Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I experimented very briefly with Adlinks a few months ago when some members reported good results. I didn't like the general nature of the links that showed up, and the click-through was pretty horrible compared to the regular text ads I run, so I gave up.
I'm trying them again on some pages that get very high traffic and that never did well with text ads, primarily due to poor targetting and placement limitations. They seem to be performing OK this time around, better than the text ads did on those pages, and less intrusive to boot. I normally don't show any ads above the fold, but the adlinks are pretty laid back so I don't think they'll hurt my primary business.
Despite the fact the Adlinks are doing better than in the past, the click through and CPC are less than half of that of the rest of my pages. I'm a firm believer in not showing Adsense on poorly performing pages, and before I started experimenting with Adlinks, I'd say I had Adsense on about a quarter of my page views, now it's closer to half.
The question is, does anybody have experience suggesting that Adlinks impressions and traffic are weighted differently then text ads in establishing the prices paid for all ads on a site? I'd like to believe that Adlinks impressions are discounted by the SmartPricing algo, because if they aren't, I'll end up having to pull them to protect the value of the text ads on my other pages. I do remember that Jen said SmartPricing affects the whole account.
I also wonder if there's another pricing mechanism at work that I just don't know the name for which sets the ad price range on a site wide or account wide basis, but isn't as severe as the reports I've read about SmartPricing. I'm sure I saw my total revenue (not just CPC) go up when removing ads from poorly converting pages and showing less ads overall, but it seemed to a slow process. Everything I've read about SmartPricing gives me the impression it's a "night and day" phenomena.
Sorry I can't answer your question but I can say that I have had good luck with adlinks.
The smart pricing has me stumped (as, I suspect, everyone else is) so maybe someone will come by and tackle that for you.
Ann
Somehow, adding about 80% to our number of page impressions for revenue that, if not neutral, was adding less than 10% to our income and killing our site CPM, just doesn't seem very smart. I wish Adsense had some kind of interactive process where the publisher could pick some topical ads for high traffic pages where the contextual targetting doesn't work for beans, but I guess we just aren't big enough for that kind of treatment.
