Did some experimenting

Please help me understand

[Emilio]

Hi,

I changed some ads around on one of my sites and my CTR increased by 200% and my eCPM by 100%...BUT my cost per click went WAY down.

Today I already have as many clicks as I get daily, and it's only 10AM here, but my earnings show half of what I earn per day.

Is this the effect of smart pricing? I never really learned what that is.

Thank you for your time.

[nickreynolds]

I'm no expert but I guess it would help get some answers if you put your stats into some kind of context. How long have you had adsense, how many impressions you get per day, over what time scale have you tried this etc

[david_uk]

There are many factors involved here. Depends what ads are being clicked, advertiser budgets and so on. It could even be smart pricing as you suggest, but nobody can say for sure.

IMHO smart pricing doesn't really like change, and doesn't always react in your favour to dramatic changes. If the new layout is working well, I'd be inclined to keep it for at least a week and see if things stabilise.

The other possibility is that the ads showing and being clicked may be MFA's, and that would account for a drop in epc.

[MisterMarkup]

When revising your ad presentation, you should use AdSense's channels [google.com]
feature to track the effect of your changes, preferably for each individual ad.

Make your change on just a few pages, and assign a separate channel to each new kind of layout you use. Let the new ads run until each channel has collected enough page views for the statistics to be significant.

If you found that your total income tanked, I'd put most of your ads back the way they were, then experiment with new layouts on just a few pages until you really feel you understand the results you get.

[Sweet Cognac]

Every time you change your ads, the default ads show up till the mediabot returns to spider the pages. Probably the default ads are cheaper.

Once the mediabot comes back, you will still have to wait because your pages need to build history.

I do not change my ads any more, it takes too long to build history.

[Emilio]

To answer some of the questions:

The site has had adsense on it for 5 months. It gets 350,000 to 400,000 impressions per day. I noticed the changes just about an hour after I changed the ads around and they're still as I reported in my first post.

Thanks.