I do like to experiment though, and I wonder if search engines just –
1) Make people lazy to bookmark or type the whole website name in Chrome/Opera toolbars
2) Help disguise sources of traffic by encrypted search terms
3) Help disguise corporate traffic watchers and aggregators
So I am giving all spiders a leave for Q1 2012. I am interested in seeing impact of this on my traffic , and I suspect that the curves would not be as linear as I think.
Is search engine optimization over rated? Let the data decide…. 🙂
I am also interested in seeing how social sharing can impact traffic in the absence of search engine interaction effects- and whether it is possible to retain a bigger chunk of traffic by reducing SEO efforts and increasing social efforts!
I recently found an interesting example of a website that both makes a lot of money and yet is much more efficient than any free or non profit. It is called ECOSIA
If you see a website that wants to balance administrative costs plus have a transparent way to make the world better- this is a great example.
World’s largest tropical forest reserve (38,867 square kilometers, or about the size of Switzerland)
Home to about 14% of all amphibian species and roughly 54% of all bird species in the Amazon – not to mention large populations of at least eight threatened species, including the jaguar
Includes part of the Guiana Shield containing 25% of world’s remaining tropical rainforests – 80 to 90% of which are still pristine
Holds the last major unpolluted water reserves in the Neotropics, containing approximately 20% of all of the Earth’s water
One of the last tropical regions on Earth vastly unaltered by humans
Significant contributor to climatic regulation via heat absorption and carbon storage
Click per milli (or CPM) gives you a very low low conversion compared to contacting ad sponsor directly.
But its a great data experiment-
as you can monitor which companies are likely to be advertised on your site (assume google knows more about their algols than you will)
which formats -banner or text or flash have what kind of conversion rates
what are the expected pay off rates from various keywords or companies (like business intelligence software, predictive analytics software and statistical computing software are similar but have different expected returns (if you remember your eco class)
NOW- Based on above data, you know whats your minimum baseline to expect from a private advertiser than a public, crowd sourced search engine one (like Google or Bing)
Lets say if you have 100000 views monthly. and assume one out of 1000 page views will lead to a click. Say the advertiser will pay you 1 $ for every 1 click (=1000 impressions)
Then your expected revenue is $100.But if your clicks are priced at 2.5$ for every click , and your click through rate is now 3 out of 1000 impressions- (both very moderate increases that can done by basic placement optimization of ad type, graphics etc)-your new revenue is 750$.
Be a good Samaritan- you decide to share some of this with your audience -like 4 Amazon books per month ( or I free Amazon book per week)- That gives you a cost of 200$, and leaves you with some 550$.
Wait! it doesnt end there- Adam Smith‘s invisible hand moves on .
You say hmm let me put 100 $ for an annual paper writing contest of $1000, donate $200 to one laptop per child ( or to Amazon rain forests or to Haiti etc etc etc), pay $100 to your upgraded server hosting, and put 350$ in online advertising. say $200 for search engines and $150 for Facebook.
Woah!
Month 1 would should see more people visiting you for the first time. If you have a good return rate (returning visitors as a %, and low bounce rate (visits less than 5 secs)- your traffic should see atleast a 20% jump in new arrivals and 5-10 % in long term arrivals. Ignoring bounces- within three months you will have one of the following
1) An interesting case study on statistics on online and social media advertising, tangible motivations for increasing community response , and some good data for study
2) hopefully better cost management of your server expenses
3)very hopefully a positive cash flow
you could even set a percentage and share the monthly (or annually is better actions) to your readers and advertisers.
go ahead- change the world!
the key paradigms here are sharing your traffic and revenue openly to everyone
donating to a suitable cause
helping increase awareness of the suitable cause
basing fixed percentages rather than absolute numbers to ensure your site and cause are sustained for years.
Here are some jobs from Vincent Granville, founder Analyticbridge. Please contact him directly- I just thought the Season of Joy should have better jobs than currently.
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Several job ads recently posted on DataShaping / AnalyticBridge, across United Sates and in Europe. Use the DataShaping search box to find more opportunities.
1 Raised salaries by 1000 $ across board, and gave a 10% increase at lower levels to reportedly 30% increase at higher levels.
The surprise 1000$ cash bonus , was a simple application of expectation management, people love a surprise 1000$ raise, but hate if told they would be getting a 90$ raise in their monthly salary from next quarter.
Ex Googlers or GoogleX as the groups is called have helped create a lot of not so evil value at Facebook, and at Twitter. Even the rest of the World made more money on Map Reduce than Google itself did
And Google refuses to do simple things like sell Android )s at 10 bucks a pop, or Google Maps at 0.99 cents a pop. Not even a paid content search by integrating syndicating sources like Factiva, Bloomberg etc
The book scanning project would be out soon , hey when, but they could better get some health record scanning contracts to help cut digital costs
And the A/B experiment to move to pay per conversion rather than pay per click will hurt spamboy advertisers in Facebook or Bing more than Google.
and will someone remove the 100$ limit in Adsense minimum revenue-the internet long tail doesnt end at the round number
But Google ‘s rumors of firing the guy who leaked the raise rumor is totally deception –
seems they are just plugging the leaks for hot new features to counter Gmail killers (where did we heard this phrase before) by
Mark “Still dont have a diploma from Harvard”
speaking of which if Facebook has 500 million unique customers logging and clicking ads (right)- how many unique customers search and click ads on Google. A histogram using a Monte Carlo would be nice- 🙂
DECISION STATS 