What Scobe says is right. Its not simply the size of the audience, but the level of engagement that matters.
Well, I’ve compared notes with several bloggers and journalists and when the Register links to us we get almost no traffic. But they claim to have millions of readers. So, if millions of people are hanging out there but no one is willing to click a link, that means their audience has low engagement. The Register is among the lowest that I can see.
Compare that to Digg. How many people hang out there every day? Maybe a million, but probably less. Yet if you get linked to from Digg you’ll see 30,000 to 60,000 people show up. And these people don’t just read. They get involved. I can tell when Digg links to me cause the comments for that post go up too.
Which explains alot. This should become a new benchmark for advertisers. The Digg example is good. But what about Google Adwords/Adsense? or Yahoo Directory? Or Microsoft Adcentre? It would be useful to know the stats of the service you’re about to use. What is the likelyhood that your average ad gets clicked? Of Ads similar to yours getting clicked? So as an advertiser ( I’m speaking hypothetically now), I can see which service is the better investment since I need hits, and I need them now.
So how do we measure engagment? Statistics for one. The more detailed, the better. Contextual information for another. The circimstances surrounding your ad getting clicked. i.e if a number of ads before yours were clicked, why was the user still searching? And so on. All this has to be considered in terms of the total audience of that service for a given day or week.
Random Musings 