Month: June 2017

What is a good RPM or eCPM for a website?

One of the most common questions I see from digital publishers is, “what is a good RPM or eCPM for my website?” I completely understand this sentiment. RPMs (rate per mille) and eCPMs (effective cost per mille) are standard advertising metrics for how much an advertiser is paying for ad impressions on publisher’s page. The problem with this question is that it requires a lot more data to provide a really good answer.

Below, I’ll highlight all the different things that need to be considered when determining what a good RPM or eCPM might be for your particular website or web page. I’ll also discuss why publishers should actually be focusing on a different metric instead when trying to ultimately maximize the value of the inventory on their website or web page long term.

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Create A Newsletter That Brings More Website Traffic

If you’re a good publisher, you already know all about the top modern traffic-building techniques; like advanced keyword research and optimizing titles to maximize your SERPs (search engine results page, if you’re not sure what that acronym means). It’s a key part of any traffic building strategy and can really help you get more and more people coming to your site and reading your content. So why would you do something old and stuffy like create a newsletter?

Of course, getting people to your site, getting them to trust you, and delivering an excellent experience is a completely different story. Many publishers focus on new visitor flows at the cost of potentially damaging long-term relationships, or as us MBA types would say, ignoring that customer acquisition costs are almost always higher than customer retention costs.

Below, I’ll highlight how you can create a newsletter that builds traffic to your website using your most loyal user base. I’ll show you why all the major brands are re-focusing their attention on this important category.

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Recover From “Two-Click” AdSense Penalty

Publishers leveraging Google AdSense ad units on their site have recently noticed a new Google penalty affecting their ad earnings. Both AdSense publishers, and larger publishing groups that leverage Google AdX  (and serving AdSense ad units), were caught off guard by this latest change. This penalty is often referred to as the “Two-Click” AdSense Penalty.

Below, I’ll show you exactly what the penalty is, how to check if you’re being affected by it, and what to do in case you want to remove the AdSense penalty. Continue reading “Recover From “Two-Click” AdSense Penalty On Mobile”

Maximizing Digital Revenue Using Often Neglected Insights

If you’re a creative type, it’s easy to get into the groove of writing, publishing, publicizing, and repeating. We’ve been told for many years that content is king and that more content = more traffic. The problem is, just like a book author who never reads reviews and never listens to feedback from readers, not paying attention to feedback is a bad idea; especially when it comes to maximizing digital revenue.

Imagine how much better a book author gets when they listen and learn from their readers. Now, picture how beneficial it is as an online publisher to do the same: analyze your site traffic, identify which topics resonate the most with your visitors, and see which ones are really contributing the most to the bottom line.

This is not going to be some boring old post about analyzing traffic or CPM’s (or RPM’s). In the text below, I’ll highlight some metrics, math, and insights that most publishers fail to take into account when they create new content, try to maximize the value of their existing content, and think strategically about the future of their site. Continue reading “Maximizing Digital Revenue Using Often Neglected Insights”

Data Science & Artificial Intelligence In Digital Publishing

It’s been said that marketers ruin everything. I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but am willing to admit that modern marketers can certainly make it difficult to fully understand nuanced subjects on sophisticated topics like artificial intelligence and data science. Digital publishers are now starting to see just how muddy these waters are getting…

My good friend John Cole was on a recent AdMonsters panel with Google discussing the growth of data science and emergence of artificial intelligence in the digital publishing space. The conversation got quite interesting when they really started to define what these terms actually mean (vs. what marketers will tell you they mean).

Below, I’ll share a couple of things that came up during that panel, as they were interesting and bring to light some of the issues I think a lot of digital publishers are struggling with. I’ll also highlight some examples of how these technologies and concepts can be applied to modern digital publishing operations.

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 Common Causes for Google Traffic Drops

One a weekly basis, I talk to digital publishers that have seen a major drop in either traffic or revenue (commonly both). They’re trying to decipher why they’ve experienced the sudden shift. In many cases, the seemingly unprecedented change leads publishers to assume that the problem is related to Google traffic drops (search mainly) and that the corresponding drop in revenue is directly tied to this change.

What I’ve come to learn from hundreds and hundreds of these cases over the years is that every problem is relatively unique; however, there are usually some pretty easy ways to zero in on the exact issue causing the drop in traffic and revenue.

The secret to quickly solving these problems is approaching them like a puzzle. You cannot start with an immediate, blind assumption. You have to start with the data first and work backward. In this article, I’ll help you start with the most common ways you can start this analysis.

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YouTube SEO Tips & Tricks

As a publisher, there are a lot of different channels you can use to get the word out and reach your audience. Lots more than yet another blog post, that’s for sure. It’s more work, but I’ve become quite a fan of video and have a thriving YouTube video channel where I produce and share consumer electronics reviews every week to thousands of viewers and fans. You can have a quick peek: AskDaveTaylor on YouTube.

Most YouTubers will tell you that producing even a fantastic video is only half the work required to have good results on a popular Google-owned site that’s been the #2 most popular site on the entire Web for many years.

You also have to approach posting a video as a search engine optimization project too. Yup, YouTube SEO is a thing, and not just for Google search itself. In fact, YouTube SEO applies to everywhere your customers might be searching for your product, service or information. Including Facebook, Twitter, even Pinterest descriptions and Pinboard names.

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