When you grow your visitor value, it means more money getting deposited into your bank account. Plus it means more affiliates and joint venture partners will come seek you out because you can advertise more aggressively and pay more money to everyone.

Every business and every industry has a basic measure of success. Retail is real estate, and the real estate in your local mall is leased on a square-footage basis, so in retail sales the measure of the store's success is sales per square foot.

Google traffic is charged for on a dollars per visitor basis. Success on Google is also measured in dollars/visitor. Say 100 people visit your site and you make $200 in sales. Then you have a visitor value of $2. This is the most basic success measure you site has.

Your main objective for your business is to get the best visitor value that you can.

With a higher value per visitor, you will be in the exalted company of: Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Starbucks, Saks Fifth Ave, and Macy's.

Having a low visitor value, you are in the company of larger strip mall retailers such as Dollar General, TJ. Maxx, Piercing Pagoda, and Wal-Mart.

If your visitor value is even lower than that, you're on the slag heap, eeking out a meager existence at a flea market, or hawking your excess inventory on eBay.

Profit is your goal. That's why you're in business in the first place. But your profit alone doesn't tell you how sleek and effective your sales process is. You might just be getting lucky with unusually cheap click prices.

Visitor value is the measure of what your clicks are actually worth. It's a measure of how smart your web site is, how effective your sales copy is, how powerful your offer is.

Here is the simple equation to figure your 'Visitor Value':

Visitor Value = (Your Total Sales Value) / (Your Number of Clicks)

Say you are making a 50 percent profit margin on your $1000 item and one in a hundred visitors will buy from you. Then your visitor value is 10 dollars. The theory is that you can then spend as much as 5 dollars per visitor for traffic and still break even, and if 1 out of every 1000 visitors makes a purchase then you have a visitor value of 1 dollar and you can spend as much as 50 cents each to buy clicks.

Of course this is an oversimplified explanation of how this works. But this part is definite: visitor value helps you know the value of your clicks and what you can do about them.