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Tracking and Establishing Your Visitor Value

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This is going to be a pretty brief post today, but if you would like more info on the topic just make sure and leave us some good comment feedback and we can do a follow-up and more in-depth post if you like…

Running a small business online can be extremely rewarding, but you have to have systems in place and metrics that you track so you know how to best administer your business. You know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out – well that certainly applies to business data. Specifically what we want to talk about today is VPV or Value Per Visitor, also called Revenue Per Visitor as well. Whatever acronym floats your boat is fine with us, but learn it, track it and use it – that’s what’s important.

SEO or organic search traffic is just one type of traffic out there – one of many. There are many forms of paid and advertising traffic models to pursue as well. But they can be very costly and without solid business metrics you’re really just throwing your money away. So establishing a value per visitor to you site becomes very relevant to site growth beyond a certain level.

Calculating Your Value per Visitor

Getting your value per visitor is really not hard. You simply need to know and track two numbers in order to calculate it – unique visitors per month, total revenue per month. Now there are endless variations to this formula, so just pick one that makes sense to you. Some like to see total visitors others prefer unique visitors. Some look at net profit per visitor and yet others look for simple gross revenue. Here’s our philosophy – KEEP IT SIMPLE! You can always improve it or complicate it (not necessarily the same thing) as time goes by, but the most important part is to get started. What we do is simply use unique visitors and gross revenue when we establish a VPV.

What and How to Use Value per Visitor Data

First, so that we’re all talking apples to apples here, let’s say that you have an affiliate site that is doing fairly well and is making $2500 a month in revenue from affiliate commissions and Adsense and that on average you have about 75 visitors a day to the site, or approximately 2280 per month. Your VPV = ($2500 / 2280) = $1.10 per visitor. This means that on average you earn $1.10 per every unique person that visits your site.

Now that you know the number, what do you do? Well, now you can go and play with some new paid traffic sources. When you setup campaigns whether they are in Adwords or other paid networks, you will have valuable data to use to estimate likelihood of profitability of those campaigns. You’ll know how much you can pay for keywords, for example.

Now is this an exact science? No, of course not. Each traffic source will have a different value. Organic traffic is highly targeted and some of the paid traffic sources are not, so you have to figure all of that into the equation. But the bottom line is that you have to START somewhere, and if you’re not tracking VPV now, you should be for a couple of reasons. For one, just by tracking it you will begin to pay more attention to it and start to think of creative ways to add upsells and introduce other products which can add to that VPV. Secondly you will begin to amass data that can be used to expand your traffic model from organic only, to a mix of paid and organic.

 

Tags: establishing visitor value, tracking visitor value, value per visitor, visitor value