TGP Tutorials & Articles
Calculating Productivity Requirements For Your Site
by DamageX of AskDamageX.com, July 10 2006
This isn't a new topic, but since it seems to me that so many still use urban myths as guidelines for determining what prod their sites need, instead of doing some simple math, I feel urged to address the issue. Over the years I have seen jayeff post about this issue on various boards, even several times on this one, yet everyday I see people post erroneous "guidelines", thus perpetuating the myth, especially among less experienced webmasters. Hopefully this will help with that.
Alright, so on to the math. I know many people are scared of math, but this is so simple it shouldn't cause anyone any difficulties. The first thing you need, when calculating the prod your site needs, is to know the skim. Let's say, for simplicity's sake, that you run a skim of 60%, meaning you send 60% to galleries and 40% to trades. What this means, in practice, is that for every click made on your site, you send, on average, 40% of it to trades, or 0.4. In order to return 100% to trades it means that you need to send out, on average, one click to trades per visitor. And since for every click a visitor makes on your site 0.4 of it is sent to trades, simple math tells us that, in order to send out one full click to trades, you need to divide 1 by 0.4. This will give us the amounts of clicks needed per visitor, on average, in order to send out a full click to trades. So 1/0.4=2.5, meaning you need each visitor to click 2.5x, on average, for your site to return 100% to trades. In other words, if you skim 60% then you need a 250% prod in order to return 100% to trades. To repeat the same calculation, but for a 75% skim site, which would be sending 25% to trades, it'd be 1/0.25=4, so for a 75% skim site you need a 400% prod.
The above are calculations based on the assumption that all your traffic is traded. This is however not the case, in reality. You do have some bookmarker traffic, some people may e-mail the link to your site to each other and you may get some traffic from search engines as well. I will not go into further calculations here, but I will still mention that non-trade traffic needs not be repaid, therefore it will contribute to sending more to your trades. So if you have a lot of traffic from search engines and bookmarkers, you'll be able to sustain more trades than if you didn't. This also allows prod from traded traffic to be lower than the calculated amount, without diminishing your returns. So the more non-trade traffic your site has, the lower prod from traded traffic it can sustain, without shrinking.
Hopefully this will shed some light and help bury the myths of 150% prod being good prod. There's more to say about this subject, but I will keep those things for another tip of the week.
This article appears courtesy and is the sole property of DamageX
Original thread at AskDamageX.com
