What Ratio Do You Value?

[[BV]]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

First page hits is the most important number. Sponsors who don't report first page hits don't want you to see how much traffic you are REALLY sending them and how poorly they REALLY convert. The second page and join page hits are only there so that they can see that their skim is working properly.

I agree, 1st page hits are best as long as they are uniques and not raw. 1st page raws and you're back to being blind again.

CCBill only reported 1st page raw hits for the longest time. This made all CCBill sites have higher ratios compared to sponsors that based their ratos off 1st page uniques or deeper.

I mention this here for those of you that might not know that CCBill now reports both 1st page raws & uniques to affiliates. (The sponsor has to activate this feature which is in their best interest to do so because it will only make them look better by having a lower ratio.)

CCBill also added another feature where if the sponsor chooses they can also report 2nd & 3rd page hits along with the 1st. (They have always reported join page hits) To enable the sponsor has to add some code to the tours and enable this feature in their CCBill admin. This feature is good for seeing how deep your surfers go into the site and how many just hit the first page, say fuck this, and hit the back button.

If your CCBill sponsors arent showing 1st page uniques along with it's usual raw hits in your stats, hit them up, they might not even know about it.

The more stats the better but reporting the ratios should be based on 1st page uniques in my book. (not 2nd or join or raws)

As much as I love Ratios they really are almost useless (to a point) for comparing one site to another, but are very helpful for seeing how different traffic sources you send at the same site convert.

Once you try to use it as a basis of comparing different sponsors it gets tricky. Especially using other peoples ratios. There are just too many variables that affect ratios. The technique and source the affiliate used to send the hits as well as the aggressiveness of the sponsors fhg, hfs and tours all play on ratios.

They do however help when things are out of hand. If you send 5-10,000 hits to a sponsor and no sales, then something is obviously wrong with them (unless all your traffic is coming from a hit bot or a 3rd world country.)