Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Would those of you with high-quality sites say you are suffering from low EPC/CPM because of Smart Pricing? I would hate to spend a lot time turning this into a "real" site without seeing a corresponding EPC/CPM increase.
- Grant
If I were you, I'd be a bit worried about whether it's possible to "upgrade" a low-quality site. Can you be sure that its history won't be factored in?
It's an interesting idea, though. If you go ahead with it, I hope you report back.
any winning www strategy includes getting more traffic, so if adsense doesn't reward high traffic sites, ultimately high traffic sites will use other revenue models, and adsense will only go on small niche sites. Google may want it that way- who knows- their system is automated so they can have 1 million users or 1 thousand.
But my experience is that, having earned loads on AS and then having it dip to 10% of previous... you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket.
For a lower traffic site, you'll make more money if you retain more of the profit margin than if you do AS or affiliate programs. For a higher traffic site, the same holds true, AND AS and affiliate programs will bring you some extra revenue, but at the same time they will drain some of your potential sales...
hunderdown, I wonder about a domain's history dragging it down and an account's history dragging it down. Nasty.
bbcarter, I'm assuming EPC is lowered for low-quality sites. I thought I had picked up on that around these forums. Maybe not. Is it a traffic increase that seems to decrease EPC? A low-quality site? Both? What are the emerging patterns with this?
Honestly though, a lot of my speculation on that was based on my much-higher EPC and CPM in the morning as opposed to the rest of the day. According to this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
that could actually be due to the exchange rate.
Also bbcarter, I'm an online retailer primarily. I just can't seem to stay away from AdSense experimentation lately.
- Grant
I would think that I run low quality sites, <snip> and <snip>. Any feedback as to why they are low quality?
I suspect some of my adsense pages for example <snip> don't have enough content, or maybe not enough text?
Or maybe I should take off the Thailand address? I'm Canadian but now reside in Thailand...
They always been low quality and everything has been fine, but with the new smart pricing my earnings have droped to triple digit versu four digits since 2003...
Bruno
[edited by: Jenstar at 6:23 am (utc) on April 22, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs or site review requests please, as per TOS [/edit]
The bottom line earnings are a steady upward trend. Page impressions are up, ctr is up. What has been sliding is the epc. I would say that there are many people here that would not consider the EPC I get low.
Why has the epc been sliding downwards? There are many factors that can cause this. Advertisers may be bidding less, there may be more sites the ads are displayed on. My site's target niche is extremely narrow, so it may be that I'm exhausting my main advertisers budgets quickly. Therefore, to give the advertisers more quality clicks over the month for their budget, Google may be lessening the price per click.
The main thing I look at is bottom line income. Other factors are important, but there is often absolutely nothing you can do about them. My part in adsense is to keep the site updated, monitor the performance of banners and adjust accordingly. If advertisers are bidding less, if there are more sites to show ads on etc are things I don't lose sleep over.
Could mean the way Tonearm and I used it above. High-quality sites being sites that have good information, were not made for AdSense, and perhaps also have a low ads-to-information ratio. In contrast, low-quality, to me, means sites like those ones that have a few sentences of content, at most, on a page, which is otherwise nothing but ads--multiple AdSense, banner ads, you name it.
You could also call sites that convert well for the advertisers "high-quality." These sites will not suffer from smart pricing discounts as much as other sites, which don't convert as well.
The interesting thing is that high quality from a content point of view may or may not mean high quality from a conversion point of view. Sites with lots of content may convert poorly for advertisers, or they may convert well.
Many factors in play here, and that's why it's so hard to figure it all out.
The interesting thing is that high quality from a content point of view may or may not mean high quality from a conversion point of view. Sites with lots of content may convert poorly for advertisers, or they may convert well.
Well said hunderdown. Since I get all of my traffic from AdWords, maybe I should be focusing on attracting good converters instead of adding value to my site. There doesnn't seem to be any evidence that adding value would improve EPC/CPM.
- Grant
I would take a very different approach if my primary goal was to make money. I would want the site to be the most efficient conduit possible, channeling the right visitors to the right ads....
- Grant
You'll find the site in my profile and you can go see for yourself, if you're curious.
What is the point of your niche content site if not to make money? Hobby?
In my case that's where it started. I put the site online nearly five years ago, long before Adsense came along. I also hadn't tried any affiliate programs before Adsense. So the site was purely a personal interest thing.
But the site became something really different than what I first intended. Mostly that change was driven by readers questions and comments.
It's only this year that I've really gotten back to putting more emphasis on the aspect of the site that was a big part of it's original purppose.
Back to the high versus low quality issue.
That's such a subjective issue.
I can imagine a high quality site that has very little info on any given page, but what info there is targets the quest of the searcher perfectly.
The other day I got an email asking me a question about what a certain widget looked like, I get quite a few emails like that.
I could easily have thousands of pages answering those type of questions exactly with a single photo and maybe twenty words of text.
If I surrounded that photo and text with 3 Adsense ad blocks and a couple affilaite spots thrown in for good measure....
would the page be high or low quality?
ken_b, I see what you're saying and I think the low vs. high quality issue ends up depending on the intention of the page.
- Grant
I've noticed that rich content pages adsense ads ( organic results ) with a lot of text generate a lot of traffic and multiple impressions but a very low CTR and a very low clicks/earning ratio.
Adwords generated pages on the other hand, used to give me a much higher cost per click. Much, much higher.
Has anybody noticed a similar phenomena in the past? But now, I don't get any results from any kind of pages...
Whether one is seeking revenue or they were having fun and found a way to make money while doing something that they enjoyed, are equal in my opinion. As for me, I fall into the having fun catagory. Quality (in this sense) is not going to be easily defined.
