Feedback on conversions?

Does Google let publishers know about conversions?

[diverman]

With all this SmartPricing stuff, where Google gives "discounts" for sites providing low conversion rates, I was wondering if there was anything available to publishers to help us tune in respect to that. I mean, if I know I have various pages that tend to offer a high conversion rate to advertisers I could reduce ads on pages not performing in that respect, or tune other pages to offer better quality clicks.

Anyone know if this exists, or have thoughts on this?

[hunderdown]

No, Google doesn't give out this info.

But you can probably infer it. I see the same set of ads on most of the pages on my site, but I've learned via channels that my EPC varies widely, by about a factor of 10! I've already taken AdSense off the pages where it just doesn't perform at all, and I've identified a type of page that does particularly well, and will try to write more of them.

You could do a similar analysis for your site. If you find that EPC doesn't vary much from page to page, maybe you could try something different and broaden the range of the site. Try adding pages that take different approaches or go into information that's a bit tangential to your main topic, but still related...

[hunderdown]

Here's another suggestion to help with smart pricing. Look at your traffic, not just your pages. Are you getting good targetted traffic? If not, work on link development, specifically to content pages, not just your home page. I think 100 visitors coming to a page via meaningful links from other sites can be worth more than 100 visitors coming to a page from a search engine. And link development, of course, has the side benefit of helping you in the search engines...

[diverman]

Thanks. Although, I already have been doing all of the indirect stuff (aware of type of traffic and from where). Inferring the conversion rate by the EPC isn't really a good method since so many other things can effect that, including low-bidding.

What would be nice is something a bit more than "guessing". We KNOW the CTR for pages and can tune accordingly. It just seems that if our revenue can be so greatly affected by SmartPricing, that we should be given some form of real, hard numbers to allow us to understand what we are doing "right" and "wrong" according to the Google "rules" of the system.

[hunderdown]

The reason, IMHO, we won't ever get that information is that it would make it easier for people to "game" the system.

I'm also not sure it would be as useful for us as you assume--conversion is also affected by what the advertiser does on THEIR site, and we can't control that. What matter is what is happening on our sites.

And yes, low-bidding can affect EPC, but still, if you have variations in EPC by page, there must be something to be gained by adding more high-EPC-type pages, and deemphasizing the pages that don't do as well.

[YesMom]

I see the same set of ads on most of the pages on my site, but I've learned via channels that my EPC varies widely, by about a factor of 10!

I've been thinking about this alot... because I've seen it too. And I've seen it across different sites of mine!

I'm beginning to conclude that what I'm seeing isn't necessarily smart pricing, but different bid levels for different keyword combinations. Same ad, but different bids because the keyword combos might vary slightly from page to page or site to site.

Just a thought.

[Sierra_Dad]

Google can't share that information if it doesn't have it themselves.

For an Adwords advertiser, conversion tracking is optional. And doing it correctly, consistently, and meaningfully is also optional.

If smart pricing really is based on conversion tracking, I wonder what data Google uses.