Once your proxy site is up and running, you’ll want to know a little about your traffic. Adsense (or any other advert provider) will give you some information. However, this is limited to your earnings, the number of impressions and your click through rate. In order to increase your earnings and optimize your proxy, you really want to know a bit more than that.
There are several ways to monitor your traffic, but really proxy owners should skip straight to Goggle Analytics. There are problems with the way that some other programmes report proxy traffic. For example, Awstats (automatically available with most hosts through Cpanel) tends to overstate the number of unique visitors due to the way that proxy scripts work. Google Analytics offers everything that a proxy webmaster should need, and it can be integrated with Adsense to offer you extra insight into your revenue. It’s completely free, and is fairly straightforward to use.
We’re not going to offer a complete overview of Analytics here. The best thing to do is to get it installed, and have a play with the stats. Google Analytics will tell you all the normal stats: visitors, page views, time on site etc. Obviously your aim is to increase the number of visitors and there is no better way to achieve your aims than by setting targets within Analytics.
There are a few particularly important areas for proxy webmasters to have a look at. Take a look at your traffic sources. You might be surprised by the breakdown of traffic, and this can drastically affect the way that you promote your proxy. You need to know where your traffic is coming from so that you know what works, and how to spend your future time (or money). For example, if you’ve spent all your time doing SEO, but are hardly getting any search engine traffic then you may need to reconsider your keywords. Likewise, if you’ve spent money on paid promotion on a proxy top site, you’ll want to know that the money translates into traffic!
Your map overlay will show you where your visitors are from by country. You need to consider whether you want traffic from everywhere in the world, or whether certain countries are more profitable. Some proxy webmasters block traffic from countries such as Iran and China, as they use the server resources but are not very valuable in terms of clicks. Others redirect any ‘lower quality’ traffic to a different proxy which has a limited file size transfer (i.e. no video/music or even pictures). This allows them to profit from the traffic as the server resources used are low. Premium traffic is generally considered to be American, British, Canadian, Australian and other European countries. It is important for you to come to your own conclusions (traffic and earnings will always differ by site), but Google Analytics is the best way for you to keep track of where your users are from and to turn that into your advantage.
Google Analytics will usefully integrate with your Adsense account. This will not directly boost your earnings, but gives you powerful tools to make improvements that will. While Adsense adverts are all likely to be on one page (the homepage), you should remember to set channels up so you can see which ad placements work for you. Analytics will report your top Adsense referrers, which essentially tells you which referrers are earning you the most money. This can be incredibly useful if you’re paying for a banner or proxy top site link. Have you earned enough to cover your outlay? This type of information will inform your future marketing decisions.
The most important element of Analytics is to protect your Adsense account. If you find that you are click bombed (one user clicks repeatedly on your ads) or suchlike you may find your Adsense account suspended. However, with the Analytics logs Google will be able to see what happened and will normally reinstate the account. Unfortunately there are people in the proxy business who resort to underhand techniques to ruin competitors, but Analytics is a straightforward way to protect you.
To install Analytics you’ll need to open an account (if you have a Google login then this will work). Once logged in, simply add a website profile (your URL) and you’ll be given a snippet of code to paste into your site files. It’s important to keep monitoring your proxy, as there will always be tweaks that can improve your earnings. Analytics provides a wealth of useful information, and shouldn’t be ignored.