And now for the stats

Finally we’ve come to the final part of the September update of Case 2008. In this post I’ll go into the stats and share with you how the performance of the site has been. The month has brought some great progress as well as decrease in income. However the decrease was expected but I’ll tell you more about that in a little while.

Kontera has been cancelled

Last month was my best month with Kontera ads. They brought in about $30 for about 3,700 pageviews. That is less than 1 cent per pageview. I normally believe that every little things helps but after doing the redesign I found that the many double-underlined Kontera links look spammy and most of them weren’t even related to the topic the site was covering. So I’ve decided to remove those links and I’ll just have to find that income in another way.

Adsense took a dive

Now unfortunately I can’t share all the stats with you due to Google’s TOS but it has, without any doubt, not been beneficial to the CTR that I changed the design and started adding ads to the sidebar.

If you remember last months update I had an Adsense income of $165. That was due to getting about 7 clicks per day in average with an average earning of a little over $5.3 per day.

Since I am now taking some of the visitor’s attention away to go look at the 125×125 ads the daily average income has fallen to $4.5 per day. This may not sound like that much but when I’ll show you the increase in traffic you see that (if you look solely on traffic) there should have been an increase in income and not a decline.

But as I said earlier a drop was to be expected when you make changes like this. When I’ve had the ads up for the next month or so, I’ll evaluate the stats and see whether it was a good decision or not.

Since I’ll still be working on attracting more traffic the jump in Adsense will just be bigger as soon as the ads are removed (I expect). When you are testing things some of them will work and some won’t. It might cost you a little in lost income but if you don’t test you won’t get the possible increase in income either.

Luckily there has been an increase in traffic

Even though Google updated the pagerank last weekend the site still has a pagerank of 2. I am actually quite pleased with that because I’ve seen several of my other sites decrease in PR and only a few increase. So keeping the status quo is great.

For most of September the Alexa pagerank has been at about 450k but over the last few days it dropped to 530k, which is almost the level of June. Now I don’t really care about the Alexa ranking but I track it just in case.

The increase in visitors has been about 13% but that is actually a low figure as September only has 30 days where August has 31 days.

Personally I think that the next thing is due to removing the Kontera ads as well as changing the design. The increase in pageviews has increase by almost 35% which is a huge increase compare to the smaller increase in visitors.

Since I changed a lot of things on the site simultaneously it is hard to what exactly created that increase but hopefully it stay when I look back on October in a months time.

Here is how to stats look in a table:

I won’t go too much into the number of indexed pages but merely point out that there has been an increase in indexed pages in Google of 100%. I’m not sure whether this is due to the additional content, the translated pages or a combination. Let’s just hope it sticks.

Ranking is an important part

Last month I decided to track and share a few more keyword phrases that I would be targeting and luckily I can now say that there has been an improvement in every single one of them. I track about 50 keywords phrases every week and most of these increases has happened within the last week.

I’ve added the main keyword phrase also (pet insurance) to see how I’m ranking on that. I’ll be the ultimate goal to have my site listed in the top 3 for the term “pet insurance”. Currently I’m at page 12.

To be quite honest I haven’t done as much promotional linkbuilding as I could have (and should have) and I believe that the increase in ranking in mainly due to a change in the sites internal linking structure. And as the site grows I expect this “power” to increase even further.

I have however started spending more time on getting external links so I expect to see an increase on most of the phrases (except those where I’m ranked second). Only time will tell. It doesn’t seem like my competitors are doing much work on there sites though.

What will happen in October?

Beside what I have already mentioned about article marketing and testing ads, I’ve begun the process of my product creation. The goal is the create an ebook that I can sell for somewhere between $37 – $67 (I’ll need to test that as well). Currently the site has about 600 pageviews of the front page and if I could just get a conversion rate of 1%, that would be about 6 sales and an income of somewhere between $222 – $402 and the potential will of course be even higher (more traffic / better conversion).

If you have any questions or there is something that you feel I haven’t covered in depth, then please let me know in the comments.

Take care,
Mikael