I track AdSense on quite a few sites. Here’s how I parse the data:

• Make sure you set up channels for each site and ad unit. This is absolutely essential.
• Look at your thirty day totals by channel/site to determine highest performing site(s)
• Remember that Google measures by impression not page view. Three units per page (the max they allow) means 3 impressions per page view
• Google eCPM rate is your earnings per 1000 impressions. If you have three units per page then you have to triple that number to get your average revenue per page view

An example: We have a top performing site that, using the tools above, returns 4.8 cents per page view or $48 per 1000 page views. This was surprising to me but the knowledge meant that we needed to focus a lot more attention on driving traffic to this site since even a slight daily bump adds up really fast.

The same site averages 2.9 page views per visit so a visit is worth an average of $.14. A thousand visits a day is worth around $140 so spending anything up to that amount daily to drive traffic is worth it, remembering that sites generating $50,000 in annual revenues (which is about what those 1000 visits per day gets you) are worth a multiple of those revenues to a buyer, probably at least $300k. You could argue that spending far more to drive traffic makes sense because you’re losing in the short term (aka, investing) but building equity in the long term.

Know your numbers- you can easily set up a spreadsheet to track them.

BTW, the site I’m using as an example is in an enormous, information-hungry consumer market involving a lot of spending. I’ve also left affiliate revenue out of the equation to simplify things.

Overall the OMMA Publisher Conference was very worthwhile. The panel discussion on ad networks became extremely heated and then finally crescendoed with Adventive’s David Koretz challenging Rocket Fuel’s Richard Frankel to “make history” by guaranteeing to double CPMs for publishers on their own network.

I was very surprised at what a crazy low-tech world the advertising industry is still living in. There are huge inefficiencies in the display ad transaction process and an overall lack of dialog and bad communications happening in the media buy process. They are still relying on fax machines to get deals done. Fax machines! One panel speaker mentioned that he’d love it if someone could just design a simple way for buyers to easily do deals. The industry needs to figure out how to transact in a more digital way.

Yahoo’s panelist provided the take-away quote for me:
“Give the consumer a gift. Make advertising a gift to the consumer.”

We topped off the launch with a private party in San Francisco’s famous Starlight Room at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel where the famous rock jazz pianist Eric Lewis tore down the house. ELEW’s performance was unforgettable. It was an exciting end to an exciting launch.

A scan of my exhibitor badge for Ad Tech San Francisco 2009

CEO David Koretz talking with media buyers about Adventive's new technology.

Celebrating at the Starlight Room at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel after the show.

This is the super top-secret project that I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. I’m heading to San Francisco this morning with the team so that we can officially launch the new company tomorrow at ad:tech.

Adventive delivers a completely new form of online advertising that provides measurable impact on revenue for publishers and advertisers alike, while providing an engaging brand experience in which advertising feels like features. Adventive’s transaction technology enables publishers to sell a greater proportion of their inventory as premium, and lets advertisers capture transactions within the ad unit at the moment the user demonstrates intent, rather than just capturing clicks.

Learn more about Adventive

I’m jazzed that our “I Hate Advertising Networks” buttons arrived today. For some insider background surrounding the controversy, check out David’s article on MediaPost entitled, “Ad Networks Are For Idiots — And Here’s The Math To Prove It“. The website, and the company, Adventive, is launching next Monday, so stay tuned.