Today I’ve been looking through my stats for the previous month to try and indentify which sites are making money and which are losing me money.

It was quite depressing reading.

Lots of my sites are ranked quite well for their keywords but either get very little traffic or if they do get the hits hardly make any sales.

You put in the work to setup a site, get it ranking ok, keep the products up to date and add content but still the visitors do not come or when they do they don’t buy anything.

I think my sites do add something to the user experience: they gather together all the products of one type from lots of different merchants and lay them out clearly in one place, sorted by price, so the user can see them all in one place and what is in their price range.

This is a rather negative post from me and I know I am one of the lucky ones who has managed to make a few quid from this game so shouldn’t complain but the more you try to analyse things to see how you can improve what you have the more I seem to realise how random things seem to be in what makes a good niche or site and what doesn’t.

But I will keep going. For now my main focus is getting my Christmas site up to scratch and also trying to get all my existing small niche sites ranking well for their main keyword.

Then I will start thinking about the bigger picture and how I can move things forward in 2011.

Appalling Click Through Rates is a post from: How I Got Rich

A while ago I tried to do some ‘tests’ to see how accurate the Google Keyword tool is and also how much traffic you get for being number one or two in Google.
Read about it here: http://howigotrich.net/tag/google-keyword-tool/

I tried it again recently with a site I have that has been number three in Google for its main keyword for many months but only gets about 3-6 unique hits a day.

After running a Google AdWords PPC campaign for that keyword I found out that the keyword got 273 impressions in one day (I’ve only run the campaign for one day so will see how it goes).

That means that for being number three in Google my site gets around 2% of the searches for that keyword clicking through to my site. This is not a lot!

According to the Google KeyWord Tool this keyword gets 1,900 exact match searches per month which works out at 64 per day. This is over four times less than what the AdWords research tells us.

So what have we learnt? The Google Keyword Tool is still inaccurate but we already knew that but this reinforces the idea and I would urge anyone doing keyword research to use AdWords rather than the Google Keyword Tool before choosing a niche.

Also it tells me that this niche is worth targeting and putting some more effort into as it is getting around 8000 exact searches a month instead of the 1900 reported by the GKWT. But there is also the problem of the 2% click through rate the site is getting being at number three in Google. Will this improve if I get the site to number two or number one? Only time (and some dodgy forum profile backlinks) will tell…

More Google Keyword Tool Data is a post from: How I Got Rich

One of my sites got 666 unique visits last month and from that site there were 389 clicks through to the merchant (amazon). Those 389 clicks were split over five products that are featured on the site.

So far so good but the bad news it no one bought anything. The items all appear to be in stock. The prices aren’t listed on my website so maybe the users weren’t aware of the cost of the items and decided not to buy once they reached the merchant.

Whatever the reason I find these figures pretty bad. Even if the item the user clicked through to wasn’t to their taste I would have expected at least some of them to have a look around amazon and find an item more suited to their needs.

The item is something I would expect to sell well online as you don’t need to see it in the flesh to buy it as you probably wouldn’t get to do that in the shops as it would stay in its box. Plus it is quite big so I would’ve guessed users would’ve rather have it delivered than go and buy it from the shop and try and get it home themselves.

Has anyone seen anything like this? Got any tips on how I can turn it around to make a few sales?

666 Hits, 50% CTR, 0 Sales is a post from: How I Got Rich

I’ve had a look at a couple of my sites which are ranked number one in Google.  I wanted to find out what percentage of the total number of searches a site gets when it is number one in Google.

One of my sites that is number of a search term that got 22,200 local exact matches in May got 140 hits from Google users searching on that term in the last seven days. This works out as 3% (140 as a % of 5012 = 3% (rounded up)).

Another keyword got 5,400 exact local matches for May which is 1,219 in 7 days. This site got 56 visits from Google users searching on that keyword string which is 5% (rounded up).

Has anyone got any comparable data?

update: another one of my sites is now number two in the Google serps with no ads above the number one site.  The site is optimised for a keyword that got 14,800 local exact searches last month.  It is not a seasonal item so should be similiar this month.  In the past three days it has had an average of of 5 clicks a day from Google.  This works out to a 1% click through rate for a site in number two position.

How Many Hits Do You Get When You’re Number 1 in Google? is a post from: How I Got Rich