Lifetime Customer Value - LVC - Harder to Calculate that you'd think

I justt read an article on Lifetime Value of a Customer and agile marketing. Like so many articles, they make it sound so easy to calculate.  I'm so tired of hearing that. As far as I can tell, anyone who writes that article has never actually tried to figure out the lifetime value of a customer with real data...

We measure LVC and find it a very difficult exercise.  We tend to think others who measure it easily are either full of it or simpletons. Or maybe they have an easier exercise than we do.

If it were a question for a monthly subscription business of profit per month x average number of months, it would be easy.  If we could segment by marketing channel or another customer aspect, we could then compare  the segments. EZ peasy

Here's the problem. Our customers often sign up, try it, then quit and take their money back within the two weeks trial. But this same customer might sign up months later and stick around for a long period of time.

Our core service is an online subscription educational service for kids.  It turns out that the first sign up might have been just a trial for later.

Customers also quit after six months but come back six months later.

In both of these cases, they might come back through a marketing effort which means putting PPC ads in front of them. Do you assign the value of the second signup to the first case? Treat them separately?

Some customers add a child. Or remove a child.  Others refer friends. Others refer lots of friends.  It turns out that the arithmetic behind a meaningful calculation is tricky and involves lots of assumptions. Am I the only one with all these questions?

Urchin vs Googl Analytics: Score One for the Old School

Query - Name a very useful feature of old Urchin (analytical tool) that newfangled Analytics doesn't do?

Answer - Track downloads.

Urchin was bought by Google a number of years ago and their software was upgraded and repurposed to Analytics which we all use.  But many of our hosting companies still provide for free the old Urchin software. Recently, when I wanted to track the PDF downloads from my site, I found that Analytics somehow doesn't have this feature (or I just couldn't find it) so I fired up old Urchin and found how many people had downloaded my handy-dandy ebook, Learning about Homeschooling.  It's free, take a gander.

Managing & Parking Unused Domains

Here's how I try to use my domains to help build traffic for SEO purposes. Examples (from my netfirms accounts):

Books Count - A url intended for our future reading program. Initially used as a parking place for the spellingcity software development effort. It's been one of my domains for over a year and about 11 months ago was populated. Since we wanted to be under the radar, it has no links. This posting is the first link to the site! Bookscount.com

Family Homeschool - This little 5 page website is put up with a site builder. It's unfinished. Nevertheless, the site has a google pr of 3! go figure. Familyhomeschool.org

Homeschool curriculum review - Another quickie website with a few pages of html that seems like I created it in word. It has good content and the right links and a google pr of 3. Why? Homeschool-curriculum-review.com. With it's strong url, I could alot with this one.

Homeschool Curriculum - This domain has no page rank, it is forwarded to homeschoolonline.org. homeschool-curriculum.biz

This approach of treating them one-by-one is kind-of fun and it is not the type of seo-work that the algorithm gurus at google are likely to care about. But, it's time-consuming and perhaps not very effective. Since I have a total of 150+ domains, is there a better way?

Previous Posts related to domain optimization (interesting to note how little progress I've made in this area despite having grown my number of domains to 150):
Parking domains for profit, is there a free lunch with domains?
Parked domains, how best to use them?
Useful Parking of Domains

Site Stats for Blogger

Site statistics for my blogger blog have been a sore spot for me for a long time.

Today, problem solved!!!! :-> !!!!

I hooked up the site stats for blogger from feedburner (recently acquired by Google) and wow, I now know where the people are coming from.

Oddly, although this blog is brilliantly written, it gets little to no traffic - :-<
So I will now experiment by changing the name a little bit to see if that improves traffic. I just focused the name on the concept of learning online marketing, learning seo, and intermediate level seo. I'll see if that helps. I de-emphased online Q&A.....