I communicate with my ad company, do you?
Writers and bloggers will always be fascinated by statistics and I always recommend to use them as a guide, don’t get caught up in them because accuracy will always be an issue.
There is a problem: what do you do if you want to monetize your site and advertising companies you use rely on third party statistics that are not accurate? Paul Stamatiou and Josh Pigford raise the question about Alexa statistics, and how inaccurate Alexa can be. What does a blogger/writer do if Alexa is showing inaccurate stats and the advertising company you use relies on Alexa and other third party services? Good question.
Since I use Text Link Ads on this site I decided to ask Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, how the company deals with issues like this. Seriously, I manage my site and the more information I have the better I can do it.
Tyme: Alexa obviously has accuracy issues – all of them do. Anything with a toolbar can be gamed. Technorati has their issues too. For example, if a site has a high number of inbound links because the blogger requested people to write a review of their site, which many feel is another way of “gaming” the system. Does TLA and Review me have other methods in place to ensure that sites are judged fairly? If so, can you share a little bit about how sites are judged/priced?
Patrick: We agree Alexa is not a perfect solution for gauging a website’s traffic. A perfect example is a blog devoted to Apple users whose user base will be heavy FireFox users not using the Alexa toolbar. Because of this the Alexa ranking for this blog will be disproportionately high compared to say a blog about Microsoft. We understand this so Alexa ranking is not the only criteria we use when pricing our publisher’s websites for our products.
We use a combination of: The website’s theme, location of the ads, number of ads to be sold, Alexa ranking, Technorati rank, and a measure of the website’s link popularity. We have an algorithm that prices our inventory based on these many criteria. The results are never perfect but by taking in six data points it can help even out some of the disparities that happen with Alexa data alone.
Six different data points - that makes me feel better but I can see where more metrics will have to be used to better screen sites initially because those things can be gamed. Getting your site accepted might be a challenge but honestly, it should be. If you’ve already been accepted, how do you make sure your site is getting the best advertising deals?
Text-Link Ads has a blog with a wealth of information on how to optimize your site and increase traffic. Subscribe to the feed. After going through the blog, do the one thing most people don’t do. Take some responsibility in the monetization of your site and work with the advertising company to get the most out of it. That’s the main point of this entry. Most people slap code on the sidebar and then complain on how it doesn’t perform. Or worse, move the ads around for a month and because there isn’t instant change become frustrated. I see my relationship with TLA like a partnership and I expect them to do their part and I have a responsibility as well. I actually have to manage my site and work with them for optimal success. If you are using a company that you can’t interact with, well…why would you do that?
I had a question, I asked, I received an answer. When I start optimizing this site I will (after looking over the blog) most likely have some more. I know one thing, I’m not going to throw code up blindly and pray it works.
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