Less pages with ads, higher earnings?

Does displaying your ads on fewer pages cause higher earnings?

[shafaki]

1- Put ads on all pages for a while.
2- Determine which pages are winners, which are loosers.
3- Keep ads on winners, remove them from loosers.

This procedure will bring up your CTR of course. But will it bring up your earnings?

The question rephrased: Does a higher CTR usually give a higher CPC?

A re-rephrase would be: Does a page with higher CTR attract higher priced ads?

[shoreline]

Yes - no question about this! I know, it sounds strange, but it is true and it does work.

[Swebbie]

The question rephrased: Does a higher CTR usually give a higher CPC?

A re-rephrase would be: Does a page with higher CTR attract higher priced ads?

I have several sites in varied industries, with AdSense on probably 95% of the pages. I've not seen higher payout per click for higher CTR. In fact, so far this month, it's been just the opposite.

My sites average about 1,600 clicks per day total, and the only correlation I have seen between payout per click and CTR is that I tend to earn more per click before about Noon "Google time" (Pacific Time) than I do the rest of the day. And the CTR tends to be slightly lower in that time frame vs. later in the day and into the evening.

I also see higher daily totals the first 10 days of the month than the other 20 or 21.

But my results may only reflect my unique group of sites and the ads running on them.

[Xartan]

Yes - no question about this! I know, it sounds strange, but it is true and it does work.

Could you point us to the proof? It seems to me that if this were really true, that Google would be more than happy to share this information with the publishers. Also, consider that they have an optimization tip to the contrary:
tip #3 -- "Should I put AdSense on all of my pages?"
[google.com...]

[Curiosity]

Trouble is, there is no objective proof. Google's never said anything about it, and no one's come up with the mechanism that runs it. However, many publishers--including me--have found that removing ads from pages with a low CTR gives a boost to the CPC across the rest of the site.

I theorized a while back that it's a way to reduce Google's server load and slow the creep of consumer ad-blindness, but if that's so, why wouldn't Google tell us about it?

[shafaki]

Or does this have to do with how advertisers bid for AdWords? I mean, does this behavior not follow directly from the way bidding works?

Let's imagine 2 advertisers bidding for the same word. Advertiser A pays more for the word, advertiser B pays less for it.

Google gives A a better chance to appear and does so by putting his ad on pages with higher CTR. The opposite is done with B. Google places B's ads on pages with lower CTR because he pays less and therefore deserves less exposure.

From a publisher's point of view, the page with a high CTR got an ad with a high CPC, while the page with a low CTR got the ad with a lower CPC. This simply explains it.

But in the paragraph before the last, I might be completely wrong, as I'm using loose logic in it. I'm not sure what exactly does Google do to the person that bids higher. I'm a bit confused and unclear about the whole process of bidding. Perhaps someone from the AdWords world could give us a hand here.

[spaceylacie]

I just looked through my stats about this. They seem pretty accurate because they are consistent over time and are a study of over 100,000 clicks.

3 ads positions on same page: The position with the highest CTR, which is 10X higher than the position with with the lowest CTR... all 3 make the same amount, within a fraction of a cent for each click.

I have other channels that vary alot in the amount I get for a click and in CTRS, it seems to depend on which pages the ads are on, not the CTR.

[Skeleton]

Google gives A a better chance to appear and does so by putting his ad on pages with higher CTR. The opposite is done with B. Google places B's ads on pages with lower CTR because he pays less and therefore deserves less exposure.

I have never thought that way, seems reasonable IMO.

[spaceylacie]

One more test... Over the past 4 months I've managed to double CTR throughout all pages I use adsense on... earnings per click are however the same, within 3/10 of a cent. This is based on data from 1000s upon 1000s of clicks.

My conclusion is that CTR, increasing or decreasing, does not in any way effect how much you get for a click.