The site is climbing back up to its normal revenues of $7,000+ and conversion rates are back up.
I cover the following in this month’s case study update:
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) review
- Traffic and revenue update
- Planned site audit
For the previous update (October 2020), check out this post, or check out all the posts here.
📊 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Review
It’s always good to step back and take a birds-eye view of the metrics (i.e., KPIs). For more metrics and charts, check out the dashboard.
Business KPIs:
- Avg. monthly revenue (est.): $7,000
- Avg. monthly pageviews (est.): 30,000
- Avg. monthly revenue/visitor (est.): $0.23
- Number of articles: 568
- Word count (total): 895,574
- Average word count per article: 1,576
P&L KPIs:
These are KPIs from January to November 2020:
- Revenue: $103,549
- Costs: $13,148
- Profit: $90,401
Domain KPIs:
- Domain age: 2006-10-17 (14 years old)
- Total backlinks: 11,800
- Referring domains: 842
- AHREFs DR: 44
- Ahrefs UR: 49
- Notable backlinks: CNN, NY Times, Wikipedia, US Embassy, NBC, CBC, AARP, CreditCards.com, Business Insider, among others
📊 November 2020 Traffic and Income Stats
Pageviews
- May 2020: 40,316
- June 2020: 33,103
- July 2020: 33,367
- August 2020: 31,084
- September 2020: 27,032
- October 2020: 29,306
- November 2020: 30,016
November 2020:
Year to date traffic:
💰 Revenue
The revenue is back up. This is primarily due to the affiliate tracking link issue discussed in the October update being fixed.
Last 12-mo P&L
📅 November 2020 Happenings
Video Ads Removed
It’s been shown that display/video ads due not impact affiliate ad revenue. Therefore, I tested video ads on the website in November.
Unfortunately, the earnings were way too low to justify keep them on. Here is the snapshot from the video provider:
This website has a revenue per visitor (KPI) of $0.247. This equates to an RPM of $247. At a minimal RPM of $0.39, video ads are just not providing any significant upside.
👉 Planned Site Audit
I like to do an annual site audit to put together an improvement plan. These tasks will be done over the course of a few months. Here they are:
- Content audit: With 568 articles, only a handful bring in traffic. A content audit will categorize which content needs to be updated, deleted and 301 redirected or kept as-is. I do this every 6-months.
- Backlink audit: I like to disavow via Google Search Console periodically any low-quality links. This is done every 3-6 months.
- Interlinking: As content gets added, they need to be linked. I use Link Whisper to achieve this. This should be done monthly. For this site, I’ve been doing it every 3 months.
- Review revenue sources: Every 6 months, I look over the revenue data to see what programs on specific pages are converting better than others. Then, I adjust accordingly.
- Find new revenue sources: This is done periodically as need on a per-page basis. But every 6 months, I like to see what other affiliate programs I can try as my traffic intent, pages, etc change across the entire site.
- New content opportunities: This is done periodically. However, on a large-scale, I like to look at this every 6-months to see what “pillar” content needs to be added (e.g., category silo pages).
If you have a few sites, then these tasks can be done monthly. However, as you build a portfolio of sites, it’s important to figure out what are the immediate easy wins vs long-term easy wins. Focus on the immediate wins every month, and plan out the long-term wins.
Wrap Up
That’s it for this update.
