Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm now making more per day than when I was running it site-wide. From this limited and inscientific experiment, I deduce that CTR is very important, even more important than traffic. Has anyone else noticed this?
I did that and lost 50 % in revenue.
Then those were not very unproductive pages if they made up 50% of your revenue.
I'm talking about pages with high pageviews/impressions per day and have a very low CTR, making up a very small portion of daily/monthly revenue.
For example, I have two channels A and B, If A is doing great and B is very poor (CTR) and I remove B, will I see an increase in A?
Thanks!
I killed about 10 of the most often seen ads. We shall see.
Re the channel A vs. channel B question, yes, if you remove a poor-performing channel, then you may actually get higher earnings in the other one.
I have done this a couple of times, with channels that averaged a CTR that was worse than a third of the site average. So if the site CTR was 6%, and the channel had a 2% or lower CTR, it was a candidate. Also, the channel was making a low EPC too--a high EPC can make up for a low CTR. And so DON'T do this for a signficant portion of pages/revenue--only for the worst-performing pages, with insignificant earnings, and just do it as an experiment. It won't work for everyone.
Note that pulling low-performing ads may not only cause a smart pricing adjustment but may also affect your visitors--if they are seeing fewer ads they may be more likely to notice and click on the ones you left alone.
Added: Partly due to this kind of adjustment, I have raised my eCPM by about 50% over the past year, while impressions have remained approximately constant. Wtih lessons learned, I now plan to start increasing AdSense impressions.
Yes, and I determined that reason to be because I allowed them. As of early this morning, the low-ballers have been dispatched to other sites who will accept .03 and .05 clicks. Some of these are big sites, specifically, ebay. Others are ones with whom I actually do compete in a small way. It is my sincere hope that they know where their great result WERE coming from and that they find out that when their traffic decreases, the reason will become clear - they were banned from my site. (then they can come and plead their case to me or G, I don't care)
My site is niche-specific, content-rich and I was actually sending these people good traffic at a very low rate. Since this morning's purge, traffic and CTR has remained constant, but, surprise, surprise, eCPM, EPC and overall earnings are trending upwards nicely. I am certain that it's far too early to tell, but so far, I am pleased.
Purging low-paying advertisers is not only good business, it is necessary if you have any sense of what your traffic is worth. G won't do it for you, and if you have lots of ads, as I do, the low-ballers are bound to show up. When they do, I will ban them. They can show those ads on lesser, scraper sites.
Has anyone been experimenting with this?
Why? Because I depend on repeat visitors, especially on people linking me because they think my site is so great. I'm pretty sure people aren't going to want to do that if they see too many ads.
One thing to consider is the value of a popular page with no ads at all. Maybe lots of people link it, it draws a lot of traffic, and you use it as a gateway to the rest of your site where you do have ads. Had you put ads on that page, maybe not so many people would have linked it.
In all of what I read on this site, I don't see anyone thinking much about how having ads on a page might drive down revenue in the long run. A link is worth MUCH more to you than a click. Once you've been paid for a click, that's all you're going to get, and the visitor is lost to you forever, but if someone links you, likely they will never remove the link, and it will bump up your positioning an increment, and stay that way forever.
I'm currently displaying more than one ad per page. I wonder if my revenue would increase if I displayed only one ad per page. Has anyone been experimenting with this?
It depends. I would be inclined to give each banner a channel, and then you can work out if the banners are productive or not.
In my case, I added a banner at the bottom of key pages as well as the top. The bottom banners were clicked only rarely, and the ctr dipped by nearly 50% on the page. I then started to see a steady decline in earnings. I let it slide for a several weeks, as at the time there were a lot of the "sliding epc" threads here, and I assumed I was being affected.
I removed the poorly producing banners, and the impressions went back to previous levels, and within 48 hours the epc and bottom line earnings had also reverted to normal.
Since then, I always make sure that banners that don't perform are removed.
Because I depend on repeat visitors, especially on people linking me because they think my site is so great. I'm pretty sure people aren't going to want to do that if they see too many ads.
Absolutely - I hate to see a wall of advertising when I'm looking for content! And like you, I think that repeat visitors are valuable.
One thing to consider is the value of a popular page with no ads at all.
Agreed. Most of my site is ad free. In part because adsense works geat on certain key pages, but not well on the majority of the content pages. I also think that another reason for ad free pages is that people get ad blindness if they see the same banners on all pages. I think that using the banners sparingly can increase the number of people that click through. That's a gut feeling - I can't prove it :(
If I could say "I don't want any ads that are going top pay less than $0.25 on my site, if you have none, display my alternate color(or ad)" I would be thrilled.
It would also act to further balance the marketplace between advertisers and publishers, since they now have the ability to direct their lowball ads at specific sites.
My pages have value. I'd much rather my visitors see no ads or an alternate ad than send them away for 3 cents to an affiliiate ad with a headline of "Buy Brooklyn Bridge Cheap".
That won't be such a problem if I remove AdSense from a lot of my pages though, which is what I think I'll do.
Some pay $1.00 for me, but others pay $.10
Is there a way to tell? Or are you guessing?
Brandon
I presume Google rewards high CTR because it prefers CTR over volume. Less is more - at least in my case.
I would love to be able to filter on price. In fact, it's partly the 3 cent clicks that have me searching for a better revenue solution than AdSense.
And then what? Replace them by 2 cent clicks?
They way it works now the system most likely serves you the best paying ads your traffic is worth...
Revenue Climbs as Impressions Slide
Interesting situation. I've seen something similar sometimes when traffic entering through one part of my site goes down a bit.
The traffic drops, and CTR, eCPM and income increases.
Leads me to believe that some traffic is worth less, from an Adsense persapective, than other traffic. Specifically traffic in my Photo Galleries is the culprit. When that drops and traffic in my other sections holds steady is when I see this occur.
The obvious answer for me is that folks entering through the other sections of my site are more likely to be in a spending mode, thus they click the ads more frequently.
Not rocket science, but interesting.
I would love to be able to filter on price. In fact, it's partly the 3 cent clicks that have me searching for a better revenue solution than AdSense.
And then what? Replace them by 2 cent clicks?They way it works now the system most likely serves you the best paying ads your traffic is worth...
I understand that Google supposedly puts their best paying ads on your site, but I don't belive it for a minute. I belive what G does is maximize their total revenue stream, which means that they will place ads from lower paying sites if they believe that there will be more total clicks by putting higher paying ads on higher CTR sites.
In udderwords,
The higher paying ads go on sites with higher CTRs of high paying ads.
The lower paying ads will go on sites with high CTRs of lower paying ads.
I think that daily caps also play into this equation, and here's a possible methodology:
If I know that advertiser A's budget for high paying keywords is regularly, routinely, always, or probably going to be exhausted, why would I want to exhaust that budget on a site where I will get very little CTR with them, when I can be getting my 3 cents all day long and repeatedly at that low site, while the A advertiser's budget is exhausted elsewhere? Because once that budget is exhausted, the CTR on the highline site will plummet with low value ads.
As an example that doesn't fit perfectly with the above, but is simplified for discussion purposes, If my site is about $20 widgets, ads for $10,000 widgets aren't going to interest nor convert into sales my visitors.
On the other hand, if my site is about $10,000 wigets, ads for the cheapo $20 version aint gonna attract many clicks nor sales, either.
However, I'll gladly guide my $20 widget customers into a $40 widget category, and there they'll be profitable to the advertisers G and me.
But G isn't giving me the opportunity, because they're taking them away to ebay for 3 cents.
So, I'd like a chance to know that there aren't any respectably-paying ads that G is willing to place on my site, so that I can then take charge of that visitor with an alternate destination.
Is that too much to ask?
The obvious answer for me is that folks entering through the other sections of my site are more likely to be in a spending mode, thus they click the ads more frequently.
If Google had the ability to track and utilize visitors' paths in real time - which I presume it doesn't - it could feed relevant ads to them.
Example
1. Someone spends some time looking at little blue widgets pages.
2. He then goes to a general widgets parts page.
3. Instead of just seeing general widgets parts ads, he sees little blue widgets parts ads.
4. The ads jump right out at him because they are exactly what he's looking for. As he clicks on an ad, he wonders how the heck AdSense can be so smart. The eCPM goes through the roof.
I guess Google could do this if a site runs AdSense on every page, which is not what this thread is about.
It could also pre-determine optimum ads for particular pages by analyzing conversion history. I'm not sure how well that would work at the moment though because I doubt that many advertisers track conversions.
"Impression ads" seem like a good idea. I guess they wouldn't affect the CTR calculations, so they wouldn't hurt in that regard. You never know until you try it.
I removed 4 failing sites and my CTR + CPM rose.
