Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
[edited by: markus007 at 8:08 pm (utc) on April 1, 2004]
Perhaps I am misunderstanding but ... wasn't the whole point of this change to IMPROVE the CTR?
Damn, first Google, then Austin, then SiteMatch, and now this. How the hell are we suppose to keep our businesses running. The SEs just don't seem to have much respect for webmasters these days - we're just pawns in their powerplay.
And this site was a known "relevant" site.
Well it was if you define one indicator of "relevance" as getting actual e-mails from lots of visitors, asking for the product the old (pre-"improvement") AdSense advertisers were offering. I think someone taking the time to sit down and bang out an e-mail is about the best relevance indicator you can find short of making an actual sale, correct me if I'm wrong.
Pages load faster now too.
Thanks.
What are our alternatives? Does Overture presently offer a text ad product similar to AdSense? I can't afford to let this die on the vine; I need a solution asap.
[google.com...]
I think it will be important that we speak out, not just for this but for future changes as well. We moved helped to move a mountain after the Florida update - let's see if we can move another one.
As an Adwords advertiser (until today), I never gave Google any conversion data, nor based on the Adwords Forum threads, have many.
This was Google grabbing the difference in your missing revenue and ending the Adsense program as we knew it.
It was a great nine months.
This form has always worked for me. Although they seem to get slower in their response (last was one week), i'd say it's worth to send them a message using your AS account. Like with Spam reports it's important to send them a detailed, constructive, non-emotional message and explain them what's the problem FOR YOU - stick to the facts!
As soon as i have evidence of a loss in revenue, i'll send them my detailed message.
CTR is now up by 50% and revenue up by around 20%.
Its early days yet, obviously, but based on 'feel' rather than statiscally relevant analysis, it looks like the peaks and troughs have been ironed out - presumably a result of better targeting for my themes.
Obviously, it depends on your 'theme', but so far I am unexpectedly pleasantly surprised.
Guess its 'swings and roundabouts', but my main areas are doing OK.
Without the collaboration from individual site owners, there's no way that Google can track sales conversions at a destination site, since A) they can't track beyond the click and B) even if they somehow found a way around that, they don't know which page(s) are "thank you" post-purchase/post-signup/post-join pages.
So Google may be sheltering behind a sorta-kinda true statement (in that they may be using the conversion data from the 1% or however many sites have set up full tracking) but it's not THE reason why the adsense program has stopped paying out.
Similarly, it may be that some advertisers are getting ads more cheaply, but it's intriguing that we are hearing many, many negative Adsense stories but no more than a handful (and a small one at that) of positive Adwords stories. So again, it's the truth, nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth...
They're basically guilty of the fallacy of insignificant cause: "The object or event identified as the cause of an effect is a genuine cause, but insignificant when compared to the other causes of that event."
Gosh, any one see aything wrong with them using this data as they are? When I implemented the tracker I thought it was solely for *MY* benefit. I heard recently that they're now tracking (via cookie) everything that you click on when doing a search. Makes me nervous to think what that information will now be used for since they've clearly shown a pattern now of stealth use of their data. :-\
