April 2006 Site Success Recap

April was a pretty slow month overall, but thanks to some serious tweaking during the month, May has had a good start as we’re already ahead of last month.

As you might recall, I renegotiated our contract with contextual link provider, Vibrant Media. Before, we were receiving CPC revenue. That means that for every click that we received, we would receive a certain percentage of the cost of that click, as dictated by the advertiser. Instead, Futurelooks is now receiving a set dollar amount for every thousand impressions.

We’ll start with a quick comparison of a month without the month in the middle, and a full month with the CPM arrangement:

February - CPC TOTAL: $13.49 USD

March - CPM TOTAL: $651.06 USD (partial month)

April - CPM TOTAL: $772.78 USD (full month)

As you can see, Vibrant has become quite the power house, adding a good chunk of change to the bottom line. Not bad for a program that I rarely pay attention to. For other webmasters, it might be worth it to see who your worst performers are and give it a tweak. Also, dusting off those soft skills to negotiate with your advertisers might not be a bad idea.

Laptop Lifestyle was up over last month! This month, we did over 31,572 page views: 20,000 over last month. The reason for this was the article we submitted to DIGG. It got to front page and totally spiked our traffic for the week.

The month ended up with $158.65 USD from a combination of Google Adsense, KONTERA Text Links, and Dealtime. CPM was not good this month. We did more traffic, but we got a much lower eCPM even though click through rate was up. We chalk this up to the slow Google month. The money just wasn’t there. However, in the big scheme of things, any monetary increase is good.