Revenue per thousand visitors - is this a good benchmark

[Elaine]

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I do wonder whether I am now a 'player' in this industry and how would I tell!

Everyone - understandably - is cagey about specifics - how many visitors, earnings etc - 1000 visitors per day on one site might be brilliant - but absolutely pants on another.

If we coud introduce a way of assessing how well we are doing in comparison to an average it may well spur some folk on to take their site(s) to the next level or peruade others to get the basics right.

Would a poll (a serious one) re how much actual earnings per thousand visitors be a good benchmark?

You would then know whether you really needed to work on your content to get the basic earnings up or just concentrate on getting more visitors to your site.

The only downside to this type of exerise is the numptys who find it amusing to distort the findings - this is a good reason to have a 'pay only' section of the forum - really serious affiliates certainly wouldn't mind parting with a few bob.

[999gi]

Sounds like a good idea but Id suggest splitting into separate polls for different areas as some areas would show much higher returns than others.
e.g. Finance would show higher than shopping

[Rich]

The only problem I see with the above is on some sites I get a lot of traffic that isn't looking to buy. In one case less than 1% of visitors click out to a merchant, let alone order anything. So the better you are at SEO the more non-buying traffic you will get (not that I'm any good at at SEO!).

The reverse argument is, if my merchant links arn't appealling to 99% of the traffic I'm getting then I'm not trying hard enough!

I think it would have to be profit per 1000 visitors as some of the higher earning markets (loans, etc) tend to have higher costs of getting visitors to the affiliate site. I'm not sure how much the figure will vary by markets.

Having said all that, I still think it would be a useful comparison and probably the best that can be done without giving specifics.

[Jean]

Elaine, this is a good question and certainly one that would help us newbies. I look forward to a good response.

[Mogga]

Elaine -
http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup

Check out your rank on that. Thats usually a good indication of whether you're a player or not!

[drivetowin]

Mogga

That's true up to a point but Elaines question is about earnings per 1,000 visitors - yeah you could get 2 million visitors a day and rank highly in Alexa but your earnings per 1,000 visitors could be crap compared with someone much lower in Alexa rankings.

I know from personal experience that you have to take Alexa rankings with a pinch of salt too - one of my sites is in the top 300,000 of Alexa yet another site which is 1,000,000 places lower gets three times the traffic and generates about five times the revenue