Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Tools for Measuring Popularity

The metrics of website traffic is a huge topic by itself, with a number of books just about web metrics, and quite a bit of software designed simply to help webmasters gather and understand the metrics of their sites. You’ll find more information about this subject in Chapter 13, but for now, to get started, it’s important to learn how to quickly get a feel for a site’s popularity.

Note

Website metrics is a very important topic because to optimize your site you need to have baseline information as well as feedback so that you can understand whether changes improve site traffic or not—and also which elements in your site draw traffic.

This topic is also important because the fees you can expect to get from advertisers largely depend on the metrics of your site.

Of course, your web server’s logs contain a great deal of traffic information that can provide you with useful metrics.

But, no doubt, the best metric of all is money in your pocket from goods and services sold on your site and from fees paid by advertisers—through the AdSense program or some other mechanism—for publication on your site.

Using the Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be installed in the Internet Explorer web browser. Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ to download the toolbar.

With the Google Toolbar in place, a button (shown at the very top in Figure 1-4) that can optionally be added to the Toolbar will give an indication of the PageRank, on a 0 to 10 scale, of a web page that is open ...