Adsense Revenue vs. Visitor Retention
As a web publisher one of my goals is maximizing Adsense clickthrough rates. In the short term this means big profits – but what does it mean long-term?
When a visitor lands on your website for the very first time and immediately clicks on an Adsense ad, what are the chances that they will return to your site?
I don’t have any hard stats on this. It might be time to find out.
I’ve made it a point to get customers to return to my websites. There are several techniques I’ve used. These involve different things like “Bookmark” buttons and opt-in newsletters – along with regular updates.
SE spammers who run scraper sites have no interest in their website’s longevity. What matters is right now.
I’m not a SE spammer and you probably aren’t either. That means longevity should be in our minds as we develop our websites.
Think about this (horrible) analogy:
Each person who lands on your website from a search engine is like a golden goose. You can sell that goose for $100 and start looking for another one or you can keep that goose and make 50 cents from it today… but it will keep making more money for years to come. If you take care of it, those revenues will grow expontentially.
There is a big opportunity cost for you. Not only will you sacrifice your short-term revenue but you will also have to invest a lot more time, money, and effort into building a top-notch site that people will want to return to and tell there friends about.
You might not have the resources to do this to every single website that your own. Instead, try this out with your most successful site – the long term payoff could be huge.
This is called creating an authority website. When you have an authority website on a certain topic, your website is recognized as the top (or one of) website of that topic. A good example of an authority website would be SitePoint (http://www.sitepoint.com).
Creating an authority website takes alot of a time, and the short-term revenue is extremely low, as you say. But in the end, if you stick with it, and traffic slowly grows, it will definitely pay off. You just have to keep going, and this can be extremely hard in the beginning.
Another great advantage of an authority website is that once your popular you won’t have to write as much content yourself. Other people will actually want to write, as their articles get viewed by hundreds if not thousands of people. But again, before you reach this level, you must do all the hard work yourself.
Comment by Dennis Pallett — October 18, 2005 @ 3:49 pm