Tracking Value Per-Visitor (VPV)
In a post on his blog, GoDaddy.com founder and CEO, Bob Parsons explains that “Everything that is watched improves.” If this statement is true it means that just the act of starting to pay attention to the VPV metric should cause your Value Per-Visit to improve. And of course, if your average VPV grows and your traffic stays the same, your site’s revenue increases.
Once you start to measure VPV you can decide on how fancy you want to get refining your measurements. For example if your site usually gets many more visits than unique visits, you may choose to track Value Per-Unique-Visitor (VPUV) instead of VPV.
Even if you choose to refine your measurement from tracking the Value Per-Visitor to tracking the Value Per-Unique-Visitor this metric you can still refine things a step further. This is due to the fact that a site’s average VPV could be calculated from traffic from several sites, and the VPV from each of these sites can sway wildly.
For this reason, a good first step is to start tracking VPV, and when you are ready a good second step is to start breaking this down further by tracking your site’s VPV for each source of traffic to your site. Once you know for instance the top three sources of traffic to your site in terms of VPV, you can take steps to increase your traffic from these sources and thereby increase your bottom line.
It’s for reasons like these that the simple act of beginning to track VPV is a great aid in goal setting. If you know what your current average VPV is (let’s say eight cents per-visit) it is easy to set an incrementally larger, and easily obtainable goal (lets say ten cents per-visit).
Once you have started tracking VPV from particular sources of traffic you can get really fancy by tracking the VPV for particular pages on your site. So if you run a content page on dogs you may notice that your Chihuahua page greatly outperforms your Shih-tzu page in terms of VPV. With this new information in mind you might decide to start sending more traffic to your Chihuahua page since it offer more “bang for your buck”.
If you want to get really optimize with the VPV metric, you can start looking at the VPV for a particular source of traffic to specific page on your site. For instance, you may notice that Plurk traffic to your Chihuahua page outperforms Twitter traffic to the same page.
Another technique that can add a lot of refinement to your VPV calculation is the technique of “Discounting the Future” which we will be discussing in an upcoming post.
