Identifying non performing Hubs

“None save a fool ever wrote but for money” said Samuel Johnson. HubPages provide tools for measuring the popularity of a hub, and its earning potential but not its earnings record. Bearing in mind that HubPages takes 40 percent of all advertising revenue a way of identifying non performing hubs is needed: this would benefit Authors and HubPages as a none earning hub, no matter how popular, is useful only if it drives traffic to an earning hub. Previously one could see historical earnings via Google Adsense but this option is not available with the HubPages Ad program. Here I take a first look at indirect methods of assessing actual earnings

My understanding is that an impression is created when someone views the hub long enough that all the adds are displayed and a click occurs when someone clicks an ad and buys something. This means there will always be more views than impressions or clicks. From the writer's viewpoint this means Hubs need to attract the viewer for long enough for an impression to be recorded and the ads placed should be ones likely to attract the interest of the viewer.

Since view duration determines impressions, the practice I developed of splitting long hubs into multiple parts is probably self defeating - and this will change.

Hub pages gives statistics only for views, with some information on view duration and incoming links. There is an assessment of earning POTENTIAL but no rating of earning RECORD. To see this information for a given hub log in and open the hub then click on stats at the top left and then Hub Metrics.

The only thing one can say with certainty is that a Hub with no views is not performing. A hub that has had no views for thirty days is flashing a warning light. The dip may be seasonal: Hubs dealing with Christmas probably get very few views outside December. I have a rough criterion that a hub that has been on for more than a year and had no views in 30 days is a candidate for deletion. Such a hub may no longer be valid, my ideas may have changed, and it may simply be that I can now write better. Currently I an deleting a non performing hub every time I add a new hub. I am also considering simply deleting about 39 of my 140 hubs if they are non performing and possibly rewriting or republishing at a later date.

A hub score is only weakly related to performance. If you look at the graph of views against time a non performing hub is easy to spot. There may be an initial spike in views and then nothing, or it may look as if there were no views. Alternatively there may be an initial spike and a second small spike later. A well performing hub will have a lot of views almost all the time. While a low scoring hub ( less than 60) that is up for a few months will almost certainly be non performing, a quick look at my hubs shows some non performing hubs in the 60s and suggests that good performance starts around 75. The score fluctuates and the graph of views against time is more reliable. It also suggests that my more “academic” hubs are less popular. This is not a problem as I know other places where they may do better.

This is up to you. Personally I would prefer 10 hubs with a steady hundred views ( and impressions) per month to 100 with ten views a month and possibly no impressions. HubPages gives you accolades for the number of hubs published, but this is not relevant to earning potential. If you do have this accolade it may be better not to decrease the number of hubs so you lose it, in case your score is affected. Remember that if your score reaches 100 you get onto the front page which means increased exposure for your work.

The move to the HubPages Ad program has raised my earnings dramatically in percentage terms but I lost the ability to track the earnings from each hub. Since all I have to work from is the graph of views against time, I am removing hubs that are not attracting traffic. Because impressions seem to be related to view duration, I will delete some multipart hubs and may republish them as single part hubs later, maybe under a different name and possibly expanded.