Interested in growing your advertising revenue? Start by tracking these key website metrics.
Magazine publishers who want to get as much value from their publications as possible should be tracking certain website metrics. In this article, we will explore the website metrics that magazine publishers who are generating revenue through display advertising should be paying close attention to.
Magazine publishers are always looking to boost the bottom line. Thankfully, digital publishers have a leg up on print publishers because they have access to more relevant metrics that can guide their monetization strategies. With an established plan to monitor the results of digital advertising campaigns, publishers can prove how well the ads that are running on their websites are performing.
Tracking relevant metrics is how publishers can hone in on which types of content or products are most successful. Metrics are also useful as digital publishers strategize how they will continue to monetize their websites going forward.
The following five metrics are important for digital magazine publishers who generate revenue through display advertising.
5 Website Metrics for Magazine Publishers
1. Total Website Traffic
Total website traffic is the measurement of the number of unique visitors who arrive at a website. This metric is an accumulation of a number of traffic sources, including:
- Referral
- Social
- Organic
- Paid search
- Direct
2. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate tracks the percentage of website visitors who land on your site, perform no action, and then leave. Google calculates bounce rates as single-page sessions divided by all sessions. The bounce rate for a page is based only on sessions that start with that page.
Having a high bounce rate means that visitors think the quality of the page is low, so they click away without engaging or completing any actions. It could also mean that the audience on the page isn’t matching the purpose of the page. This is often the case when the keywords that are driving search traffic are irrelevant. Having a high bounce rate will have a negative impact on your ability to generate sustainable revenue through digital advertising channels.
3. Page Value
Page value is a metric that magazine publishers don’t often discuss. Google defines page value as the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an e-commerce transaction. The value is meant to give the publisher an idea of which pages on his or her site contributed the most to the site’s revenue. For example, magazine publishers can see which landing page is driving the most subscription sales by tracking page value.
To calculate page value, you can follow this equation from Google.
4. Impressions
Impressions is a metric that most digital publishers have heard of before. When businesses run ads on a publisher’s website, they want to know the number of impressions over a given period of time. The term “impressions” refers to the individual ad transaction, or how many times the content (usually an ad) has been viewed.
Because display advertising is usually sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis, it is important that digital magazine publishers accurately track impressions and report back on the metric to their advertising clients.
5. Conversions
Conversions are completed activities, like purchase transactions or email signups. Magazine publishers should be tracking conversions for their advertising clients and for themselves. How many readers signed up for an email newsletter after seeing a pop-up ad or after visiting a targeted landing page? That information can influence the development of future marketing initiatives.
In order to calculate conversions, magazine publishers need to have a specific campaign goal. With that goal in mind, publishers can calculate conversion rates by taking the number of conversions (for example, ebook downloads or newsletter signups) and dividing that by the number of total interactions during the same time period. If a publisher had 100 conversions and 1,000 interactions over the course of one day, then the conversion rate would be 10%.
To make conversion tracking simpler, publishers can use Google’s free conversion tracking tool.
Which website metrics do you track on a daily basis? Contact our team here at Web Publisher PRO and let us help you develop a more strategic monetization strategy that takes into account the most relevant web metrics.
