Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So, what are the "elements of conception, design and strategy" that are best caculated to deliver traffic most likely to convert for a given advertiser? For isn't Smart Pricing, as best it's understood, supposed to be about advertisers ROI, which at least, in part, is about conversions? (Could also be about preliminary decisionmaking, such as shopping around for vacation ideas - not necessarily an instant purchase.)
So, what are some elements of smart design for dealing with smart pricing?
1. I think like a domainguy, which I am. So, I start filtering traffic by employing a relevant, preferably type-in domain name. Good idea? It appears that a healthy number of people looking for BlueBrassWidgets are prepared to type-in BlueBrassWidgets.tld. It's called "direct navigation" and a good number of people employ the technique.
2. Metas and KWs and Titles that accurately represent the true content of the page? Thereby starting the filtering/prescreening process at the SE level?
3. Crafting content that is actually aligned around the visitor's decision making process? Comparison articles? Detailed reviews? How else do you does content effect conversions?
4. Your other ideas, perhaps broken down according to the general subject matter of a site?
A lot of time is spent here discussing how to profit from AdSense, but if advertiser's ROI is minimal you can expect to see your AdSense revenue reflect that trend. So, with that in mind, what can you - as a publisher - do to maximize value for advertisers? (Setting aside the possibility of poor design of advertiser's sites adversely affecting conversions in some cases.)
[edited by: Webwork at 4:25 am (utc) on July 5, 2005]
One thing I've started doing more lately, despite probably losing AS income, is hyperlinking important words to other pages in my site that explain more about that particular subject. I realize that in all likelihood, that is where the reader wants to go, instead of feeling like he has no place to go and clicks on an ad.
While that is nothing new in webmastering, I feel like I am giving readers a better "path" throughout my website and advertisers will see that and know that ads placed here convert and the click throughs are higher quality. My readers can go through a lot of quality content before needing to click on an ad.
HOWEVER!
I also think that Adwords Advertisers should spend more time looking at their landing pages. They need to look in their own backyard as to why conversions aren't coming through. I think it's too easy for them to blame someone else for their problems.
I've seen landing pages that don't work, or just look like total crap, or ads that are inappropiate, or seriously mistargeted in a shot-gun approach.
There are plenty of other reasons besides a bad website as to why conversions may not be as high as expected. It's a two way street but publishers have taken 99 percent of the blame so far. That's not accurate or fair IMHO.
Don't just assume that a site has to be pretty with an awesome type-in domain name, perfect meta tags, optimized on-page keywords and great original content to convert well. The opposite can be true.
That is, I provide direct affiliate links to companies who pay respectable commissions for products my visitors are most likely interested in.
Contextual advertising is just a backup in the case that I didn't do my job well enough. Then they leave my site never to return, and I wish the next guy better luck as I take his .02.
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So I guess you could say my traffic is more filtered, for better or worse.
Better: I did miss something, but the contextual ad machine knew that people searching for green widgets are also interested in twisted widget reviews. And that's what my visitor was really interested in.
Worse: This visitor doesn't want anything. If they did, they would have purchased it on my site. They're either windowshopping or not willing to buy unless they find some amazing deal that my affiliate ads couldn't provide.
Scraper visitors are probably a little less filtered, as you know they didn't find what they were looking for on the previous site. They're probably worth just as much as (if not more than) my visitors.
This is where site-targeted CPM pays off.
Good: Advertise on review sites.
But the problem is, why would anybody spend all day writing sweet reviews if these = high conversions, and not put direct AM links?
Advertisers need to budget themselves based on the ROI they're getting.
Newspapers don't tell their big car dealership advertisers that they'll refuse any classified ads for cars of the make sold at the dealership.
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. . a webpage, largely devoid of meaningful content and with "no way out" - except s few bold/obvious/well placed AdSense links - is perhaps not calculated (emphasis added) to deliver traffic to advertisers that convert particularly well. Expressed differently, it's well designed to "get clicks" but not necessarily visitors who clicked because they saw particular value (Other than "How the heck do I get out of here?).
I have seen well crafted AdWords ads that send clickers to well crafted mimimalist AdSense pages whereby the AdWords arbitrager, who goes after the lowest cost AdWords clicks, sends the AdWords clicker to a page with say, a brief definition of a medical/scientific/technical term, which "definition" or 2-4 sentency "explanation" is then surrounded by nicely targeted AdSense ads.
Do I doubt that this model can deliver converting clicks? No, I don't doubt that such mimimalist pages can deliver value to advertisers.
Why?
Because of the self selection and filtering involved. Someone actually scanned the SERPs and/or the AdWords boxes and drilled down far enough in their search to get all the way to the "cheap clicks", perhaps where they finally found the ad/message that spoke most directly to their need/desire.
If this - delivering highly targeted, motivated, consciously self-selected traffic - can be done with AdWords to AdSense arbitrage strategies there's no reason to doubt there are other approaches that will work, such as mini-sites or highly targeted landing pages with minimal content, etc.
However, are all minimalist sites - be they AdWords to AdSense arbitrage or scraper sites or even "barely intelligible, minimal, redundant, regurgitated content sites/pages - created equally in their conception, design and execution?
Are scraper or minimalist sites well suited for particular situations? What are they?
Here's what I'm after: Assume "I don't care" about what the webpage or website is called. What are the characteristics - the design and execution elements - of any type of page that will work better/best from an advertiser's perspective?
My take of the essential elements of a page/site that is designed to maximize an advertisers ROI:
1. Filtered traffic. Traffic that lands on a page that actually contains information - and therefore contextual ads - that is responsive to a need/want/desire that motivated their search effort.
(Scraper sites can work - can provide a reasonable ROI - for reasons that should be obvious.)
2. Filtered traffic that is not only "search term responsive" but "demographic responsive". (Are people who navigate by falling into and escaping from scraper sites the advertiser's demographic, or, is there a more web/life savvy demographic that an advertiser is after?) So, how do you design to filter for demographics? Nice, brief discussion on this point, eh?
3. Sectioning of traffic: Can your site, by its content, discriminate between searchers that are "just looking for information about digital widgets" versus "so ready to buy a digital widget that they can taste it - just tell me which one to buy!".
Can you, by design, section/filter/aggregate your visitors into categories - lead them to "status appropriate pages/resources" - that in turn would trigger status appropriate AdSense ads? So, instead of triggering ads for "Buy a digital widget cheap now" you might trigger ads that say "Learn more about digital widgets here".
What I'm after is a model and/or discussion of site design that identified and addresses factors that should be relevant to smart pricing. How do we design a site that is friendly to smart pricing and thereby friendly to advertisers? This isnt' simply "how to build a good site" but "how to design, build and execute a site that maximizes those elements that smart pricing is sensitive to".
Some would argue for 1 design path only: Design for visitors to arrive on a page and immediately exit via AdSense. That works fine for advertiser ROI and smart pricing IF your inbound traffic is highly filtered and segmented.
I'm suggesting that you consider the benefits - from a smart pricing perspective - of performing additional filtering and segmenting on your website.
There's a potential added benefit. You have now created a new, more targeted page, one that is more likely to compete with the scraper pages "on topic" and might just do better in the SERPs than they - scraper, on the fly pages do - due to the site's theming.
I'll be waiting for the suggestions of the experts. I want to do this as well but just do not know where to begin.
If you dynamically brought up a page targeted towards people searching for "brown widget repair" (as opposed to "buy brown widgets") when those keywords were in the referring log, that would probably be the ideal situation.
You could have several different alternates depending on things like time of day or google .tld (a different page for European visitors).
With enough information and insight into what it is that these different demographics actually want, you could probably tailor a site fairly well to each group. Unfortunately, as I said above, cloaking is frowned upon; also, more important information isn't usually as easy to figure out.
Referrer logs don't usually give away your visitor's age, marital status, gender, salary, etc.
You could attempt to figure these things out based on where you as a publisher, advertise. If you buy links from a European magazine website known to have pretty tight and specific demographics, then you can much better serve them based on those bits of information when you tap your referrer information.
So my counter rant is:
It's the advertisers responsibility to make his ads relevant and his site convert.
It's our responsibility to send interested parties to the advertisers web site.
That's it, no more, no less, as we have no control over either the advertisers ads or the web site. We can only control our content and assume GOOGLE puts the appropriate ads on the site when people come to see our content.
When you want to talk DIRECT ADVERTISING, which I do on my web site, your discussion is 100% appropriate as it's a one-to-one relationships, with adsense it's a hit and miss crap shoot for the most part so I'm not sure how we have any control whatsoever except to ban advertisers we don't like showing up on our web site.
One of my sites is a unique one-of-a-kind site (and these are so rare these days). It is about widget storage services (ok, that's not exactly what it is about, but it's the closest think I can think of to describe it). There are only a handful of widget storage services in the world. I review each service and list the pricing, features, etc. of each.
The site has been #1 in Google for years, and #1 in Yahoo, and MSN since their inception for the kwd phrases widget storage and widget storage services.
The users who come to the site are only interested in one thing - buying widget storage. The topic is incredibly boring. There is nothing to research, other than pricing and features. Nothing to read about. Nothing to browse through. The only possible interest anyone could have in the topic is that of purchasing the service.
The adsense ads are always perfectly targetted - every single time. Anyone clicking on an ad is a perfect lead. No one but someone interested in widget storage would be compelled to click. (It's really boring).
EPC a year or so ago was about $8 per click - sometimes up to $12 - occasionally down to $4. These days - 3 cents.
The cost to the advertiser is still high. That hasn't really changed. (Although of course, I have no way of knowing what they are actually paying, due to smart pricing, but the normal bid cost is still high).
I cannot possibly send more targetted leads to the advertisers. Basically, I just keep the ads there for now until I find a better replacement. But they are pretty much useless to me at this point. Smart pricing...blah.
Without giving Google the actual books, and having very competent people writing the books with reliable data, I fail to see how smart pricing does anything but reward advertisers. Don't like spending money? Tell Google all the referrals you're getting are worthless. Then you get cheaper advertising.
What am I missing?
I agree with dazzlindonna.
I am involved in one major sector where the bid price for the keyword has stayed at a very high level over a number of years.
I know the price of the keyword as I also use Adwords.
Over the last couple of years my earnings from a site targetting this keyword has dropped to a couple of cents, the cost of the keyword has stayed the same in Adwords.
One of the problems is that in this sector hardly any websites use coversion tracking, I think this influences the end result of the earnings in Adsense via the smart pricing mechansiam.
dregs33
