Estimating adsense revenue technique

Marketing
1

Are we calculating this right?

OK so a friend and I are trying to estimate how much a website about, for example, travel to a particular place would make using adsense. I already know what the click thru rate would be because I have partially made a similar site in the past on the same subject, and based on that I know that I can have a ctr of, lets say, 5%.

I also know that revenue is, lets say, 50 cents per click.

So I need to know how many visitors will come in a month, how many pages they will look at (impressions)

My total revenue can then be calculated using this simple equation:

(number of visitors) X (page impressions per visitor) X (5% clicks per page impression) X $.50 revenue per click = revenue

There are two variables here I need to figure out: the first is the page impressions per visitor (which I can roughly estimate to be at least 8, based on my other partially-made site.)

That leaves the first variable in the equation: number of vistors. I have tried a variety of means to get a good estimate but I can’t figure it out. I have a totally unrelated blog about a far less interesting subject which draws 600 visitors/day on a regular basis so I suppose the new, more interesting site will generate more visitors than that, which is good. I think at a minimum I can therefore rely on a revenue stream of 600 x 8 x 5% x $.5 = $120/day.

I have tried to find the traffic of similar, competing sites using a variety of sources but they vary wildly and I am not sure what figure to use.

For example using LonelyPlanet.com as a reference: Using Google Trends, I see that LonelyPlanet.com had just under 200,000 unique visitors per day in Feb 2011 which ads up to about 5 million for whole month in total.

But google ad planner says they had 2 million Unique visitors (users) and 5.1 million Unique visitors (estimated cookies) for the month of Feb 2011

Google ad planner’s explanation of “estimated cookies” and “users” metrics seems to indicate that the “estimated cookies” is the number of visits to to a site, whilst “users” is the number of unique, unduplicated individuals who visited.

Which figure is correct to use for my purposes?
Let me just ad that using even the lower figure, competing websites have 3000 visitors/day. That’s a LOT. That means that my website, once operational and drawing only a third of the traffice, would generate

1000 x 8 x 5% x $.5 = $200/day … which is not bad at all. :cool:

2

The CTR at 5% is ok
The CPC at $0.5 is perhaps a bit high estimation
8 pageviews per unique visitor is a very high estimation

That’s my opinion, try it and you’ll see.

I prefer to simply make estimations on the eCPM, I think that $5 CPM is good.
So if you’d like $100 per day you would need about 20,000 page impressions per day.

3

Thanks I don’t want to violate any TOS but lets just say that CTR and CPC and pageuniques I gave are VERY VERY close to what I have already seen on the other, partially-made site so I think it is a firm basis for an estimate of revenue. I was more concerned about the forumula for calculation of revenue, and more importantly, ways of estimating the traffic of competitor sites.