Using Adsense stats as a business development tool

This afternoon I decided to set up historical records of Adsense earnings for my top performing websites over 2007.

I’m not a high-flyer in SEO - I spend all my time working on development projects rather than posturing - and while I’m certainly not a top Adsense earner, the revenues are enough to make Google my biggest single client by a longshot.

The results are illuminating, and have already prompted me to consider prioritising changes to sites, future development projects, and serve as overall investment and business development indicators.

While I own a number of websites, Adsense earnings across them follows a longtail that makes their earnings on lower quality sites less than significant, and 97% of my earnings comes from just 20 websites.

These are my higher end projects, part of my program of being a serious internet publisher, whether via news sites, forums, blogs, or a combination of all three. All of my sites are information-based, and none sell any products or services.

Yet after number crunching this afternoon the Adsense stats have given clear indicators on where I need to focus or rethink my publishing program.

There are two main areas I’m pushing as a publisher: finance, and technology, and you can see the earning stats over 12 months here (details removed to stay within TOU):

Finance (top) - Technology (bottom)

As you can see from the graphs, in each sector I have a leading website, which far outperforms the others.

The main finance site lost a little revenue this month, but as staggered earnings are typical, I’m not going to worry unless I see a continued downtrend, which may be due to credit crunch conditions adversely affecting advertiser spend more than anything else.

On the technology graph, the meteoric rise of the leading site was obvious enough just looking at figures that I grabbed the iron while hot. I bought out a potential rival last month for nearly $20k and merged it with the existing site, which has caused a further acceleration of revenues.

There is also another strong tech site which again requires that I keep monitoring it and consider ways to improve the user experience.

The really interesting stats come from looking at the lower-end sites close up:

Finance (leading site omitted)

The strong rise of the site represented by the dark blue line demonstrates a site I must prioritise investment in. This means pushing content further, and maybe some high-end link work.

Interestingly enough, it also shows a couple of sites which have shown steady and continued groath in revenues, and I already had it in mind that I should look to redevelop these sites with better presentation, namely on internal navigation, to make the sites more useful for human users - and the graph confirms my intuition.

A number of newer sites are also shown, which have steady but uncertain growth patterns at present.

The really interesting aspect is the weak light blue line. This shows a site and sector that has shown little growth, when an established website should show some form of steady growth. Already I have to ask whether continuing this site is worth the investment, and whether I should either kill it or sell it. I’ll defer that decision to prioritise on the above pointers.

Technology (leading sites omitted)

The technology graph is also really interesting in terms of analysing strong and weak points.

Three sites, represented by dark purple, dark brown, and light blue lines, are showing strong growth curves. Stronger advertising spend for Christmas or stronger traffic and presence? Immediately I should cross-reference these with traffic, and if traffic is also growing well, prioritise these sites for further redevelopment to improve the user experience, and encourage further traffic growth on the assumption that this will help revenue growth.

There are also two sites showing a downturn, but overall movement. Should I prioritise redevelopment for these?

No.

Here’s my thinking - strong sites getting stronger represent opportunity. Opportunity demands to be seized when present, so that such sites can have their strengths accelerated.

That doesn’t mean to say I’m abandoning sites that perform weaker, but it does suggest that while I do need to look at whether I can improve these sites, I should focus on the stronger of these weaker performers first.

More interestingly, because each site covers a different niche or vertical, I can already see which areas perform best overall.

For example, among the finance sites, investment related generally perform more poorly than personal finance related.

Because of this it has shaped my publishing strategy - I had been keyed into developing another site in the investments space, covering a different niche spread. Looking at the Adsense, I cannot justify the investment.

Instead, everything points to development in publishing personal finance sites, which is actually what some of those newer sites on the graph are.

This also suggests I should look at niches in personal finance that I have no specific presence in, and ask whether I should test development in these areas.

Overall, we already know the usefulness of data, and because I spent time this afternoon using my earnings data as a publisher and advertiser, it has already lead to some key business decisions, such as:

1. Validating some existing strategies
2. Highlighting areas that must be prioritised for further attention
3. Highlighting areas that also require further attention
4. Illustrating which areas can support further investment, and which areas to avoid.

I appreciate that as a blog post this may all seem very self absorbed, but as someone who tends to act intuitively rather than scientifically, it’s interesting to see how the application of temporal data can justify, modify, and change my business decisions.

With proper care and attention, I should therefore be able to use this data to make business decisions, invest better as a business, and overall help strengthen my position in tackling long term goals as both a publishers and advertiser.