Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We have some sites that are very similar in terms of content and we actually compete against each other (in the friendliest sense of competition) and often compare notes.
Recently, adsense payouts on his site are a good 40% better than what I'm experiencing on mine! His site has been around longer and does get more traffic (but not significantly more) than mine.
I realize that G does pay out its larger webmasters better than the smaller folks, but the disparity we've seen seems inexplicable and very unbalanced.
While I realize that I cannot count on Google for anything and they will change their ways with a whim, I just don't get this. Can anyone provide any insight on this issue? As understanding it is very important to my business.
Thanks in advance!
B.O.
Do either of you advertise anywhere or do you just count on SERPs?
Are you saying that if his clickthrough ratio is better, they'll serve him higher paying ads? I'll check, but I believe that both our CTR's are about the same.
Can anyone provide any insight on this issue?
It's not difficult to see what's going on. Google clearly does not like brown oatmeal. Simply eliminate any and all references to it and you'll beat the snot out of your friend's results.
Seriously, though, it's probably the result of some variables that you cannot possibly account for completely. Your sites would have to be virtually identical in all ways to get exactly the same results from AdSense. And then, of course, somebody would get the duplicate penalty and the friendship would end horribly. :-)
If his site is somehow sending better qualified visitors to the adwords advertisers (through Googles SmartPricing), then he will get a better payout percentage.
That doesn't necessarily mean a higher CTR, that can just mean that the people that did click actually were better leads on the advertiser side somehow.
Would the same text but different graphics be enough to be considered non-duplicate sites?
It's your traffic that's most likely the source of the difference between your two sites. Let's say that your visitors, though equally likely to click on a particular ad, only "convert" (however that's defined by the advertiser) 10% of the time. Your friend's site has visitors that convert 20% of the time. Let's say that ad pays a maximum of $1. Via smart pricing, Google decides that the same ad is worth more to the advertiser on your friend's site than on yours (because it converts twice as often). So a click on his site is worth $1, and a click on yours is worth 80 cents. These are completely made-up numbers, but if you read the AdSense and AdWords documentation it's clear that this is something Google does, in order to make advertisers comfortable with placing ads on the "content network," where there are a wide variety of web sites, with many different demographics.....
