The Value of Online Marketing Information
March 11th, 2007 by Ian
Do you sell anything online? Do you buy or sell online advertising? If you do and have been doing it long enough, you know how valuable it is to know the conversion statistics for different types of traffic. You could spend a lot of time and money doing trial and error, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you already knew which keywords and sites worked?
There are a few companies mining this information in masses already. The best way to market and make this work is to give incentives for doing it. One of the primary examples of this is the almighty Google. Google offers services to webmasters that lets them track traffic statistics with a nice easy-to-use interface for no cost. With Google Analytics webmasters can see all the traffic information including the following: geographic location, repeat visitors, referring sites, keywords, and since the information is tied in with Adwords the very important, cost per conversion.
Once you know what a conversion is worth (and it’s much easier to figure out than the cost per conversion) you can just look at the cost and determine how much profit is in the niche you are following. Even if you didn’t know anything about that niche, you would see areas that had tremendous opportunities.
Another company mining information is ALGOCO. ALGOCO is a company that pays you for surfing the internet. You install a toolbar in your browser which sends back your traffic information. The payment structure is enough to basically let you earn $10-30 per month depending on how much you surf. The nice part about it is you can refer others and earn more. They have a calculator that tells you the amount of money you can money with the network you build. This scenario yielded a monthly income of $9,767.50!
This information is not quite as direct as Google Analytics for determining which niche to open up a new business, but it is very rich with marketing information. For example, let’s say someone visits Bloomberg, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, and… our blog, ALGOCO would then know that maybe our blog had a similar target market as the other sites mentioned.
