Read your logs you wanker!

Posted by stuart as , , ,

After my mega-whine the other day about adsense being Google’s way to inflict slow, painful torture on unsuspecting webmasters, I realised that I’d made one bloody stupid mistake that had been costing me money (and a fair bit of it) over the last six weeks or so.

(Of course, when I say a fair bit of money - this is a relative term, let’s just say my stats are telling me I could have more than doubled what I’d made in the last six weeks or so if I’d picked this up earlier).

Starting at the beginning - I’m a lazy bastard! Trawling through site logs is not my idea of a good time. Let’s see: drinking single malt Scotch and playing with my kids, or trawling through AWStats logs, which shall I do? The answer is pretty obvious to me, so I’d been ignoring my stats for a while.

The other day, I decided I’d better have a gander at the stats of one of my sites, and saw that I was getting a truckload (again, this is relative - a couple of dozen visitors a day to a particular page is a truckload for me) to a single page on this site. Further investigation showed that this traffic was all coming from a particular search on Yahoo!. This term seems to be quite specific to myspace.com users. (Which is why the traffic is coming from Yahoo!).

Now this page of mine just happens to rank number one in the Yahoo! SERP’s for this term. It’s just a short blog post, which has nothing to do with the topic that these people are searching for, it just happens to have the right keyword mix and title etc.

Traffic is pretty cool for this page, it’s easily the highest trafficked page across all my sites, so I should be making a couple of bucks from it, right?

Not if you don’t have any ads on it, idiot!!

Not sure what planet I was on when I made the post, but it was sitting there, ad-less, for the last six weeks or so. So of course, I dumped a 336×280 ad block, just below the heading, and got 2 clicks in the first hour, and a steady (albeit slow) trickle of clicks ever since.

In the couple of days that this page has had ads, it has a CTR of over 10%, with an eCPM of just under $25!
Lesson for the day - read your freaking logs!