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It’s nice to have a popular blog or website with many daily visitors and page views. Ultimately, most webmasters want to make money with their website. If you are not using your website to sell your own products or services, putting ads on your site can make you a nice return on all the hard work you’ve put into developing and marketing your website.

There are a number of different ad types you can use on your website and each has its own pro’s and con’s. I’ve discussed PPC ads before, today we’re taking a closer look at CPM ads.

CPM ads
CPM ads are ads that pay per ad view (CPM = Cost Per 1000 impressions) so it doesn’t matter if your visitors click on the ads. Your earnings are directly related to the number of visitors and page views you get on your website. A steady traffic stream will generate a steady income stream for you.

Different CPM programs offer different rates. A rate of, say, $2 CPM will not necessarily make you $2 for every 1000 page views on your website or blog though. The ad programs often pay different rates based on the location of the visitors. The $2 CPM offered might only apply to US based traffic, while visitors from the UK might only make you $1 CPM and Asian traffic could not be paid for at all.

If you want to optimize your ad income and the CPM ads you are running on your site are only paying for traffic from certain countries, it could be a good idea to only show the ads to visitors from the paying countries. The ad space could be used to display PPC ads to visitors from other countries. To do this you can use the free ip2nation database which lets you look up the visitors country based on their ip-address. A simple php program can then be used to display ads based on the visitors country.

Another thing to look into when selecting an ad publisher network to sign up with, is how exactly is the traffic measured. They might not count every page view, but only the unique visitors per day. A single visitor looking at 100 pages on your website could only count as a single view instead of 100. So, the ad network advertising with higher CPM rates might bring in less money than the one with lower rates. Have a good look at the details of the program you sign up with.

I recently helped David, who runs a nice recipe site at ChefPla.com, setting up his blog feeds with FeedBurner. The problem with his rss feed was the lack of reporting available in standard website statistics software. When using something like AwStats, which is what most hosting companies provide, you can only see the number of hits on your rss feed. FeedBurner provides a little more insight in how your rss feed is being used.

David noticed some issues with his rss feeds. I thought I’d share my response here with you. Here’s part of the e-mail I received from David:

…
There are a couple of issues I have noticed with the rss feed.

• The number of subscribers is below 10 still, but it fluctuates from day to day so I do wonder how accurate the information is.

…

The fluctuating subscriber numbers in FeedBurner are easy to explain: the provided subscriber count is simply the number of people who have accessed your rss feed on any given day. This might come as a shock to some of you, but not everyone is on the internet every day. So, a rss feed subscriber count of ten, two days in a row, could mean you have 10 subscribers. But it is also quite possible that the ten people who accessed your rss feed on day one are not online the second day. Ten other people might have accessed your feed on the second day, bringing your total subscribers count to 20 people.

The problem with accurately tracking the subscriber count is the limited information available to the feed provider. The only things we can track are the software used to read the feed (although, as pretty much any information send over the internet, this can be faked) and the ip address of the computer accessing the feed. I don’t think there is something similar to the cookies used in browsers in use in feed reader software, and even if there is: this would still not guarantee a 100% reliable way of tracking subscribers. I think the service provided by FeedBurner is as close to reliable subscriber tracking as you can get.

But even if we know that the reported subscriber numbers aren’t very accurate, we can use the reporting available to look at the bigger picture. Over time, if you are doing it right, you should see a general upward trend in the reported subscriber numbers.