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The marketers who make the real bucks are the ones whose web sites have the highest visitor value, which is the average sales value of each click they get.

The marketers who make the real bucks are the ones whose web sites have the highest visitor value, which is the average sales value of each click they get.

Seeing growth in your visitor value means several things. The most obvious is that more money is being put in your bank account, but a desirable bonus is that you will have affiliates and joint-venture partners lining up to do business with you. And this is why; aggressive advertising and more payouts for all.

Every business and every industry has a basic measure of success. Retail is real estate, and the real estate in your local mall is leased on a square-footage basis, so in retail sales the measure of the store's success is sales per square foot.

You buy your traffic from Google by paying money for each visitor. This is the same way you measure your success, dollars per visitor. So when you have one hundred people visit your site and you have two hundred dollars in sales, then you get a visitor value of two dollars. This is the basic unit for your success.

Your mission in life is to have a high visitor value, or high value per visitor.

With a higher value per visitor, you will be in the exalted company of: Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, Starbucks, Saks Fifth Ave, and Macy's.

Having a low visitor value, you are in the company of larger strip mall retailers such as Dollar General, TJ. Maxx, Piercing Pagoda, and Wal-Mart.

With a per visitor value below that you are living a miserly existence selling at flea-markets and pitching your stock on E bay.

Profiting is the aim here. The whole reason you are in business. However profits alone don't tell the story of the effectiveness of your sales process. You may be having a run of luck with uncommonly inexpensive clicks.

Visitor value is actual, boiled down, value of your clicks. It is the appraisal of how effective your website is, how effectual your copy is, and the impact of your offer.

You want to compute your visitor value? Here is how:

Visitor Value = (Your Total Sales Value) / (Your Number of Clicks)

Say you are making a 50 percent profit margin on your $1000 item and one in a hundred visitors will buy from you. Then your visitor value is 10 dollars. The theory is that you can then spend as much as 5 dollars per visitor for traffic and still break even, and if 1 out of every 1000 visitors makes a purchase then you have a visitor value of 1 dollar and you can spend as much as 50 cents each to buy clicks.

We know this is an oversimplification of what margins are and how they work. But the point is clear: visitor value tells you what your clicks are worth, and what you need to do about it.