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]
Aren't they [Ad-Sonar] still in beta?
Yes, but everything works perfectly as far as I can see. I've even received followup phonecalls from one of their partner managers who is trying to help me finetune my ads as much as possible. That's unheard of with Google.
Yes, quigo's ad_sonar is now working better than google does.
There's an idea...
works soooooo hard on their sites, but they can't get the ads to cover the investment they've put into it...New York Times. That's high quality, e-commerce traffic. They deserve a higher PPC
With respect, how hard they work on their sites is not really a material fact and it's not logical for their expectations of revenue to be based on the effort that went into individual articles. Revenue should be based on what the advertiser is achieving from the traffic the publisher sends. News sites are limited in what they can do and often have very, very low quality traffic (from the point of view of e-commerce). People click a headline and read an article because the subject interests them and not because they are in a buying mood. A lot of (non-news) publisher sites can be geared towards - and the content targeted towards - attracting people in the buying mood doing pre-purchase research. News sites can't do that and in relation to those publisher sites they should earn less.
EFV, you are spot on as usual in most respects. Like you I've taken a hit on earnings but there is no other ad network I can make even the current level of earnings on, so I'll be staying with Adsense. I do believe that your prediction of variable pricing having the effect of diminishing the quick-buck sites is wrong. Some of the quick buck sites are big players and Google earns revenue from them and they still have their poor quality automatically generated pages reaching the tops of SERPS. The variable pricing is still variable at Google's pleasure so there may be some poor quality auto generated pages paying pretty high payouts if Google's algo says they should be getting a bigger chunk. (The reliability of doing this without access to ROI does leave me feeling it's pretty much luck. How can an automated system decide which sites should get more money for clicks? Especially when it doesn't have ROI information? Perhaps that's why content sites like yours and mine are showing a drop ;))
Has this reduction in CPC, as seen by publishers, been passed on to the advertisers?
Can anybody verify that advertisers are paying less for thier ads displayed on content website publishers?
Has this reduction in CPC, as seen by publishers, been passed on to the advertisers?
I've seen a few posts by advertisers who have reported seeing discounts, and I've also seen posts by advertisers who have complained that cheap nickel ads are getting harder to come by. So maybe click prices are edging toward a middle ground: fewer bargains at the low end, but cheaper prices in the middle and top ranges. That's just idle speculation, though, and I won't be surprised if somebody here provides an example that shoots the idea down. :-)
2 sailing sites. All information based content
I have seen the same old ads appear but now at much reduced cpc. My ads are spot on theme wise and always have been. The subject might be "learning to sail" and I will see sailing school ads.
I have seen an increase in ads for sailing related clothing and gifts, which whilst still thematically accurate do seem a little a bit out of place.
(Oh and I've just signed up for ad_sonar)
Judging the quality of the traffic you're getting is key to successfully marketing your product, but I found it incredibly difficult to implement. I was lucky to be working in a software company, so I could steal some programmer time to help me build what I needed.
If Google is creating a system which builds in the value of the traffic, that's an enormous benefit to advertisers. Remember... the clients? A fraction of them have the tools to accurately track the return on investment for the traffic Adsense is sending them.
My EPC is down about 25%, but if that's what needs to happen to keep the whole system working, I'm glad to take the revenue hit. I think we're still a few years away from this maturing, but when it does, I think we'll all be able to bank on how stable this source of revenue has become.
Anyway, raising my volume of traffic is easy. Selling advertising is hard.
From my point of view, CTR has dropped slightly, but total earnings for each day has dropped by about 60%!
a) The savings are passed on to the advertiser.
b) The publishers are informed about how and why their revenue is decreasing, so that they can take steps to increase it. Right now, none of us know anything about improving the "quality" of our click throughs.
Basically what Google has done is changed their CPC program into a CPS (cost per sale) program, but measures it in click throughs *when one has absolutely nothing to do with the other!*
I signed up to be a part of a CPC program. Nothing more, nothing less.
My two cents: Google is doing this as a way to quiet advertisers who don't want their ads appearing in AdSense.
My two cents: Google is doing this as a way to quiet advertisers who don't want their ads appearing in AdSense.
But advertisers can already opt out of AdSense, simply by opting out of content ads. And let's face it: In the case of niche topics, at least, AdSense probably offers better targeting and higher-quality leads than many general-interest "premium partners" do (never mind DomainPark or gmail, which are the biggest reasons for not using content ads).
