Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been observing all chaos in Adsense stats more than one year now. Reading your advices and observations here at WW was also helpful and leads to the same conclusion:
Google is intermediar between us (publishers) and advertisers
Intermediar in a bad sense of this word for us. They just buying our traffic for the price they want and
sell those clicks for the price they want.
On the big run this equations is (maybe) 70 % goes to publishers. But in any specific case it is not entirely true.
I will not share with you how and why I came to such conclusions. Let's say it is my job to find patterns in a sea of statistical chaos.
System averages and estimates the price for whole account for such publishers and what we see in our AS control panel is just bulls!@t. We can't say definetely even how many clicks (or traffic) You sold today. It is not that number what you see in a stats. It is much higher ( I could prove it but It would be against TOS ).
What does it mean for big reliable publsihers -
they account was established 2 years ago they have perfectly clean history, they have stady SE traffic.
They Score points is high - they just get High salary from AS. Exactly - salary - earnings per month. Not per click.
New publishers - ok. No statistics yet. Simple estimation and guesses - It looks like You get high value per click at beginnig stage. But in real life because traffic and clicks are low at that stage is just small salary divided by small amounts of clicks.
Medium publishers - here we see all horrors and stupidity of smart pricing. For each jump in traffic or clicks trough You gets a penalty. Because statistical averages (several months) shows that Price of your site (account) could not change that much, right? And instead of increasing price per click You see just dramatic drop. Also in your salary check for month.
How to escape all of it? Change to Yahoo or sell ads directly. We all (supposed to) read AS TOS.
What does it said about price per click? Exactly - You will get as much as we (Google) whant.
What does it said about price per click? Exactly - You will get as much as we (Google) whant.
AdSense is a free market with auction-based ad rates. Bids go up and down constantly as supply and demand fluctuate.
If you want stability from AdSense, your best bet is to have an editorially diverse site with enough subtopics, advertisers, and traffic to help smooth out the day-to-day fluctuations. (It's like the difference between investing your money in a handful of stocks or a diversified mutual fund.)
they have stady SE traffic
'steady' or 'shady'? ;)
d
[edited by: davec at 3:53 pm (utc) on Sep. 4, 2005]
Simple test -
Switch off Your ads on all your sites for half day
end just see what will happend.
I now it could be expensive. But this is biggest stress on a AS system and You should see what I'm talking about. Switching off one single site may be not enought. But also I guess You should see a compensational clicks or EPC on other channels of Yours ( may be even impressions ).
you cant make a post like your post above and say i am not going to share with you my working out.
you are going to get shot down without giving some FACTS.
How to escape all of it? Change to Yahoo or sell ads directly.
The reasoning ignores a variety of facts, but this conclusion is certainly valid. You should absolutely do this.
Here's what I think will happen: there will be more AdSense money for the folks who see no reason to leave AdSense, thus people making this departure will help secure the core publisher base for Google.
The people most likely to leave AdSense will be the people delivering the poorest ROI for their advertisers. Thus, ROI for AdWords advertisers will increase, and the people making this departure will help secure the core advertiser base for Google.
Thus, the advertisers most likely to leave Google will be the ones who did the worst job at focusing on ROI. These will be the sort who spend big bucks per click, and then suddenly stop advertising altogether because they ran out of money (or even went out of business). This will contribute to greater volatility for competing systems.
Realizing that they are largely only poaching the dregs from AdSense, MSN and Yahoo! will focus on courting big-name advertisers/publishers. How do you get big-name advertisers away from someone else? Everybody who's ever sold ads for a living, all together now: "YOU SELL OFF THE RATE CARD!" IOW, you secretly give your big-time advertisers a much better deal than you do your little advertisers. (Should work the same for publishers, of course.) Who ultimately pays for this inequity? The little companies, of course. Does Google already do this? I would be surprised if they don't. However, the effect will be highly amplified for people trying to break in. Starting a competitor to AdSense is a very tough chicken-and-egg problem -- very tough to ever reach that critical mass of participants that makes it work.
The lesson of the past for AdSense competitors has been this: to pay more money out than Google, you have to have lower overhead than Google. I deem it unlikely that Yahoo! or MSN will have suddenly overtaken Google at one of their core competencies: automating the hell out of everything and doing the work with the cheapest commodity PCs available. Thus, it's quite likely that the folks departing AdSense, even though they tended to be the poorest paid (due to providing the worst ROI) will see little or no increase in income, and quite possibly will find less.
Competitors will quite likely not make it any easier for you to figure out what you're going to earn per click than Google does, but suppose they do? Google can silently up their percentage payout so that publishers doing A/B tests will decide (as has happened multiple times in the past), that Google has the superior payout. Once the relatively poor position of the competition has become webmaster folklore, Google can silently lower the payout back to where it was.
Worse: to give you a mechanical formula for the PPC you're going to get, the AdSense competitor will have to pay publishers who supply crappy ROI (something that cannot be mechanically established in advance, and that is not stable) the same as publishers who supply excellent ROI. Again, this shifts the best and the brightest on both the publishing and advertising sides over to Google. It's like a gigantic brain drain -- you don't see the effects until it's too late.
The folks who go to sell ads for themselves will discover that they now have a new career for themselves or the people they will need to hire:
I'm very excited by the prospect that there might be major competitors to AdSense. Boy, they sure are taking a long time to get up and running -- I wonder what that means? But anyway, I figure I win either way. Either they somehow find a way to give me more money than Google and I switch to them, or else the competition helps induce Google to give me more money.
In any case, the long-term trend is absolutely clear: the online advertisers who are going to win in the long run are those who focus on the rarely-mentioned task of providing highly-qualified traffic to their advertisers.
If you're totally focused on the middlemen (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, whomever), then you're probably not much focused on your advertisers (the folks who really provide your income).
Tom
Your point is that your earnings will leap, but I doubt sufficiently to warrant this.
If you think Google is unfair and crooked then dont go near it.
Ive had problems with adwords (not adsense) and google has ALWAYS come down in my favour.
The grammar makes me suspect - 2 days back, there was someone with similar grammar... The thread title was 'Webmasters of the world'. Someone just having fun?!
<side note>
I would ask people not to jump into conclusions too fast based on the grammar of posters. I am not a native English speaker myself--English is my third language--and it is sometimes difficult to find the right words and construct the right sentences to express my thoughts. Yet having so much different nationalities on this board is one of the great powers of WebmasterWorld.
</side note>
I speeks English quite fluently but absolute zero in a grammar.
I'm really sorry.
And of course I have just one identity here at WW.
And if You are interested more - I'm Russian, yeap.
And also have PhD in Physics.
About swhitching for whole day - it will not work.
Again - what I mentioned is what You get paid is not what You see in Your stats. I'm not telling Google screwing publishers. I'm telling they are deciding how much to pay you, but info per click is nothing.
That is it.
Now back on topic: What you are saying is that smart pricing--as this pricing behaviour is called in general--is not a direct function of conversion rate or some other algorithmic factors, but caused by some sort of trust value assigned by Google to your site. You are not allowed to earn more than a given amount of money and this will only grow when your trust value increases. This is in line with observations of people who increased their CTR by better ad placement etc, but saw their EPC reduced by about the same amount.
If your hypothese is right, the number of clicks in the stats is just an artificial number, not the actual number of clicks. I find this hard to believe. There are several people here with click tracking software and if there were a large difference between their own stats and Google's we would have seen many posts here about weird stats. We only see that kind of posts now and then.
I am also wondering how this trust value--if it exists--is assigned to all those scraper sites. I'm under the impression that some of them manage to make quite a lot of money, even though I can hardly imagine that they deserve a high trust value...
You've pretty good translated my sentences.
I'm also wondering about click tracking software - those people should see such discrepancies in clicks.
The idea about eating up all advertisers budgets during first half of the day is pretty good - but my site is more like in beginnig stage yet and it is not possible with me - I'm not a biggest publisher in my niche.
For instance some examples from my stats -
in the beginning of the Adsense day the price for click could be 10 bucks. During the day the price is gradually dropping down to few cents.
Domestically speaking it is not possible just because of assumption that USA visitors is more valuable. But they are coming at the end of the Adsense day, right?
Now - switch off your account for half day.
What you will see is that the system will try level
out everything - Impressions, clicks, and what is more important - Earnings per day.
Statistically - such behavior is impossible -
10 USD clicks in one half of the day and 1 cent in another (in average).
And one thing what I saw - system wants to make Your average eCPM on the constant level no matter what you do. Before may 5th we had more impressions shown in stats. So eCPM was lower. After this date we saw a mayor drop in earnings ( I'm not talking about big publisher like EFV for instance - his Adsense Score Points is probably very high and system TRUSTS all changes what happend with him ).
I'm reading WW like a news paper and what I saw that
users here at WW with number of posts less than 500 are in this category of Smart Pricng Victims.
And again - here at WW we are sharing our experience -
If you did not experienced this - please say so.
But telling it is all bul@#$ it is not right point in a conversation of intelligent men.
About scrapper type of sites - they are probably not getting high eCPM anyway. They just got bulk earnings because of huge amount of such sites.
After reading lammert's post, I think I get it, but I still have one question.
Now - switch off your account for half day.
What are you suggesting here? Are you saying that if you earned $X on Monday, then on Tuesday you removed all your ads for 12 hours, the remaining 12 hours would still earn $X?
You're saying you've tried this, but have you repeated the test? I find it hard to believe the results hold true over a longer period.
It was mentioned here at WW many times that your stat during the day is not correct - it is finalising only after whole day is closed. So - nothing new here.
What is new - price per click what you see does not matter. What is matter - how much AS system decides to pay you at the end of the day.
Coming back to my first post AS just buying your traffic but not selling your clicks directly to advertisers.
