I just recently posted an article on my AdSense blog entitled, "AdSense CPM Drops As Impressions Increase".

I wanted to touch on the same topic again, but this time aside from an AdSense standpoint.

As I said, as your traffic increases it tends to become more diverse. If you're writing about AdSense, for example, you'll attract people who are interested in AdSense, but you'll also attract people interested all kinds of monetization, and also website publishers in general.

And then there are people who publish websites as a hobby, and those who publish them as part of another business, such as a real estate agent.

So while your traffic and impressions increase, your overall CTR and CPM start dropping. Even though your bottom line, the earnings, keep going up, your website is not monetizing effectively as it used to.

You could look at this in a variety of ways, positive or negative...

• Positive - as long as your earnings keep going up, the extra "lookie-loo" traffic is ok. Besides, a small fraction of this traffic might end up becoming a loyal reader.



• Positive - having more visitors means more visibility, and more people seeing your brand. That might bode well over the long haul.



• Negative - having more visitors that don't monetize is a waste of bandwidth. It's costing me bandwidth!



• Negative - if my CPM drops while my impressions increase, then my income becomes unpredictable. I need to forecast income with traffic increases

Magazine publishers know that there's a small percentage of their publications that get handed off to other people, people who didn't pay for the magazine. They've addressed this by stuffing a few subscription cards into the magazine, as well as full page subscription ads.

So the question is, if you look at this diverse traffic as a positive, then it becomes your challenge to find ways to benefit from it.

You may not know it, but it's possible that a big chunk of traffic is coming to your site for a reason that you didn't know about.  

Labels: Monetization