potentialgeek - 1:09 am on May 26, 2007 (gmt 0)

when I doubled CRT on one site by placing the ads in a much more prominent positions, I made a lot more money. But what if the advertisers didn't? Am I at risk of losing my account because of a falling conversion rate?

Even if this isn't a reason for the end of accounts on June 1, it's still an important issue Google needs to address. It is important to the advertiser and publisher alike.

Publishers are so in the dark on this, it's crazy. We aren't told what CTR would be too high and we aren't given any conversion rate data for the ad campaign.

So we have to wait until we're smartpriced. That's the only information we get from Google, but even that isn't clear, because there's no notice 'you've been smartpriced,' and in fact it's all guessing, because we never even know for sure if we've been smartpriced.

Or the advertiser doesn't contact you and say, 'Hey, that last change you made on ad unit placement just isn't converting for us anymore. In fact, your CTR may be higher, but we'll probably have to ban your site.'

Sure, you can say, it's none of our business to see the advertisers' data. Their conversion rates are confidential. Fine. But just once I'd like to see a study by one advertiser and one publisher who communicated with each other and shared their data so the rest of us could get a better heatmap that makes the Adwords-Adsense program work better for everyone. Google should start a beta group of advertisers and publishers to run this testing.

Right now there's this huge wall between Adwords and Adsense which obscures the idea that at the end of the day we are all a partnership (Google-Publisher-Advertiser) trying to make money online.

p/g