Another year has passed and I have been doing some HEAVY number crunching. I thought I would share something I pay the most attention to but have never really blogged about. A lot of people look at CPM, CPC, CPA, and that is all good but here is what I look at – IPU That is right a SHOEMONEY ORIGINAL ACRONYM! It stands for Income per unique.
So for instance if you have a site that is bringing in 8,000.00 a day and you are getting 65,000.00 uniqes a day that is around 8 cents per uniq user. That is pretty good. I have sites that range 2-9cents per uniq depending on the niche.
If you are not making ATLEAST 2 cents per uniq then you need to look at some alternatives or perhaps you are just not trying to make money with your website. This website- Shoemoney.com gets around 5,000 uniques a day, yet I have ZERO advertising on here. Mainly its because if I want to say shit piss fart I can and not have some advertiser be pissed. Anyway this is one of my sites that I do not want or care to make money from.
IPU is also a really valuable tool I use to evaluate domains for purchase. Many people can tell you what kind of income they are making with AdSense, azoogleads, cj, but that doesn’t mean that you are going to make that much. Niches flux a lot but traffic is traffic and I know that *I* can consistently make a min of 2 cents per uniq and if its a niche that I am familiar with I could say that I know I can make as much as 9 cents per uniq user.
So IPU is a important factor to think about before buying a complete website. People always ask me how I come up with a price for a completed site that is bringing in income. I always tell them it doesnt matter to me what kind of income someone says they are making, SHOW ME UNIQ USERS!
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2416 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Good advice, i’d never looked at revenue from a per-user perspective before but it makes sense. This is something that’ll certainly be looking at from now on.
BTW: 4 posts in 1 day, yer on a roll!
That is VERY helpful. I always wonder if a site could be doing better or if it is pretty well maxed out. This will help to know where to allocate my time.
Good stuff, Shoe. I think .02 IPU is a good goal setter for anyone, especially the ones just starting out in this industry.
lol this was one of those that has been in my drafts for a long time and I just decided to publish it. 1 down 20 to go =P
Funnily enough I was working this out a few weeks ago in the pub of all places, my main website is doing about 12.5 cents per unique…..Pretty happy with that just need to add more uniques now!
Hi Shoe,
Think you might have saved the heavy crunching for home:
8,000.00 / 65,000 = 0.123 or about 12 cents per user. Even better than you thought
Of course, it makes my 0.005 per user look even worse!
I’m currently doing 0.02 ony my blog but only on a good day. I think it fluctuates daily. But then again, my ad revenue was just implemented and it’s not really intended to be a primary souce of income. Still, good acronym, IPU. Definitely keep that in mind.
Another great post by ShoeMoney .
Clever approach Shoe – always good to try to normalize things, and I can see IPU becoming a new term as it’s a good way of comparing things – you are quite the trend-setter!
Nice post. I like it and will use it, IPU.
Thanks.
Interesting point of view.
I think I have an IPU of over $0.2 at my HYIP site actually
But my forum is not doing very well in these terms ..
Another great idea shoe!
Great metric – really simplifies things. $0.0000 to four decimal points. Time to get working on that….
Do you measure cost-per-unique too? Or do you subtract that from the income?
I run around 6,000 uniques during the week, half that on weekends. On a really good day I make $70.00 but it’s usually closer to $40.00.
By your figures, I should be making at least three times that, so obviously I’m doing something very wrong.
Tell me what it is and I’ll give you half of it
I totally agree with you there Shoe. Uniques are the only thing I care about as well. I am also very sceptical to the stats. Are the uniques REALLY unique I always ask myself.
nice post indeed.
I will find out how much that makes on my site now
interesting post. I liked what you said about not having ads here
I am getting the urge to say “nice post” but believe someone has used that phrase before..
Nice post.. I think I need more reading mat’ls and more content. to meet 0.02
Im currenly earning 0.002 per unique
I need to work on my uniques
though most of my traffic comes from gooogle.
I sort of go off IPU for my adsense. My visitors normally look at 5 or 6 pages on average, so my adsense click through rates are low percentage through impressions, but fantastic through unique users
I have a few sites that make over 1 dollar a visit on average I only get 30 visits a day but they better then 10% now I just need to get a few thousand visitors a day.
wow.. Shoemoney.. great advice..
i would really calculate it but mostly i look for total income of the day that i need to achive anyhow..
but thanx once again for your new tricks;)
Great find, great metric, and the one that really matters. i get $0,069 on one of my sites. It’s nice to see that something is working out right. Now off to get more uniques.
Great tip, I haven’t really thought about cracking it down to numbers as you have done, but will start doing it from now on.
Thanks.. I always wanted to know about IPU rates
I’m starting with adsense.. I wish to make one 10000th of what you’re making. you’re my idol
I agree, good advice. I’ve dabbled in adsense a bit and I am looking to plow further into it and this helps.
hehe, I agree. I just started adsense too.
Thanks for the nice advice. I just want to add that I became not interested in Adsense anymore. Your account may be banned for invalid clicks although you do nothing. Even if you use a tracker to prevent invalid clicks, someone may simply view the html of your page, take off your pub-id, put it on a porn site, and also get your account banned for nothing. So, I will switch to AdBrite!
Thanks for the nice entry!
Excellent tips, i recently was interested in buying a music site because i knew it was very popular and it had a lot of traffic, owner said he couldn’t paid anymore the server fees and maintain the site that costed around $2500 a year. Well to make a long history short i found out he was banned from google and my interest went down to zero
I love this blog layout ! How was it made. It’s really good!