Increase Income by Understanding Numbers

March 24, 2007 • Filed in: Thoughts & Relationships

Last Tuesday evening I watched the first 4 episodes of the TV series ‘Numbers’ on DVD. I didn’t intend to watch all those episodes. It just turned out that as I got home, no one was watching TV and I wasn’t sleepy yet. My intention was just to watch one episode until I got drowsy.

Bad idea. It turned out to be one long night. The more I watched the show, the more fascinated I became with Mathematics and Statistics. It made me think more. Did you realize that the more you thought about something, the harder it is to sleep? The mind simply worked and I became restless.

I loved the first episode in which the Charlie (the mathematician) statistically predicated the location of a serial rapist. It was intellectually awesome. The geekiness in me wondered how I could apply similar principles online? How could I use numbers to earn more income?

Then I realized, I’m already doing it. Remember that I started conducting a design test last week? I found out some interesting stats based on it.

Since October 2006, I was using the Water Wordpress Design Theme. I had some good click through rate numbers. Clickthrough rate(CTR) is the percentage of advertisements or other content a user clicks on or chooses to view. If your website showed advertisements 100 times and visitors clicked on it 10 times, then that’s a 10% Clickthrough rate . Get it?

My clickthrough numbers were pretty decent before my design changes. I decided to try tweaking the design a bit to see if I could improve the CTR. Higher CTRs generally mean a higher payout on Adsense earnings.

After one week of testing, the new design faired badly. My CTR went down at least 2%.

This week, I have again made some design changes on the Ad placements. I’ll see if the numbers improve. I have yet to see the verdict. I’ll give you an update if I see any positive changes on the bottom line.

This continuous testing is actually one of the more exciting (and addicting) aspects of web marketing. Online marketing is scientific - data is collected and results can easily be measured. When you monitor your CTR and income daily, you realize that small changes in the web site results in visible changes in daily income. It’s like a continuous game to get high CTR. I consider it similar to playing a game of minesweeper. You see certain patterns while you make changes. It’s really intellectually fun.

To give you an idea, I have one other website that gets a much higher CTR. I based the new design here on that other website. I found it surprising that I didn’t get the same CTR levels. The other website doesn’t get as much traffic as this one. That may actually be a factor. I’ll try to find a pattern and predict some figures based on the data I collect.

Right now I’ll just keep collecting data and check numbers. I hope to find a pattern that will earn me more Adsense income. I fancy myself a mathematician now.