Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Bob owns A.
Pete owns B and C under one Adsense account
Joe owns D and E under different Adsense accounts.
Lets say there is $1,000 worth of relevant adwords listings in a given day.
Lets say each site begins with equal traffic.
Question 1: How is the inventory assigned?
On a site basis -- so A,B,C,D,E each get $200 with of possible inventory before switching to PSAs
On an an owner basis -- so Bob, Pete and Joe each get $333 worth of inventory
On an account basis -- so Bob gets $250, Pete $250 and Joe $500?
Or on a site traffic basis -- so A,B,C,D,E each get $200 worth.
Question 2: Assuming inventory allocated on a traffic basis, how is the inventory altered when traffic level changes?
Let's say Bob's traffic triples -- he'll need extra inventory to avoid switching to PSAs far earlier. Will his new inventory be taken from Pete and Joe in equal measure?
Any ideas?
On a site basis -- so A,B,C,D,E each get $200 with of possible inventory before switching to PSAsObviously it's not based on any one of these three principles. You seem to acknowledge that yourself in question 2.
On an an owner basis -- so Bob, Pete and Joe each get $333 worth of inventory
On an account basis -- so Bob gets $250, Pete $250 and Joe $500?
I would say that in general it's based on site traffic, but I don't think the way you are laying out the scenarion will be illuminating. The matching and bidding rules are too complex and the pool of advertisers too deep. It's one of those cases you could say X will happen if all other things are equal, but all other things will never be never equal.
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I think the problem I have with your question is that it's a supply-side interpretation, as if Google is trying to dole out inventory to websites in some equitable way. I don't think that's in their mind at all. IMO because it's a competitive bidding system, they are more likely to be allocating ads to the highest-quality and lowest-priced pages available, and what happens to individual publishers is more or less a side effect.
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IMO because it's a competitive bidding system, they are more likely to be allocating ads to the highest-quality and lowest-priced pages available, and what happens to individual publishers is more or less a side effect.
Or the other way around? In other words, someone visits a page, triggering a call for ads. The AdSense system serves up the "best" set of ads available at that time for that page. If that's true, then the system will respond dynamically and instantaneously to changes in traffic.
What spurned the question was a conversation I had had earlier discussing how one's available inventory could be affected by actions/behaviour of a competitor.
It was put to me that if a competitors site (albeit in the totally controlled, non-real world state described above) was to experience a surge in traffic, this surge could impact the earnings of your own site (by using up inventory) even if your traffic was not affected.
In many ways it is a supply-driven equation because each day there is a total budget allocated through the adwords programme -- when nobody has money left to spend, what gets served?
I realise it's an issue that isn't going to be answered by a simple "Oh yeah it's the square root of your traffic by 42" -- was just thinking aloud.
