How to “Spy” on Other Sites’ Traffic?

You can use Project Wonderful to know exactly how much traffic a site gets. I will explain how immediately after this:

I’ve just read a post on my old blogcatalog buddy’s blog, about how Entrecard is making good money with Project Wonderful ad spots.

Just to recap his article:

• Entrecard is running 2 Project Wonderful ad spots on their forums page, the prices for which stand on $6.10 and $7.10 per day
• Abhinav is also running a Project Wonderful ad spot on his blog and it costs $0.24 per day
• He was wondering what was the traffic one would need in order to achieve $6 range prices on Project Wonderful.

How Many Visitors Does Entrecard Have and What is CPM

1. Entrecard’s got roughly 12,000 daily unique visitors. It took me less than a minute to answer his question. As promised, I will explain how to spy on a site’s traffic in a while.
2. CPM (cost per mille) is the cost per 1,000 impressions of an ad, and it is used as a common denominator in order to compare advertising opportunities on different sites. One may have 100,000 unique visitors per month, the other may have 800,000, with CPM you will know to compare the two.

Why is Project Wonderful Wonderful for the Advertiser, but not for the Publisher?

1. According to an article on ProBlogger where Daniel Scocco compares Coppybrlogger.com and JohnChow.com and explains a lot about pricing your ad spot, a CPM of $1.5 is a good average for a 125×125 ad spot.
2. $6 it costs to advertise on Entrecard divided by 12 = $0.5 per thousand. This means that Entrecard’s CPM for that spot is about $0.5.
3. A CPM of $0.5 is great if you are the advertiser, it is really cheap!
4. If you are the publisher, you really could do better.
5. Moreover, Project Wonderful charges 25%, so
6. Entrecard could have charged more than 3 times as much as they’re getting right now, if those spots would’ve been sold directly to the advertiser.

That is why.

The Promised “Spy” Technique

Project Wonderful’s says in its intro that they are all about fairness and transparency.

Indeed! That same transparency is what I use to know what traffic a site that has a Project Wonderful ad spot gets.

Go to the site you are interested to spy on. If you look below the Project Wonderful ad spot, it says “Your ad here, right now: $0.00“. This is a link, and if you click through you will get to a purchase page with a monthly graph showing the site’s Unique Visitors and Page Views. It shows the stats for the page the as is place on, but basically it would reflect the sites overall traffic, because webmasters would put it on the most visited page, to get the best prices.

So now you know. Use it wisely.

- Alex