How can you make money with a web site if you don't sell something? Ah, how times have changed. Many sites make all of their revenue from ads that are placed on the site. These ad-­driven sites are a breed apart. They want eyeballs—and lots of them. The more people who view their site, the more value it has to an advertiser. Particularly, stats like visitors and page views are most important; don't ignore quality of visitors, though. If your advertisers aren't seeing sales then ultimately you're going to have a difficult time generating revenue or you may be forced into receiving a percentage of sales, which is difficult to track. Typical ad-driven sites are content focused - news, sites, sports, how­-to sites, and gossip are all popular. Here are their metrics:

Number of visitors: This is the raw number of unique visitors to your web site. It's a great metric to take to advertisers, especially if your visitors tend to be in a particular niche. But, counting the number of visitors that visit your site is like counting the number of people who walk by the front of a retail store. If they don't engage then you don't have a business. Make sure you track additional metrics like Bounce Rate and Page Views to add some gravitas to your visitors metric.

Total page views: For ad­-driven sites, this is the number. It measures the number of total pages of your site that were viewed. It's a raw number: 'We had 97,000 page views last month'. Just like visitors, this metric can be easily misunderstood. A high number of page views could be an indicator that your site is popular, or it could mean that it’s difficult for visitors to find what they're looking for. It's useful—just be sure you investigate what it means.

Average page views per visit (total page views / visits): measures how many pages each visitor sees. If you're an ad­-driven site, the easiest way to increase your ad revenue is to increase this statistic. If you can increase it from two average page views per visit to three average page views per visit, with the same amount of traffic you’d then see 50 percent more ad revenue. ‘Since adding links to related content at the bottom of each node with the Acquia Solr Search module, we've seen our average page views per visit go from 3 to 4.5'.

Tomorrow we will look at things to look out for so you don't skew your metrics. Until then!