A CPM comparison

by Sapphire (February 14, 2008)

A few months ago, I wrote about my BlogHer earnings, and how far off the pageviews according to AwStats were from what BlogHer calculates, which resulted in around $200 of actual earnings for over 341k pageviews (according to AwStats). Of course, no stats package is 100% accurate (it’s a matter of opinion what counts as a real visitor), and not every pageview AwStats records even allows the ad to fully load.

So for the two sites I have running BlogHer CPM ads (my only CPM right now - I still earn much more with them than other networks), I set up Quantcast tracking. Quantcast’s stats tracking turns out to be extremely conservative. Not quite as conservative as BlogHer, but you’ve got to figure someone who’s paid by advertisers is going to use the most strict tracking package available, and I can’t blame them. Plus, they’re geo-targeting and so on, which narrows it even further.

But the point is, Quantcast’s current monthly average pageview stat on both sites is within a few thousand of what BlogHer reports for last month. So it’s a lot closer than AwStats.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. I took Quantcast’s number for average monthly pageviews for each site and divided that number by the amount of money each site made from BlogHer last month. Not a perfect comparison, but good enough to notice some trends:

Site #1
Monthly Page Views: 28,462
Earnings: $54
Per Pageload: $0.0019134

Site #2
Monthly Page Views: 3,879
Earnings: $13
Per Pageload: $0.0034918

The site with lower traffic (#2) is earning a good bit more per pageview than the site with higher traffic. Which means if that trend keeps up, when Site #2 has that much traffic, it’ll bring in more income than the first site. (Yes, the overall earnings are really sad on both sites, but let’s face it: CPM is only really worthwhile when you have many thousands - maybe millions - of page hits. But that doesn’t stop me from playing with it.)

So what’s different about these two sites:

• Niche. They’re in different advertising hubs on BlogHer and Site #2 does seem to have more lucrative campaigns.
• Spam. Site #1 gets mountains of spambot hits, which may inflate pageviews without actually letting the page fully load to show the ad. Site #2 is newer and less popular with the lunatic fringe.
• Pageviews per person. Site #1 gets more pageviews per person than Site #2. You’d think that’s a good thing, but it might be because people leave more comments on Site #1, which reloads the page and causes a pageview that might be very brief (just long enough to see the comment posted) or hit some kind of filter in the CPM stats as just being a refresh, if such a thing exists. (Surely it does, or you could just sit there all day reloading pages.)
• Site #1 has a lot of plugins that call the feed which might generate valueless pageviews. I’m not sure if they inflate pageviews, but the homepage features the feeds from several categories, the sidebars have recent comment-type plugins, etc., and I have a feeling AwStats definitely counts those as hits (but don’t know about Quantcast).
• And until recently, Site #2 had a cleaner, more SEO-friendly theme than Site #1. That doesn’t seem like it would make a big difference unless it’s causing slow loads (which it didn’t, to my knowledge), but who knows.

Any other ideas what I should look at for comparison?
-Until last night, BohRev’s theme has always been a LOT cleaner.

Posted in Traffic
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