Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Decided to start a new thread because it was getting a bit unwieldy.
What just didn't sit right with me is, how could an MFA (Made for Adsense) site possibly be paying a high enough CTR to be displacing other high bidded sites? The MFA will need a very high CTR for their ad AND a high CTR on their site AND make a better CPC on their site if they are able to spend so much money on Adwords successfully engaging in arbitrage.
Clearly something is fishy in Denmark. So I've been playing around and perhaps came up with the answer. Note, I know adsense much better than adwords, which I'm only using to understand adsense better.
Let's take just two examples. You have a widgets merchant and you have an MFA working the widgets theme. The widgets merchant should be able to outbid the MFA guy everytime. The MFA has to pay google twice and a webmaster once and CONSISTENTLY achieve a high enough return to risk high payouts on Google. The merchant has a margin to play with and if he doesn't make as much money, even greater volume helps him reduce cost of manufacturing.
There are only two real ways I can see the MFA beating the system. Either
1. He has to have made a super site receiving very high cpm.
2. Or/And he has to have such a great CTR that Google will think his ads will be clicked on more often to make up for the low bid.
Regarding number one, it's been my experience with one site I have that has a few internal links and a prominent adsense placement that it is doing surprisingly well. That site happens to have a good domain name and I intend to use it in the future. I did no linking or advertising. It has no serious ranking in the SEs. Just wrote up 5 pages or so. Expected less than a buck a month. Making 10-20. Turns out it has a very high CPC. And when I analyze the site, it has some similarities to MFAs since it isn't meant to really be sticky or email the site to a friend.
Now I think I know why it succeeds. The ads are targetted. So probably conversion is high. There's no way to leave the site other than adsense. So CTR is high. MFAs must do very well in both categories the same way.
So Google screws up right there by rewarding MFAs as having high conversion since no one wants to stick around an MFA and will click it often. If they found the site in a targetted manner, it will convert. Very simple concept.
To tackle number 2 takes more work. So I played around with the CPM feature. And soon realized, you are wasting money if you CPM on sites where the ad is not in a prominent place. So I browsed and picked and chose sites where the ad placement is prominent.
So what would I do if I were an SEO? Simple. Use the API to grab the domains I can advertise on (assuming that is possible...) Spider the urls. (If the API doesn't give that to you, you can randomly spider to find adsense sites.) And determine programmatically what percentage of the text is google ads. What the theme is. How many links the visitor has to choose from. In a very short time, I'd have a list of sites where I can bid on CPM and get a very high CTR. That makes me a "desirable" advertiser in adwords. And I start displacing better paying ads and paying less for it, because G erroneously scores me on the basis of my overall performance on the ad network rather than my relative performance compared to the ads next to me.
If my analysis is correct, then it is definitely worth filtering out MFAs. And merchants are definitely getting screwed by overpaying. And the entire Internet is polluted with MFA crap. I sure hope Google fixes it soon.
What just didn't sit right with me is, how could an MFA (Made for Adsense) site possibly be paying a high enough CTR to be displacing other high bidded sites? The MFA will need a very high CTR for their ad AND a high CTR on their site AND make a better CPC on their site if they are able to spend so much money on Adwords successfully engaging in arbitrage.
One thing I'd like to know is *WHY* their ads get a high CTR as opposed to real advertisers. Are they much better at writing sexy ad copy than real advertisers?
I've just looked back at my stats, and my worst month was last June. This is about when I started to block MFA sites and then saw the cash figures (and ultimately smartpricing) recover. I know we aren't supposed to mention figures here, but I think it's essential to give the bare minimum.
At that time, I started wondering just how these crap sites could make me more money than real advertisers. At the height of my smartpricing despondency, the ctr on my site was 15%+ for the month. Now it's settled back to a stable level that smartpricing loves (4.5% - 5.5%).
Bearing in mind that at any one time I never saw more than 2 out of 4 ads in the block showing adsense violators, to increase my ctr by three times, these violators ads must get a HUGE ctr - why? Why are their ads more clickable?
The business model of the scraper that uses adwords for traffic is to buy clicks cheap and convert as much traffic as possible into a click. I'm guessing the profit margins are low, but the sheer number of clicks makes it worthwhile.
How easy is it to do in practice? Possibly not that difficult. You do need to study the system in order to game it, but that would be a worthwhile investment in time. I have been experimenting with Adwords recently, and managed to break even. My keywords were possibly not the best, and my targetting wasn't that good. BUT with no real knowledge of how the system worked and a half-arsed ad that got low placement due to my tight budget I managed to buy clicks cheaply and convert them to more expensive clicks on my site and break even - even at the low(ish) ctr rate of my site.
What was STOPPING me doing better than breaking even? In a word - content. I.E. I have some. Visitors to my site will find themselves in a content rich site. Had I not had all that nasty, distracting content stuff then my click-out rate would have been much higher. OK, smartpricing would not have valued the outgoing clicks very high, but there would have been lots of them.
You have to remember that many scrapers have ONLY adsense/adwords links on the page AND they routinely disable the back button. For most visitors the only way out is to click on an advert.
Sadly, Google can't see past the end of it's nose - they actually see this practice as more profitable for them than encouraging real publishers. if only they could see past this quarter's balance sheet to the inevitable future that will happen unless they clean up serps and adsense. Sadly it seems that YPN and M$ are likely to follow the same example like sheep as they see it as a model that works!
They can say things like "All of your options are here free"
or
"Compare widgets here for free"
"Try before you buy"
While a real advertiser is more limited to truthful sales pitches, and/or less practiced in producing ad copy that gets clicked. Remember, real merchants are busy dealing with other real issues, the ONLY thing an MFA site is concerned about is CTR.
I have never blocked advertisers from my any of my sites as I have always believed in free market economy but after doing some checking found 52 such sites with very low bids and keeping out the genuine advertisers .
I would rather have 2 genuine advertisers paying realistic bid's not huge amounts but viable for them to see a ROI than 10 adds all for MFA and MFO
One further thing I noticed on MFA sites they block every other MFA and MFO
and that says it all
steve
One thing, though: There's no way a spider could read a page and make the remotest guess whether the clickthrough rate would be high or low. I doubt many humans could look at a random page and guess the CTR with any accuracy. If you really had the ability to create a spider that could understand screen layout, themes, user behaviour, etc., then there would be much better things you could do with your time than such a marginal activity as gaming AdSense.
When I get a chance, if you want I'll dig up a couple of example urls and sticky you so you can see what I mean that it would be easy for them to calculate programatically.
Hmm, I see your point. I did face a dilemma with this thread. Either to give good examples so the issue would have to be addressed, or hide the technique so that others don't copy it. I agree it may give people ideas. I hope I made the right call.
[edited by: vordmeister at 9:23 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2005]
