Less ads better?

Removing useless ads a good thing?

[saikyo]

Hello,

"The best change we made, (which could also be seen as a mistake from the past) was to remove all Adsense Ads from the image galleries, and forums, as these provided very very low CTR, which I believe lead my account to be ‘Smart Priced’. Shortly after removing these ads, the CTR for the whole account climbed, so did the earnings."

I read this on another website.

Can anyone verify that this is true?

If so, I'm thinking to go remove the ads that I have that preform poorly...

Currently I put ads up on every page...

[edited by: jatar_k at 11:49 pm (utc) on April 8, 2006]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[ArtistMike]

I personally take ads off pages that get a lot of hits but very few clicks. It is just the way the system works, you get hit by SmartPricing if you don't.

Mike

[Andrew Bassett]

What if your site in general gets a very low CTR because of its nature? Why would you get paid less per click simply because you don't have many clicks?

[david_uk]

My advice is to put a channel on each banner to monitor performance (if you haven't already done this).

If an ad is not getting the clicks, then removing it isn't going to reduce your income anyway. The effect of doing this will be that CTR will improve. RandomPricing(tm) seems to like improved CTR, so it's likely that EPC will improve also to earn you more money for less add impressions. That was certainly what happened to me when I removed the extra blocks that weren't working. You need to run it for a week or so to see how it works - RandomPricing(tm) apparently updates about once a week.

Besides, having minimal ad blocks reduces ad blindness and it's usually worth doing for that alone. Visitors come for your content - not to see a wall of ads obscuring it.

[Andrew Bassett]

But what if even the _best_ performing ads on your site get around a 0.2% CTR, and you get thousands of impressions per day. Why would/should you be paid less per click? If anything, you should be paid more due to the visual exposure given to the advertisers.

Would you, then, need to artifically reduce your ad impressions, perhaps displaying them 1 out of every 5 visits?

That kind of smart pricing doesn't sound very smart to me.

[david_uk]

If a page's ctr is that poor on adsense, then it makes no sense to run adsense cpc ads on it. A cpm banner from Fastclick or whoever will earn you more money. In fact, Google's algorithm is supposed to put cpm ads on pages where it's more likely that they will earn more money than cpc ads would. That way you do get paid on how much exposure the advertiser gets.

[saikyo]

Hey guys, this is on a per page basis right?

The ads that my site has, that don't get many clicks, are actually ads that are on other pages, in which the pages themselves just don't get many visits. At least not when compared with my main front page.

Will the non-performing ads on other pages affect the CTR of the ads on other pages of my site?

[Opera14]

Well, to my knowledge, they'll still count as impressions, and if people don't click them, your CTR will go down.

[saikyo]

Wow.

It's silly but I didnt know that... I think I should dig the useless ads out of my pages that never get hit...

So basically, the CTR, is a function of the number of impressions vs the number of clicks?

So, if you have 1 impression, and 1 click, you would get the max payment per click possible? And on the other hand, the more impressions and less clicks you have, the less you get paid per click?

[arikgub]

How is smart pricing related to CTR? Smart pricing should be based on conversion ratios. One might argue that low CTR sites tend to have lower conversion ratios, but it is just a speculation....

[david_uk]

So, if you have 1 impression, and 1 click, you would get the max payment per click possible? And on the other hand, the more impressions and less clicks you have, the less you get paid per click?

Probably not! Smartpricing is known to be very complex, and Google aren't giving out information about how it works, so a lot of what you read is individual experiences and consequent speculation.

You might increase your ctr, but increased ctr only means increased payout if Google decided that the clicks have converted for advertisers. Otherwise smartpricing discounts the clicks. Howvever, lowering ctr from what smartpricing is used to seeing on your pages may mean that Google thinks they have less value to advertisers than they did, and I believe that this is the experience people are discussing here.

How is smart pricing related to CTR? Smart pricing should be based on conversion ratios. One might argue that low CTR sites tend to have lower conversion ratios, but it is just a speculation....

I don't know that there is a direct mechanism that links ctr with epc. I agree that logically there shouldn't be one, but what smart pricing seems to do is to take account of changes, and doesn't seem to like sudden ones. For example, if you grow ctr and impressions over time at a steady rate, smart pricing seems to like that. If you get sudden dramatic changes then it seems to react to them by whacking you.

For example, when my site rose to the top position in serps for my keyword briefly, the ctr was unchanged, hovever there was a huge spike in clicks due to extra traffic. Logically, that shouldn't have affected epc, but during the time the site was getting an unusually high number of visitors, epc sank. When there was a change in serps and I was back to position 4 again and usual traffic I got hit AGAIN, as there was a change in clicks due to decreased traffic. It recovered eventually as it always does, but sudden changes either way usually mean getting hit by smartpricing is my experience.

[arikgub]

... but what smart pricing seems to do is to take account of changes, and doesn't seem to like sudden ones. For example, if you grow ctr and impressions over time at a steady rate, smart pricing seems to like that. If you get sudden dramatic changes then it seems to react to them by whacking you.

Sounds like sandbox counterpart...