Search Arguments ate my revenues

The search argument debacle is not over

[androidtech]

I previously made a post about not using actual words in your search argument values because they could harmfully alter the ads Google displays, to far less relevant and less profitable ones.

My proffered solution at the time was to use numbers instead. In our case our main search argument identifies the search engine that generated the page hit.

So we changed our search arguments that identify the PPC engine that generated the "hit" from a word to a number. For example "?se=100". In the past this did not affect the ads Google AdSense displayed at all.

Well the last two days saw a precipitous decline in our CTR and our revenues, today was really bad. After a little detective work the reason became obvious.

For some reason Google has changed their code and now even a purely numeric search argument has a deleterious effect on the ads displayed.

And it's an unfortunately consistent result. All I have to do is add and remove the "?se=" argument from the browser address bar and I get the same two different sets of ads for the exact same page. One set is much more relevant than the other and much more profitiable. Unfortunately it is the unprofitable less relevant set of ads that gets displayed since we use PPC tracking search arguments for all our pages.

Note: we have been using the exact same search arguments for several days now so unless the media bot has gone into hibernation, it isn't a "wait until the media bot gets around to it" issue.

I hope those of you with dynamic sites aren't getting really hammered by this. Give your pages a quick check and make sure you are not getting nailed by this syndrome.

So our choice now is to give up PPC search engine tracking or live with much lower AdSense revenues.

thx

[androidtech]

BTW, I just e-mailed AdSense support on this. If you see the same negative results, you might want to do the same.

Also, after a thorough check of all pages, this new syndrome affects some pages drasticalliy and some not at all. But where it does have an effect it's very nasty.

It's kind of strange to realize that at any second a change by one of their programmers can wipe out your revenue stream. I for one will start being very apprehensive if they ever go public and develop that ubiquitous public company 3-month attention span to their bottom line. Currently I regard them as a benevolent giant, hopefully things stay that way.

thx

[Clark]

I agree. It's very easy to tell when they are testing an algo because it shows on the bottom line. Last 2 days were definitely so-so.

[richmondsteve]

So our choice now is to give up PPC search engine tracking or live with much lower AdSense revenues.

Another alternative is to track the search engine referrer using a method that doesn't involve a query string in the URL. For example, tracking based on HTTP_REFERER or specifying a unique page for each campaign by using Apache mod_rewrite (or its equivalent) to allow for the same page to be displayed on different URLs.

[Dolemite]

Another alternative is to track the search engine referrer using a method that doesn't involve a query string in the URL.

Exactly...there's no need to keep this visible. Cookies or some clever mod_rewrite usage could easily hide the query string.

[androidtech]

Since my case has to do with PPC engines, I can't rely on that strategy since they feed their URL's through other syndicators so the HTTP referrer isn't constant.

This is why, for example in FindWhat's case, they give you a tracking URL to call from Javascript on your web page, to trace back to the original keyword that triggered the hit. This helpful facility is offered by them because of the URL mangling that takes place in the search results delivery chain.

thx