Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For the past 4 days, our site has been showing the ads of this single advertiser - in our leaderboards, in our skys, in our rectangles - both in text and image ad formats. This advertiser has occupied every single Google ad that we have. It's just everywhere in various formats!
The advantage is that our traditionally low performing pages for CPC are now becoming more productive.
But the downside is more alarming:
- Our CTR is down by almost 60% (afterall, it's the only ad you'll see no matter what page or what ad format you see. They're like the exclusive advertiser on our site)
- Our overall ECPM is down by 30%
- Our revenues are also down
I guess CPM ads will work for sites with massive traffic. But the CPM price is too low I believe to compensate for the CPC revenues that we are getting. We are doing really well with the CPC model.
I'll continue to track this. Unfortunately, I don't think publishers have the option of rejecting site-targeted CPM ads, right?
a button perhaps allowing us to select if we want to run CPM ads or CPC ads or both.
This would be great, but doesn't this open it up to potential abuse? For example, one could specify an ad block at the bottom of a page to be cpm since that's less likely to be clicked.
I don't mind the $2 CPM ad to show in sections or channels of my site that only yields eCPM of $2 or less. Heck, I'm even willing to show it in sections of my site with eCPM of $10 or below. CPM ads can definitely help boost revenues from those areas.
But I don't want to show $2 CPM ads in channels of my site that typically gives me $35 eCPM and higher - and I've got lots of those sections. Our most popular and high traffic areas typically gives us our best eCPM. Yet during the past 5 days, the $2 CPM ad monopolized those high-eCPM pages, replacing my well-targeted and high paying ads with the measly $2 CPM ads. The decrease in the eCPM of these pages were so significant in the 5 days the site-targeted CPM ad was showing. No wonder my page eCPM for the past 5 days decreased. There is no way on earth that a $2 CPM ad will give better revenue in a section that typically yields $35 eCPM and where clicks of $5 and up are regularly seen.
If G improves its ad serving capability to really know if a CPM ad will provide greater revenue than a CPC ad, then I'll try CPM ads again. Until then, the moment I see those CPM banners, off they go to my filter.
After removing the said CPM ad, our eCPM today increased by 18%. That in itself shows that CPM ads are not good -- as of now -- for our site. Hopefully it will be in the next months or so.
Alika, if you are talking about the new Site Targetted Ads, you cant remove it yourself because you dont have control over what ads will appear if your site was chosen..
How did you manage to remove the CPM Ads? Did you implement it yourself or youve been selected by Google Site Targetted CPM but you decided to remove the ads yourself?
Alika, if you are talking about the new Site Targetted Ads, you cant remove it yourself because you dont have control over what ads will appear if your site was chosen..
How did you manage to remove the CPM Ads? Did you implement it yourself or youve been selected by Google Site Targetted CPM but you decided to remove the ads yourself?
If so, what is Google thinking of? That would be a disaster!
Ann
CPM ads I guess would be a way for some advertisers to save on advertising dollars esp on high priced keywords. The first CPM ad we saw is from an advertiser whose keyword's average CPC price is $14.50. They typically show up in one of my high eCPM pages.
Given smart pricing and other factors, let's say the cost per click on our site would have cost the advertiser only $5 per click net instead of the Adword's quoted price of $14.50. If the advertiser got 10 clicks from me from 5000 impressions (0.2% CTR), then that would have earned me $50. Or even if the price is only $2 per click, I would have earned more.
But with the new CPM ad and at the low price of $2 per thousand impressions, 5000 impressions would give me only $10 in revenue! The advertiser saved by choosing CPM ads.
CPM is good -- just not on our site!
How did you manage to remove the CPM Ads?
Specify: google_ad_type = "text";
Wouldn't that do it?
Specify: google_ad_type = "text";
Only if you want to eliminate ALL graphic ads, if there are some context sensitive ones you want to keep relevant to your site you lose those as well going text only.
I haven't had any experience of this yet - but from my understanding of the way the auction and ad matching process it should not happen that people start to lose loads of cash.
But, if this were happening to me I'd be straight onto G saying that I did not want these ads on my site until they operate how they have stated they will
- extract from Adwords on the subject:
<<- When site-targeted and keyword-targeted ads both are eligible for display in a given position, they compete equally for ranking. The AdWords ranking system takes into account the max CPM prices of all site-targeted ads, compares them to the combined cost-per-click prices and clickthrough rate of keyword-targeted ads, and then displays the highest-ranked ads. ->>
Do the people who've suffered the loss in revenue operate in a small niche with a small number of advertisers (i.e. have the major players all switched to CPM?)
Do the people who've suffered the loss in revenue operate in a small niche with a small number of advertisers (i.e. have the major players all switched to CPM?)
No. We are a business information site targeting a particular market. We have been at the top of our main keyword for years now (except for a couple of months early last year when we did a major boo-boo), and our keyword is competitive with 901 million search results today. Our site is definitely not the very small niche site with limited advertisers. We cover a diverse range of topics that would interest this market that ranges from getting bank loans, writing a business plan, marketing a website, operating an ecommerce site, management strategies - and this strategy has helped us with the ups and downs of smart pricing. We've been around since 1998 and has about 5,000+ content, about 80% of which is original with the 20% submitted to us.
The site-targeted CPM advertiser we first saw (and blocked) is an advertiser relevant to one of our smaller sub-topics (we have only about 10 articles in that sub-topic). So we have loads of other advertisers in the various topics and sub-topics that we cover.
I've blocked all graphic ads for now
Ownerrim - the site-targeted CPM ads come both as a graphic and as text. So blocking graphic ads won't help if the advertiser uses text advertising, too (and most likely they will be).
In our large rectangles for example (an ad format that currently does not support image ads), the site-targeted CPM ads either show as one big text covering almost the entire rectangle; and in some instance, it looks like the normal text ad except that instead of 4 you have only 1).
Sounds to me as though G maybe have a problem (bug) with their CPC eCPM v CPM eCPM comparison engine in some circumstances. According to everything they've said - if there is a good supply of on topic CPC ads then the CPM ads have to beat them out on comparitive eCPM.
As I've said in my earlier post, I'd like to see a CPM ad in channels that only brings me $2 eCPM or less from CPC ads. But I don't want them in my channels where I consistently get eCPM of $35-70, as I know that CPC ads work really well on those pages.
Yet from my 5 days experience with site-targeted CPM ads, they simply took over my site and showed almost on all pages. As a result, my eCPM nosedived. eCPM has since gone back to normal levels when I added the advertiser in my filter. Not an ideal solution (as I'd like that advertiser to show up in pages relevant to them), but there's no other way right now.
Yet from my 5 days experience with site-targeted CPM ads, they simply took over my site and showed almost on all pages.
The other day, I saw a few site-targeted CPM ads on pages where I wouldn't have expected to see them (unless the CPM bids were fairly high), but for the most part, the ads were appearing on low-eCPM pages.
Some of the ads were off-topic, though: For example, I was seeing ads for Italian hotels and Italian language learning in a section of my site that's exclusively about Paris.
Also, the ads that I saw were really just direct-response ads in CPM clothing. CPM ads are likely to work best for companies with brand names that users will remember, and for purposes other than generating clickthroughs. For example, I occasionally see CPC ads for big-name airlines, tour companies, and hotel chains on my site. Those advertisers are perfect candidates for CPM ads, because implanting a message like "More nonstops from the U.S. to Europe on Widget Airlines" or "Free Wi-Fi in every Worldco Hotel" is valuable for the advertiser even if the ad isn't page-targeted and doesn't generate an immediate response. By comparison, an ad for a no-name Italian booking service in a section of my site that's about Paris is likely to be a wasted impression.
Again, it's early days yet, and I think site-targeted CPM ads will perform better for publishers and advertisers when Google gets its software bugs worked out and attracts a larger pool of mainstream advertisers who know how to use CPM ads effectively.
Thanks for all of the feedback on the CPM ads- I've passed it onto our product team and they're taking a closer look at the system. If anyone has specific sites that they'd like us to investigate, please stickymail them to me and I'll pass them along as well.
I'd like to also pass on some more general information on how our CPM ads work. The minimum CPM that an advertiser can bid on your site is $2 and their ads will only appear if your eCPM from CPC ads is less than $2. Basically our algorithm looks at your page and the overall eCPM it's generating. If there's a CPM advertiser who has targeted your site and is bidding more than your current eCPM, then we display their ads. So, you should only see an increase in earnings because of CPM ads. Of course, if you're having a different experience, please send it along to me or the AdSense team and we'll be happy to help.
Thanks,
ASA
The minimum CPM that an advertiser can bid on your site is $2 and their ads will only appear if your eCPM from CPC ads is less than $2. Basically our algorithm looks at your page and the overall eCPM it's generating. If there's a CPM advertiser who has targeted your site and is bidding more than your current eCPM, then we display their ads. So, you should only see an increase in earnings because of CPM ads. Of course, if you're having a different experience, please send it along to me or the AdSense team and we'll be happy to help.
So those Purple Pill ads were over $4CPM?
If that's the case turn them back on....
I only wish I had a few more advertisers as there appears to be a drastic drop off due to daily budget limits. Mid-morning CPM is 3x-4x our old numbers but by the end of the day its down to "only" 1.5x.
I can only hope we're converting well enough to keep these advertisers interested.
The only suggestion I can think of would be to provide a break down of impressions. It would be nice to know the CPC impressions vs. the number of CPM impressions.
Keep up the good work ASA/Google.
The image ads were not even a good quality, and it was a name brand company. I can understand why webmasters are upset about the CPM ads, the ads make their "labor of love" website look spammy.
PS Are CPM ads "clickable?" (Sorry I didn't check)
