When I first began this site to monitor my online marketing progress I sat back to determine what metrics I should use to monitor progress. My first thoughts were about 50% right and 50% wrong. There are many statistics available for websites, however not all of them are relevant. Whether or not a statistic makes any sense for you depends on what your goal is.

As my site was new I thought it would be important to monitor site traffic, unique visitors, page views and other typical metrics. While these are valuable and can be used in many ways, such as encouraging advertisers to advertise, they alone are not metrics from which I can make decisions that will impact my main goal.

Determine Your Main Goal
Before you determine which metrics to utilize when monitoring your success and to make decisions from, you must first determine your goal. A site may offer a paid newsletter subscription, their goal would be to obtain new paid users. There are various steps in the process from a first time visitor through the final action of subscribing to a newsletter. In the case of this site the main goal is revenue. Simply tracking traffic to the site is not enough. Therefore should I really of cared about Alexa, Quantcast and Compete?

Alexa, Quantcast and Compete Do Not Matter
In the case of these tracking sites they track overall traffic but that is not the goal of this site. Having third party numbers showing that this site is visited more or less than another is not helpful. Alexa, Quantcast, and Compete have their uses. Alexa Rankings recently changed and Quantcast actually allows you to add code to your pages to add additional information to their statistics about your site. Why would you use them? Mainly to have a third party validate the web traffic to your site and Quantcast also provides information such as demographics about your site visitors. Useful for some purposes but not for this site.

Revenue Metrics
What matters in the case of this site is the ultimate goal of revenue and which metrics assist in determining how to optimize the revenue. If 100,000 people visit my site in one day and I do not generate revenue it does not matter if another 100,000 come the next day, so my Alexa ranking may be high but increasing my Alexa ranking through non converting traffic does me no good. Determining where my visitors come from, such as keywords in a search engine, what they do when they are here, and whether they ultimately end up increasing revenue for this site are the only metrics that matter.

Suggestion
I strongly suggest adding the Google Analytics code to your site. The information they gather is only accessible to you, a free statistics package from Google, and the information is invaluable. You cannot beat this free statistics package and you can better track the metrics that matter to your site.

When looking at sites that are well done, visually and from the perspective of obtaining new customers I came across DirectTV. Their site is an excellent example of a site focused on customer acquisition. Obviously a good service at a great price is important, however being able to convert a visitor into a customer with the proper messaging to get your offer across is an art form and Direct TV did it right.

Recently I came across the Direct TV site when I moved, purchased Direct TV and am very happy. I got two DVRs and hooked up the system to five TVs in the house.

Their Direct Satellite TV offer includes free DVR or HD upgrade, local channels are free and installation free. They have also decreased their monthly fees by $18 a month for 12 months and for three months you get HBO, Showtime and Starz. All of these offer points are front and center grabbing the attention of the visitor and I am guessing (as they convinced me) that their customer acquisition and conversion is very high.

This is a great site to use as an example when creating niche sites of your own to promote affiliate programs. Of course if you are in the market as I was for Directv Satellite take a look at their offers.

In-Text advertising is what Kontera is known for. You can make more money per page using their system and installing their code. Install once and generate revenue forever.

How Kontera Works
You place their code on your pages and Kontera will hyperlink, in other words make links on your pages clickable by visitors, to advertisers sites. For example, if you have the word baskets within a post on a page of yours they may make that link clickable because an advertiser paid to receive clicks on the word baskets.

How You Make Money With Kontera
When a visitor is on a page of yours and a word is hyperlinked by Kontera that catches the visitors attention they can place the mouse over the word. When they move over the word an advertisement pops up enticing them to click and learn more. The visitor, if they click, is taken to the advertisers site that bid on that keyword. Since the link is clicked the advertiser pays Kontera and Kontera splits the revenue with you. What is nice about this advertising is that you do not need to do anything and the advertisement is nothing more than a hyperlink of a word that is already in one of your articles and does not appear as additional advertising. This raises your page eCPM.

New Feature to Make You More Money
The more clicks, the more money you make. Kontera has added a new feature to make individuals more likely to click and there is nothing changed on your page. The information that is shown when someone moves the mouse cursor over the hyperlinked word is enhanced, call it a rich media experience if you will. Take a look at this image from Kontera of their newest feature:

The benefit is hopefully more clicks per page and more money for you per page and per visitor.

Total April revenue was $6,161.59, below is the April 2008 monthly summary in the quest for $10,000 a month in revenue, part time. We will be tracking the site growth both in traffic and revenue here on the about page. This site is unique, we show you exactly what our progress is towards $10,000 a month, in your spare time. We discuss what we tried, what worked or did not work. Of most interest is the marketing tests category, detailing tests and how they performed. The first month was September when the site launched on 9/4/07, which was a naked Word Press installation and much of September was spent tweaking the site.

April was an interesting month. Alexa rankings and website statistics changed and the site showed a better ranking. However I am focusing on better targeting my content more narrowly in search of quality traffic instead of mass traffic. I have found that when trying to maximize revenue through affiliate marketing and advertising the overall ranking of the site is not an indicator of revenue, which is probably obvious to most.

Therefore the ranking of the site as shown by Alexa, Quantcast or Compete, does not directly correlate with a sites revenue. I should either remove ranking or better yet I will probably just add other key metrics such as links in to the site from other sites, and metrics that better quantify the quality of the traffic and correlation of type of traffic to type of content. I am not entirely sure how to do that at this moment.

RSS subscriptions have increased significantly from 152 to 791 and the newsletter subscriptions have increased from 3,707 to 6,578. My rationale for this increase, and only a guess, is my focus on more targeted content is obtaining visitors interested in the content and therefore more likely to subscribe to the site RSS or the newsletter. Also, due to the faster growth in the newsletter I would conclude, another guess, that most visitors do not know what an RSS feed is and how to subscribe while everyone understands a newsletter. Just a guess, but it would explain the larger newsletter growth.

Looks like May is a month for obtaining more links in and working on site SEO, just like I said in April but did not put in as much time as I would have liked. I always like to point out that the above not only applies to this site longest.com but also the other niche sites I operate such as VentureCapitalUpdate.com. Overall I am happy as the total revenue was over $6,000.