Part 6 - Portfolio Optimisation - Traffic Domains

If you remember from previous articles the normalised RPM allows us to precisely compare one monetisation provider versus another.

This metric is VERY different from the traditional RPM that is often used more as a marketing tool than an actual unit of measurement. The normalised RPM is the revenue from every monetisation source divided by the raw unfiltered traffic, times by one thousand.

nRPM = Revenue / (Raw Traffic) x 1000

Escrow.com

The chart below is one that shared at Domaining Europe and highlights a number of opportunities for domain investors. The first is on average, direct advertisers pay considerably more for traffic compared to Google based sources.

Normalised RPM chart

This should be no surprise but one of the problems that many domain owners have is they don't have the scale to access these larger payouts. In addition, the majority of monetisation sources are obligated to send the traffic to a potentially sub-optimal solution (eg. Google) so the traffic never gets exposed to the direct advertising networks.

What the chart also displays is each of the parking providers in the sample have massive swings in their average payout levels each day. This is contrary to what many people would expect.

The second chart shows what percentage of the traffic each company is winning over time for the portfolio being measured. The first thing you will notice is that although direct advertising networks pay more, they only pay more for a small amount of the traffic. The reason for this is they don’t have the breadth of advertisers that Google has…..but this is beginning to change.

Percentage of Traffic Won

What can be seen is no company wins more than 35% of the traffic on any particular day. This means the best case scenario that you have with leaving all of your domains with one company is 65% of the time the traffic could perform better elsewhere. Remember, that’s the BEST case scenario. The reality is typically much worse.

Both these two charts also show that every company wins some traffic. So moving all of your domains away from every company is a bad idea. The best thing to do is to drive the right traffic to the right company at the right time. For whatever reason, each of the parking companies being tested performed really well on a subset of domains….the challenge is the subset is often a moving target.

The third chart shows how a typical domain’s traffic could be routed across an eighteen-day period of time. Each row in the chart represents three days. What it shows is how the traffic is routed based upon the normalised RPM being generated for three parking companies. This is a sample of one domain and it should not be construed that one company is better for ALL domains. As can be seen, at the domain level the swings in who is winning is quite dramatic.

Traffic Routing For a Domain

The case for routing your traffic with a technically proficient company is incontrovertible. Building systems, yourself is an enormous undertaking and I would highly recommend against pursing the investment in time and money so that you can focus on other endeavours.

The fact is if you wish to extract the maximum amount of return from your traffic then you need to pursue a course of action that leads to intelligently routing your traffic across multiple monetisation solutions. If you don't do this then you're leaving money on the table.

In the next article I will begin unpacking how to run a properly constructed traffic test as part of your overall portfolio optimisation strategy.

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