Steps To Make Money Online

Evaluate the traffic.

Advertising fees vary significantly from site to site. What allows one site to charge twice what another site charges for a similar listing? Theoretically, more expensive listings should perform better. The bottom line is this: How much traffic can you expect to get and does the fee make sense? To help you determine this, try asking for a trial period of a week or two so that you can evaluate the traffic.

Once your ad or listing is live, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to get all the information you need to make an intelligent decision. Use the Referring Sites report (in the Traffic Sources section) to see how many visits the new listing is sending you. The Pages/Visit (Average Pages Viewed per Visit) column in the table shows how much of your site these visitors are viewing.

You can also tell if the visitors referred from the ad are seeing the pages that you want them to see. If you have defined these pages are goals, the percentage of visits in which the pages were viewed will show on the Goal Conversion Tab of the Referring Sites report.

Click the Goal Conversion tab. The table contains a column for each goal you have defined (Goal 1 through Goal 4). The conversion rates in this column represent the percentage of visits in which the goal page was viewed at least once.

If you are concerned about a single clicker masquerading as multiple visitors, the Referring Sites report is again useful. In the table, click one of the Sources. The Referring Site report appears. Now, use the Segment drop down menu to segment your visits. For example, if you segment for "visitor type", most of your visitors should be new visitors. You should also see a variety of entries when you segment for "City", "Browser", and "Flash Version". If all of the visitors are coming from the same city, have the same browser, operating system, and Flash version, you may have cause to be suspicious.

The web empowers you.

The great thing about the web is that it is a trackable medium. Instead of making guesses about which ads and links work, you can use your analytics to identify the right advertising opportunities for your business.