Two of our e-commerce clients, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands per month, now see better conversions on AdSense than on pure search traffic for some of their campaigns.
Full article: [clickz.com ]
there is a way to bid separately, AND show different (branding) ads. we do it and it costs us FAR less than search ads.
see:
[webmasterworld.com ]
post 5
Adsense Placement:
61% of Impressions
7% of clicks
0% of sales!
Max CPC bid on adsense only placements are average of 30% of average Search Only placement. But as you can see we get 1 and a half more impressions for 30% the cost on Adsense (impressions only) . Not good for sales, but GREAT for branding!
We use adsense mainly to increase market awareness. Our adsense only ads have our company name in the title and do not 'encourage' the click.
In hindsight, AdSense looks like a blunder by Google in the year leading up to their IPO. Yes, it increased revenues for them, but at the cost of angering one of their most important constituents: their advertisers.
The recent changes appear to be an attempt to salvage lost goodwill from the advertisers. AdSense will probably eventually settle in as an important part of AdWords for both advertisers and Google, but at substantially lower CPCs than were seen at the beginning of the program.
In hindsight, AdSense looks like a blunder by Google in the year leading up to their IPO. Yes, it increased revenues for them, but at the cost of angering one of their most important constituents: their advertisers.
Did you see the numbers in Google's IPO filing? I wish I had that kind of blunder in my bank account. :-)
Isn't that what smart pricing is trying to do?
We have advertisers paying good flat rates for advertising on our site because they get a good return, as against 90% of the sites in our area where they won't even bother to advertise because they get minimal return. If that can happen through Adsense then all the better and one of the ways of differentiating sites with good ROI is smart pricing.
Writing off Adsense as many seem to be doing is a bit short-sighted.
I suspect that such "writing off" occurs mainly in categories where there's a limitless amount of search traffic for the advertisers' keywords.
I just saw a post on the AdSense forum that read:
I do adwords and even when I bid the highest, I just can't get enough traffic for all the variations of the specifics keywords and phrases that I want. There just isn't enough traffic for what I want. I suppose I could choose more general terms but I think the more general terms just wouldn't convert well enough.
Anyways, I was surpised by how limted the amount of traffic was out there for what I was bidding on.
That's an interesting observation, and it helps to explain why I see so little advertiser turnover for some ads in a given day on my editorial content site. If an advertiser is trying to sell "Elbonian river cruises" or "Shelbyville nudist camps," there may be so few available impressions for those terms that he'd be foolish to limit his ads to search pages.
