What is average or good page views?

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nathan_nathaniel

Joined: Dec 19, 2006

# Posts: 4

Posted: 02/11/2007 07:48 am

I have a web site with fairly low traffic. On a good month I generate just over 50,000 page views. The average guest hits about 7 pages. Someone is asking me about advertising rates and I don't know what to tell them. Is 7 page views per guest a good number? Does it indicate a higher value in terms of advertising as opposed to 2 page views per guest? I did a lot of Google searching on this and got nowhere, so I thought I'd ask here for your expertise.

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excell

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Joined: Mar 19, 2001

# Posts: 14502

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Posted: 02/11/2007 08:34 am

hey - I consider 7 page views per average healthy.

What might be helpful is to focus in on a good average visitor session...

It doesn't really matter what the numbers are what you need to show is that targeted searches actually convert.

Does that make sense for you?

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SportsGuy

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Joined: Aug 30, 2002

# Posts: 3581

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Posted: 02/12/2007 07:00 am

Hey Nathan, as excel said, 7 page views per user is solid - very solid.

Yes, typically a site with more page views per user would indicate a higher value, but keep in mind that blogs typically have lower page view rates because of their design, so that "trend" is not set in stone anywhere. (My blog reference is just for balance.)

Now, as excel alluded to, the time each visitor spends on your website is important. If those 7 pages per user are being generated by a robot hitting pages for some reason, you'll see average user times hovering around a second or two. If actual users are reading the content, however, times should be in the several minute range - which would indicate a couple of things:

1 - users are reading the content
2 - the page views per user indicate a good amount of interactivity

So, based on what we know, this "could" be a very positive situation for you.

As for what to charge advertisers, that's a tougher nut to crack. If you had Google Adsense running on the website, this would give you an indication of how eager the users are to click on related advertising, and would allow you an easy place to start - you would simply charge enough to offset the Adsense revenue you were making, maybe a bit more.

Under no circumstances should normal advertisers pay less than what you are making with Adsense - if they're unwilling to pay, skip them.

Assuming the site in your profile is the one we're talking about here, I'm not seeing Adsense ads in place, so that benchmark is out.

At this point, it's a gut call on your part. Talk with the advertiser and ask them what their budget is for advertising. Try to find out what they're hoping to pay - $50/month, $100, $500, etc.

I know for my own website ad space starts at $500/month per advertiser. Since no one has stepped up to pay that (well, actually, I haven't contacted anyone to offer it, either), I stick with Adsense. I'd need 2 advertisers per month to equal my Adsense revenue on that website, and I'd probably go as high as 5 advertisers in rotation to allow good exposure for them, and good revenue for me - maybe 4 in rotation, but you see the idea.

Also, take into account your own expenses for operating the website - how much time does it require from you each month? What are your hosting costs? Do YOU do any marketing that costs you anything?

Lump it all together and come up with an idea of your actual monthly costs - this will be your bottom line number. If advertisers want on the site, this cost base, at a minimum, should be covered for you.

In the end, don't discount pulling a number out of thin air, as well. If you think $200/month is reasonable, then that's the number. Chances are that you'll find someone who'll pay for the space, but that again will take more time from you.

One final thought to bear in mind is how you will serve the ads on your site. You have a couple of options:

1 - hard code the ad directly into the page - the only way this makes any sense is if you have a series of "includes" set up. By doing this, you can edit the "include" to change the ad, and once that "include" is positioned on every page of the website, the ad will appear there. If you do not currently have includes for things like the header, nav area and footer, this should be your first step - learn how your particular setup uses them, create them and edit every page to allow them to be used. It might take some work now, but either way you'll be going down this path or a similar one to serve ads across the entire site.

2 - this option again will rely on includes to show ads across the entire site, but there's a twist in how the ads are served. If you want to show more than one advertiser on the website, you'll want what's commonly called "ad serving software". There are many out there, but the one I'm going to be implementing shortly on my own sites is phpads. It's free, comes on my server already (I have a dedicated server) and allows me one common point to input ads and generate the ad code to call the ad onto my webpages.

So the process would look something like this:

1 - Upload the ad into the phpads system
2 - Login to the system and select the ad code for the appropriate ad
3 - Insert this ad code into my header include, for example
4 - Make sure the files are saved live on the server
5 - Check the website for the new ad to be, in this example, showing in the common header across the site
6 - Click the ad to make sure it's going to the expected place

Now, this might seem like a LOT of work, but it's a process. Follow the steps and you'll be in fine shape when you're done.

Step 1 - make sure every page on the website has "includes" used on each page
Step 2 - stick the ad code (whether it's through an ad serving system, or just an image you're putting up and linking for an advertiser) into the appropriate space in the include.
Step 3 - check to see if it's live

That is, admittedly, simplified, but it'll get you started.

Before you take any money for ads, make sure you site is ready to show them site-wide.

If you need to build an include, it's pretty simple:

1 - open your favorite html editing software
2 - create a table in the size you want that fits the site
3 - create whatever you need to - if this header will include your nav items, put them all in here, etc.
4 - make sure you leave space for dedicated ads - the IAB has a list of commonly used ad sizes - start with this list and use sizes that make sense to you - bigger usually performs better, but it's your call.
5 - save the file as something (nav-include.html, for example)
6 - insert this into the space on the actual webpages by using the appropriate inclusion code. Here's what I use for my site hosted on a linux powered server - it's .php, but the principles are the same everywhere, just the actual code differs...

So, I have a folder called /includes/ and the file is called include_header.php.

My ad code resides inside this file, so I update one file and the ad appears across the entire website. I did, when I built the website originally, have to make sure that the include code was placed into every single page to make sure the include appeared on every single page, but now, it's a slick system that allows me to quickly update ads as needed.

Sorry if you already know all of this info Nathan - but I wanted to make sure the answer was as complete as possible for others.

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