As advertising has in the large part shifted away from CPM deals to CPC and CPL/CPA type campaigns so too have the metrics you should be forcussing on. Traffic is no longer order of the day, now Targetted Traffic is far more important even if the overall levels are lower.

This was reinforced for me at the beginning of this month, when I sat down and went through traffic and revenue figures for all the individual Inter Sites for March 2009. One of the smaller sites in the network had the following traffic figures for March 2009:

• Vists – 775
• Pageviews – 1813

Not very impressive by itself, but over the same period this site did the following revenue:

• Affiliate – £110.43
• Paid Search – £15.86
• Adsense – £3.88 (based on a rough £1 to $1.50 conversion)

That’s a £130.17 from 775 visits or approximately 17 pence per visitor to the site. I won’t give you the exact site, but it’s a small niche that pulls in a small amount of organic and type-in traffic.

Now obviously if that was your only site, you wouldn’t be retiring anytime soon, however consider in this case it’s just one of 520 sites in the network currently and the figures start to look more interesting.

Another thing to note is that with such few visits, you’re not chalking up large bandwidth bills, or hardware costs even when you scale up (and more on scaling up in a post soon). Lastly look at the breakdown between affiliate sales, paid search and adsense. As I’ve stated before, if you’re only relying on Adsense and looking at getting lots of traffic to make any significant money, you should look again and see if you have very specific traffic that might convert well into an affilate based sale.