Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Each ad group has ads that pay a little and ads that pay much more. All I ever got was low-paying ads. But now that my CTR is way up, so is my $ per click.
We have read that Google pays out from 40% to 80% to the Adsense publisher. Is there a direct relationship between the 2 stats, such as -
CTR Payout %
5% 40%
10% 60%
15% 80%?
Could this be possible (actual)?
If not, then what DOES determine which publishers get the high-paying ads?
Is it just volume (impressions)?
Or volume plus CTR?
Are publishers rewarded porportionally for their performance, or just their website size?
Can low-volume publishers get high-paying clicks? Or is the deck stacked against the little guy?
In short, what factors determine who gets the high-paying ads?
It sounds to me like there are a lot of disillusioned people out there, and what they are discribing...sounds a lot like nothing short of slavery to G to me. Most of us are in this business because we want to get AWAY from slaving away our lives for someone else...
Real slaves aren't allowed to walk away if they don't like their masters. :-)
And for every publisher who is disillusioned or feels enslaved, there are others who profit nicely from AdSense just by placing a block of AdSense code in a running page margin and cashing a check at the end of the month.
By the way, I wish you luck with Google's competitors, and I'm all for competition in the contextual ad business. However, my own results from a test of a Google competitor were disappointing. (Most of the ads were from Expedia or Orbitz, and CPM was very low.)
You sound a little cranky with Adsense. I think some of that comes from a lack of understanding and perhaps a simple observation that Adsense is good for some sites, but not all.
Your theory on keywords most likely won't work. If there is only one bidder, then adsense will treat the ad in a special way. You won't know if Google is applying smart pricing or not - the rest of the site may be themed differently, so Smart Pricing kicks in. Plus we don't know the cut publsihers get.
As a general observation, I am still amazed at how many people seem to have no concept of what Smart Pricing is, but even with this lack of knowledge they will summise it is only a technique to screw publishers - which it is NOT.
but I was also told by a rep that the avg CPM is $2 and the avg CTR is something like 1-2%
I have seen a CPM of over $100. It's not hard to find. An avg. CPM of $2 is due to the type of your industry.
... "constantly adding content and impressions, but losing ground in earnings and constantly chasing the wind to make up lost ground and meet prior earnings quotas" sounds a lot like nothing short of slavery to G to me.
Do not believe everything what people say. Earnings are up and down and you have to work hard to earn them. No one is forced you to do it anyway
This "Smart pricing" scheme which I've been reading about sounds like simply a license to steal for G if there is no positive accountability or trackability. Keep the publishers from knowing what the advertisers are actually doing.
Secret is a trademark of Google. It won't tell everyone any of its algorithms. Don't expect it differently for AdSense.
You need to learn more.
Europeforvisitors:
>>Real slaves aren't allowed to walk away if they don't like their masters.
From what you're describing there is no alternative for them. It's the google-way or the highway. In this case it sounds like it's a psychological slavery for them, just like gambling to gambling addicts, "maybe if I just go one step further (one more bet), make that great page (big win), I'll finally hit the big times." But as it's sounding, it never happens...
>>Most of the ads were from Expedia or Orbitz, and CPM was very low.
Umm, much of our content is in the travel related industry, and a particular high demand geographic area even, and gee, guess who we're seeing almost exclusively in our Adsense ads? Specifically Expedia and Orbitz in particular, AND they're often the TOP bidders! So I guess there isn't much difference.
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Darkmage:
Let me begin with: you're darn right I AM CRANKY about GAdSense. Why?...
>I think some of that comes from a lack of understanding and perhaps a simple observation that Adsense is good for some sites, but not all.
I can also agree with your diagnosis of a lack of understanding... but I don't see G being very forthcoming with detailed explanations or even non-template support responses. It would be a breath of fresh air if we could have some real specific information instead of forum rumors, generalizations and dismissive assurances from G that everything is ideal from their rosey point of view. From what I've read forum-wide, GAdsense is only "good" for newly made, static, targeted sites specifically BUILT for it, or those who are scamming it and afraid to reveal their tactics for fear of getting caught. Legitimate, original content, dynamic, user-oriented sites are penalized by G's overly cautious and otherwise wacky content matching.
G panders Adsense to publishers as a way to get quality targeted advertisers without having to deal with marketing to them individually , billing, etc. Which is all we would expect from them. Well what good is that if G can't properly TARGET or even KEEP UP with changing content? Journalists and publishers should not have to design and constantly re-design their content specifically for G, there simply isn't time and still staying on dedline (which is made even harder by the fact that the actual ads don't match the preview tool ads and everything is delayed up to 2 days). We've already issued a short list of terms and alternate terms for our regular writers NOT to use as they will almost certainly trigger stupid GAd results. I can imagine the nightmare for publishers with a print edition which then would have to be re-written for the online version!
>You won't know if Google is applying smart pricing or not ...
None of that matters. My experiment was not designed to try to determine or even assume all those things. My point is, it would be quite easy to confirm what PERCENTAGE the publisher is getting PAID compared to what the bidder finally gets CHARGED simply to confirm the claimed publisher PAY PERCENTAGE. That should be constant no matter WHAT price is being charged. If that is varying depending on other factors, then it would come out in the test. But if they charge you as the bidder $1 on your billing statement for that keyword, and then pay you as a publisher only .10 for that keyword channel on your report, SOMETHING is not right.
As I understand smart-pricing from bidding on Overture it is simply a matter of always reducing the TOP bid to 1 cent over the 2nd place bid. End of story. Sorry, no further useful explanation is given by G on the Adsense side. If G is performing some other obscure mumbo-jumbo scheme, without giving the details, I'd be better off buying a cheap Rolex on the corner of Main Street. At least THERE you can SEE what you're getting first.
FromRocky:
>I have seen a CPM of over $100. It's not hard to find. An avg. CPM of $2 is due to the type of your industry.
Sure, we have some relatively low-traffic CHANNELS with CTRs consistently over 15% and that high of CPM too and higher. If most of them were that way consistently I wouldn't be here bothering to write this now. Unfortunately, we also have far many more high-traffic channels with CPM of .2% or less! From my immpression our categroy of travel and health and fitness are among some of the highest bid areas. I got the impression the rep was talking Adsense-wide, but I could be wrong. When I consider the number of high volume, ultra-low CTRs we alone are getting, due to their missing and mis-targeted ads, I can certainly believe it. Our CTR previously was only 1.5% site-wide. Now that we've eliminated the ads from pages where they were putting up sheer non-sense on high-traffic pages (and stopped placing ads in new areas) we're up to a whopping double of that which is still a far cry from our typical 10% site-wide for privately placed ads.
>It won't tell everyone any of its algorithms. Don't expect it differently for AdSense.
When I am selling G a whole lot of an otherwise valuable commodity (which YES they did call me personally, repeatedly and made an argument of why our sites should switch to using them), and then I have no choice but to take THEIR word (or rather some complex "smart price" algorithm, not even a live person, which may not be functioning properly, but then WHO would know for sure?) for what they claim it is worth, and let THEIR faulty algorithm decide what types of ads to waste it on, and then let THEM solely track the unverifiable clickthrus (they won't let you frame or track clickthrus yourself so you have no way of knowing the actual number), then let THEM solely decide how much to give you percentage-wise of their cut from the advertiser (they're even vague about that). I think there is an awful lot of blind faith being asked for here. It's mostly suspicious to us that when WE and our private advertisers track the clickthrus with our own code for our OWN advertisers, the CTR and thus CPM is astronomically higher. Maybe I'm just too honest and expect everyone else to be so too, or perhaps I'm just skeptical now that I've discovered others aren't always so honest.
The only reason we decided to give it a try is because we have VERY good G rankings and were afraid we'd be penalized if we didn't. (yeah, yeah, they claim there's no connection whatsoever...) Amazingly a week after we started, the pages we added GAdsense to consistently jumped up a few positions. Like from #10 to #5 Obviously just a coincidence though...
In our case, other than suspicions that the payout/bid percentage is far lower than 50%, I feel a large part of the problem is the lack of proper targeting on the ads they are running causing the CTR to be so low. Of course TRY and tell them their algorithm sucks, all you get is template-letters from support people who obviously have no clue why they are serving blue widget ads on green gadget pages and trained to impart "the customer is always wrong".
I've also recently had another insight. How do we know what keyword or phrase they are actually matching? Since the average publisher is not allowed to indicate content hints and as wacky as their context matching algorithm seems to be, say you have a "green widget" oriented page where the bid for "green widgets" is $10. But you also mention "little green widgets" in one spot for which the highest bid is $1. As everyone knows, some less common terms for the same meaning can have widely different bids. Since there is never an indication, even in the Adsense tool, of what keywords (or combination of terms) they are drawing their bid prices from, Either:
1. They could be using the bids from "little green widgets" to pay you for "green widget" ads and collecting the difference. or
2. maybe just placing "little green widget" ads instead of "green widget" ads which are simply "a waste of higher-valued ad space".
A G rep once claimed to me (paraphrased), "maybe the 'little green widget' advertiser bid on the term 'green widgets'". Possible I suppose, but unlikely when it would have cost him 10 times as much and would have brought in far fewer, lower quality visitors!
I've been observing the variation and trending of ads on our mistargeted high-traffic low-CTR pages which we haven't removed yet. Over time it has become quite apparent what they are doing. It LOOKS like the algorithm is slowly TRYING to home-in on better producing ads, but in most cases are NOT suceeding and end up returning to the old useless ones. I've also noticed brand new pages on existing domains are getting default ads based on the content of OTHER PAGES WITH AD UNITS ON THE REST OF THE DOMAIN until they get crawled! Does this mean they are also biasing individual page ads based on rest of the domain content? Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not, especially for a cross-market domain.
My conclusion still: G is more often than not, probably unintentionally, mis-targeting ads and the only way to fix it is to have more frequent crawls and guidance and feedback from publishers or at least some occassional manual common-sense review.
In this case it sounds like it's a psychological slavery for them, just like gambling to gambling addicts
Now we've gone from "slavery" to "addiction." What next? "Mental murder"? "Economic rape"? "AdSense Abuse Syndrome"? :-)
Umm, much of our content is in the travel related industry, and a particular high demand geographic area even, and gee, guess who we're seeing almost exclusively in our Adsense ads? Specifically Expedia and Orbitz in particular, AND they're often the TOP bidders! So I guess there isn't much difference [between AdSense and its competitors].
That hasn't been my experience at all. I see a great variety of AdSense ads on my editorial travel site. That wasn't the case when I tried AdS****r. IMHO, that just goes to show that publishers should test different options and use the revenue sources that work best for them.
My experiment was not designed to try to determine or even assume all those things. My point is, it would be quite easy to confirm what PERCENTAGE the publisher is getting PAID compared to what the bidder finally gets CHARGED simply to confirm the claimed publisher PAY PERCENTAGE. That should be constant no matter WHAT price is being charged.
Why? Because you think Google should be paying a straight percentage split or commission like a traditional banner network or affiliate program? Google never promised you a fixed percentage.
As I understand smart-pricing from bidding on Overture it is simply a matter of always reducing the TOP bid to 1 cent over the 2nd place bid. End of story.
Overture is Overture. Google is Google. Different companies, different ad programs, different pricing algorithms.
My conclusion still: G is more often than not, probably unintentionally, mis-targeting ads and the only way to fix it is to have more frequent crawls and guidance and feedback from publishers or at least some occassional manual common-sense review.
I see very few mistargeted ads on my site. There are some chronic examples (which Google Support staff invariably claim they can't see), but I find that mistargeting is more of an annoyance than a serious problem. If your experience has been different, you might be better off without AdSense--unless, of course, you're too addicted to quit. :-)
Actually, Yes they did. The rep specifically stated "we pay you the MAJORITY" of the bid price. Unless they've managed to change and hide the rules of math too, that still represents >50% to me.
>I see very few mistargeted ads on my site. There are >some chronic examples (which Google Support staff >invariably claim they can't see)
Know exactly what you mean x 10. Grr
>you might be better off without AdSense--unless, of
>course, you're too addicted to quit. :-)
Not at all, we have other options, that's why I mentioned earlier we've already started changing pages back over to old ads and to other new ones. In fact exactly as you mentioned, we've started using Ad*r where it works better (which is quickly expanding) and retained GAd for now where it is working properly.
BTW I think "Adsense Addiction" COULD become an official psychological term for the affliction mentioned above. i.e. Forever chasing the pot of gold at the end of the Ad Unit Rainbow. :-)
Actually, Yes they did. The rep specifically stated "we pay you the MAJORITY" of the bid price. Unless they've managed to change and hide the rules of math too, that still represents >50% to me.
Maybe they do pay us the majority of the bid price, but that doesn't mean they're using a fixed percentage split. In fact, they almost certainly aren't. (That would be foolish--it would just invite cherry-picking by the competition.)
To put it another way, they might be paying 58% to Tom, 53.75% to Dick, and 51.333% to Harry, depending on factors that could range from individual account profitability to what Larry and Sergey spent on dinner last night. On another day, the percentages might be different, depending on whatever gets factored into the formula. How they determine compensation isn't our business; we might be curious, but that doesn't mean we're entitled to know, or that Google is cheating us by refusing to hand out the recipe for its secret sauce.
They also probably analyze their data by sorting on the most lucrative sites and manually checking them monthly. Paying them a higher CTR so they don't lose them. And anyone below a certain threshold gets lumped in with a lower-level CTR/CPM etc.
From a business point of view that doesn't make sense. All this will do is concentrate income to a few sites, making Google more vulnerable. Plus of course, there is no evidence. The exception of course is the premium publishers.
So: no reason, no evidence, no merit.
