More about thumbs and productivity

  Greetings!

  We want to talk about the importance of thumbnails in the context of trade productivity. Thumbnails are like the face of the site, the better they are, the easier it is for your to promote, earn and work with your content. Speaking of trading, thumbnails are the key to your site's productivity. But before we start, let's dedicate some time to the notion of productivity.

  Believe it or not, in the beginning of our journey we had troubles with understanding it. The main reason is that different traders may refer to different types of productivity and more than that, there are lots of trade scripts and they count productivity slightly different. The same type of productivity (calculated the same way) may be called differently in various scripts UI. 
In the beginning it was really tough for us and we suffered (a little). You simply have to understand what productivity is and how it is calculated to make your trade work and to see what exactly is wrong with your site.

  You can receive a lot of ins from a trader (incoming visits to your site), but small amount of clicks (click is counted when a user clicks on thumbnails). Hence the difference between ins and clicks. User might spend some time on the page and won't find anything interesting to click on. We began by using Progress trade script. When you go to the admin panel, you can see 2 columns dedicated to productivity. But which one should we look at? Trade Productivity or Total productivity?

  The answer is: you should check out both of them and know what they mean depending on the circumstances.

  When you are discussing trade with you partner and they casually mention that their productivity is 120% - what do they mean? Do you remember that they can call the same by different names? Most often when they speak about productivity they mean total productivity (this is how it is called in progress). In progress, total productivity is the number of clicks received from the trader (both to trade and to content) divided by the number of ins from the trader. This ratio tells you about how often thumbs are clicked on by the visitors. Basically, it is your CTR.

  Sometimes some people share their trade productivity. In progress, trade productivity is the number of outs (users that you send to trade) divided by the number of ins. This allows you to see how much traffic you get in return. 

  If you are Progress user, you should look for this ratio in a column named "Return", and not “Trade Productivity.” Then you are obviously wondering what trade productivity column for and how it is calculated in Progress. Trade productivity is the number of clicks to trade that came from the trader divided by the number of ins from the same trader.

  After we clarified what productivity is most commonly spoken of, let's get back to our main concern. The most important thing that should bother you is your CTR (a.k.a. total productivity) because it shows whether the users that came from a certain trade find your thumbnails worth clicking on. We want to talk about thumbs more in this post. What is thumb (thumbnail) - it is the image that captures the essence of your video. When you browse the site, you see the video previews. Some of them make you want to click fast on the video to find out what is it all about. Others... Well, not so much.

  We can add and manage content on the site using various means. The easiest one is installing the rotator. A rotator is a script that allows you to manage the content of your site, be it thumbs or text. Depending on it's features, a rotator helps you to import content, download, crop, edit previews. Most importantly, it allows you to rotate the thumbs and find out which of them has higher click-through-rate. Most of the scripts allow to choose the number of clicks after which the content is considered as already rotated. There are lots of such tools, some of them have free versions where you can "pay" by giving the owner a certain percentage of your site's traffic. It is a good deal if you are a beginner and just want to grasp the main concepts. We started off by using Buran. We can crop the thumbs as we like and check out the stats in the dashboard.

  Why do we talk so much about rotators? Because without them you are hardly ever able to achieve any productivity. If we take into account just thumbnails, there are three keys to bear in mind:

- download as many previews as possible;

- rotate;

- choose the ones with the best CTR.

  What else can you do with thumbs? We suggest you to conduct a research and see what thumbs are used by successful tubes/CJs. Try not to use the ones that are of bad quality, used by everyone, too boring, do not go well with the overall design of your site. It is even better if you've got some Photoshop skills and can polish the images. Try to add at least 5 previews for one video and put them all out for the visitors. See which one gets the most clicks.

  The best practice is to rotate the thumbs by means of trader's traffic, but not the one that you buy from SSP to feed your traders. Avoid this if you can. The goal of this practice is to choose the most clickable thumbs by the traffic that is real (not all SSPs are great, we know it) and that is interested in your adult content.