they reviewed my ad setup and they didn’t say a word.
Remember it is all about money! You are making a blog to earn money and ad broker – they serve the ads for their clients to earn money too. If they want to earn more, I guess you have their blessing since you are just multiplying their income too. And their clients are happy because their ads are viewed more often, and they can spend more money on advertising. And that is what they want! So, let’s make them happy too! That is why you see on the last day of the quarter CPM rates skyrocketing to the moon – everybody wants to get rid of the quarterly budget (money).
This concept is nothing new. Everybody these days is rotating ads. This page you are viewing right now has the ad rotation set up. Maybe you even noticed when the bus stops in the city – they are rotating ads as well. Everybody is rotating ads because the space is very valuable, but nobody wants to pay full price!
How Much Money Will I Earn with Ad Rotation?
Significantly more, that’s for sure. At the beginning of the article, we came up with the income number of $1,680 per month, based on 30,000 views of articles based on 7 static ad spaces per article. So now it is time to do some serious multiplication.
Let’s Put Basic Math to Work for Us!
We have established that your article takes about 9 minutes to read and, during that time, in a single ad space, you will display 14 different ads during 1 session. So now you have 7 ad spaces available to display ads 14 times during this one single session. So, during the one-page view, you are able to display:
7 ads x 14 times = 98 ads will be displayed
You have 30,000 page views per month, that is 98 ads x 30,000 views = 2,940,000 ads will be displayed. If that is based on our CPM of $8 per 1,000 views 2,940,000 / 1,000 = 2,940 blocks of 1,000.
2,940 blocks of thousand x $8 of CPM = $23,520 per month
Minus. of course, this damn fill rate of the ads. It will be 20% less if your fill rate is only 80%. But even taking this into consideration, income is more than $1,680 per month displaying static ads.
Also, with rotating ads, the value of your site visitor raises a lot. Remember, at the beginning of this article, we established that our site visitor worth is $0.056. Now with this little trick of multiplication, our visitor magically is worth $0.056 x 14 = $0.784. So now we are very close to $0.80 per visitor!
So, what do you think, which is the best way to go? Static or Rotating? I think the answer is pretty obvious. And you are not adding more ad spaces clunking your website and look even spammier. A very elegant solution in my opinion. But you are the judge.
How to Do This Ad Rotation
It is pretty easy. Just install the plugin and you are done! There are some paid plugins for WordPress which have the ad rotation incorporated. I found one which is free, and it does the job well. It is not perfect, but it is pretty darn good, and more importantly, the only one I found for free. It is called AdRotate by Arnan de Gans, a digital nomad.
If you are interested in how you can implement this plugin on your website, please visit an article on my blog here.
Happy Money Multiplying!
P.S. Don’t try this technique with Adsense. It is against their policy. They stated: “Auto-refreshing ads. Publishers are not permitted to refresh a page or an element of a page without the user requesting a refresh.” But I suggest that you check yourself because they change their policies pretty frequently. You can find their policies on their website here.
