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Values and Costs
When you configure Summary to track Values associated with costs of items,
you can use the Value column to estimate costs of specific items or to
find out your expenses for a given period. You can even use positive values
for revenue and negative values for costs to have the Value column represent
your profit.
Usage Costs
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Figure 4. The Overview Report
includes bandwidth usage details. |
In the previous section we talked about assigning values to page views to
estimate advertising potential or income potential. You can assign a value to
page views as a cost to estimate your bandwidth usage costs. From the Overview
Report in Figure 4, you can see that 12,169M bytes were transfered for
14,284 pages. This gives an average
of 872 bytes per page. If you know
your bandwidth charge you can use the following formula to figure your cost per
page (remember to convert usage costs into dollars per byte, not dollars per
megabyte or gigabyte):
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Bandwidth Charge * Bytes per Page = Average Cost per Page
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External Service Costs
The other way that Summary can provide cost analysis is by connecting costs
to particular events. Generally, there are external services that you use that
charge you fees. If you group the requests for each such service in the Summary
configuration and assign a cost to them, then Summary’s reports will total the
expenses you have incurred (or at least estimates) for given referrers or search
terms, or for particular periods in the time metrics reports.
For example, perhaps you have a credit card order page on your
system. You can give this a value of the cost of each credit card transaction
(assuming the cost is a flat fee – if it is related to the size of the
purchase, then you can use an average charge as an estimate). If you track your
own advertisements that are on other sites, you can tell Summary to assign the
impression cost to each advertisement to get an estimate of your advertising
expenses. There are other services that you may have or may add to your site
that you can configure Summary to track as well.
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Values