It's always great to find more sources for traffic, and you should continue to work on your Search Engine Optimization, and on getting inbound links to your pages to bring targeted visitors to your site.



But chances are there are some simple things you can do to your pages to improve the Click Thru Rate (CTR) and the value of each visitor (eCPM). If you can raise your eCPM by 50%, for example, it will have the same bottom line effect as leaving the eCPM the same and raising the traffic by 50%.

And if you raise your eCPM and your traffic continues to increase, you will make even more money!

eCPM is a number that appears in our AdSense earning reports, and it is computer from your CTR and the average amount you earn from an ad click. It's an estimate of how much you earn from each 1,000 page views (not clicks).

So if your eCPM is $10.00, and one hundred thousand visitors come to your pages, you can expect to earn about $1000 (100 times $10).

The value of eCPM as a measurement tool is that it lets you take your attention from individual clicks, and think of the value of the page to advertisers ? and to your visitors.

Your eCPM is likely to vary a lot from day to day unless you have a large number of clicks each day (hundreds, or even thousands). For most smaller sites, it is good to look at eCPM for 7 days at a time, or even a month. You can easily pick a period to look at by selecting the time period from the drop down box in the AdSense reports.

Your eCPM will rise if your CTR increases while the price of an average ad stays the same. It can also increase if the price of an average ad increases while the CTR stays the same.

And of course, in the best of all possible worlds, both your CTR increases, and the average value of an ad.

Think of eCPM as like a temperature measurement, but of the advertising value of your pages.

There are two basic principles to improving your eCPM, and those will be the subject of the next two articles in this series. The first is making the format and layout of your pages more friendly to ad serving, and the second is to focus your content and your visitors better to attract more highly targeted ads.

While at first blush it might seem these are ?tricks? to increase AdSense revenue at the cost of your site's quality, that really isn't so. The same things that improve your site for AdSense, will improve the visitor's experience of your site.

We will talk about this soon. In the meantime, take a look at your eCPM, and start thinking about what you can do to increase it.