For years I've heard different numbers thrown around about conversions, click thru's, traffic, etc and quite frankly I wonder where these numbers come from.  In the past four months I've built and ranked over 50 websites on the front page of google and I can honestly say I wonder why my numbers are so far off what was always promised to me. 

Let me give an example, I have a site ranked #1 on Google for a term that gets 1100 "Exact" searches per day or 33,000 exact searches per month so according to the good old 50% rule (1st spot gets 50% of the clicks) I should be seeing 500+ unique visitors per day but the truth is I get about 150-200 unique visitors per day.

Ok, as if that wasn't enough I was always told to expect 1% conversion rates on targeted traffic.  Well, my traffic is coming from the two primary keywords I am targeting and they are buying keywords however this site is converting at around .1%.  No, not 1% but POINT ONE %.  That means for every 1,000 visitors I make 1 sale.  I've tried different themes, different reviews, different products, etc and it just seems to stay the same.  In fact my CTR from my page to my merchant is always 20-25% regardless of what I try.

I'm not sure what is more frustrating...having a site with little traffic making a little money or having a site with loads of traffic and still making very little money off it.  According to the "math" I should be seeing around 15,000 unique visitors per month and converting at 1% meaning 150 sales per month x $17 commission this site should be making me  $2,550 a month but you know what..its making $80-$100 a month.  Every time I look at it I want to scream...and I have other sites that are doing the same thing.  

I think the thing that people fail to mention in the beginning is you can have all the traffic in the world but if you are terrible at writing good sales copy or you are promoting a product that doesn't convert well you might be beating your head against a brick wall when it comes to making any real money.

For me, this is the exact reason I have started to move away from affiliate sites and back to adsense.  With adsense I know what kind of CTR to expect and I know roughly what kind of CPC I can get.  No, I won't make as much per site when looking at the "math" but in reality I might just make more.