Strange, strange pattern

I will never understand Smart Pricing if I live to be 22

[Don Markstein]

First off, let me say how glad I am to see this site back! And how glad I am that it exists in the first place. Thank you, Brett, for your efforts to spread knowledge and make the Web a better place to do business. I've been a fan ever since I found this place, but it takes something like the recent difficulties to show me how MUCH I appreciate this site. With something like this under your belt, you can be sure the world is a better place because you've lived in it. Maybe that's kind of an extravagant way of saying it, but I'm not kidding. This site is good work.

Now -- I've noticed that my EPC varies wildly during the day. Not surprising, one would think -- it's natural that with a smaller sample, ratios among the various statistics reported would be off the norm early in the morning, and tend to return to average as the day goes on.

But -- if that were why, one would think the EPC (I do the arithmetic even if Google doesn't offer that info) would be as likely to start out lower as higher. But always, absolutely without exception, it's higher.

So as the day wears on, the EPC drops -- sometimes drastically. Toward the end of the day, the new click-throughs tend to bring in half, a third, a quarter -- even less, occasionally -- of what they did earlier.

My wife thinks Google is giving itself a quantity discount of some sort -- paying less for a click-through later in the day, simply because there are more of them. That can't be true, can it?

Or is this somehow an artifact of Smart Pricing? Am I getting zapped worse by low-paying garbage later in the day than earlier? How can that be? Why?

More to the point, is there anything I can do about it? I'm trying to disable some of the crap ads, but I'm sure there's more I can do about that. So far, tho, it doesn't seem to be having any effect.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give.

-- Don

[AlexMiles]

I've wondered about this too, and what I think it might be is money from yesterday getting credited.

Only the the money. You've already seen the clicks and impressions.

[hunderdown]

Alex, yes, I think that's it. Actually, I'd argue that it's money AND clicks carrying over. Google seems to report impressions almost in real time, unless there's some glitch. Clicks and money come in batches, with one of them happening overnight.

Also, if your site gets any UK visitors, you may be earning from them in the early hours of the US morning...

[Ankhenaton]

I had sometimes extreme eCPM in the morning. I was so worried that i thought it was a click attack in the beginning that I wrote to Google. :\ The response was not to worry.

It's just click dumps etc from the day before, which then increase your eCPM that's all imo.

[midwestadsenseguy]

I'm not sure that when you see EPC decline in the same day that it has anything to do with smart pricing. This is a result of how Google encourages advertisers to set up adwords accounts. I'm an adword client as well as adsense to I have a bit of insight on this. Google has the option to set a daily spending budget to your account. So I could for example say $50 each day I want to spend.

At some point during the day the money will likely be used up. That could happen at 10am on one day or 5pm the next day. But once the money is gone for that day, then no more of my ads will display until the following morning. This is I believe why we constantly see EPC drop throughout the day as the daily budgets of advertisers are consumed and the ads stop running to be replaced by lower paying ads.

Now that I see how this impacts across all advertisers, I never just set a daily limit and use up my money in the morning. Better to wait until later in the day and then turn on adwords so you can get the same exposure and clicks at lower costs.

That being said, I think Google does do 'smart pricing' to certain sites when they have a big upsurge in revenue. I've seen it happen on my own site where one day I may make $275 and the very next day, with almost the same advertisers the site has it's EPC is cut in half and I only pull in $140 on the same quantity of traffic. I know this is not a supply/demand issue because my other site with nearly the same content and exactly the same keywords and advertisers does not see the EPC drop at all.

[photo200]

It is known thing.

Not all of webmasters here can admitt that but it exisits.
Conspiracy or whatever - does not matter.

Google did not promised You to pay any amount per click - so they can do ANYTHING.
They want to pay big EPC in the beginnig of the day
and at the end they can decide they've paid already too much ( StupidPricing"TM" ) and they will reduce your earnings 10 times by reducing EPC 10 times.

I see this picture every fu@#%ng day.
You cand do nothing abut it - just change to Yahoo or whatever you like more.

[hunderdown]

Patterns. Somewhat against what I said earlier, but I've been thinking about this:

Sometimes I see patterns in the clouds. Is that a ship? A tomato? A volcano?

Beware of seeing shapes in semi-random data. Google conspiracy? Manipulation? Thousands of programmers tweaking our statistics?

Maybe, but who knows? The bottom line -- earnings -- is what matters. Do what you can to improve your earnings and don't worry about what you can't control.

[Don Markstein]

Out running errands all day -- thanks to all responding.

So, it might be money from yesterday, lagging behind the clicks and impressions, distorting the averages. But I don't think that's it, because I'm tracking the EPC as they come in, and that definitely declines during the day.

Or it might be advertisers' budgets running out, and thanks, midwestadsenseguy, that sounds pretty plausible. But then, you also suggest my wife might be right after all, and they're giving themselves the equivalent of a quantity discount, or in some similar way merely jacking us around, and of course that sounds plausible too.

Or, per photo200, it might be that, but with an edge on it.

One thing it is not, hunderdown, is me imposing patterns on a random world. This is not random. The pattern is, it's absolutely consistent. The whys may not be certain, but the fact of the pattern is beyond question.

Apparently, in fact, I'm not the only one who sees it. So, how common is this pattern? I take it, then, nobody has a way around it?

-- Don

[Ankhenaton]

So, it might be money from yesterday, lagging behind the clicks and impressions, distorting the averages. But I don't think that's it, because I'm tracking the EPC as they come in, and that definitely declines during the day.

As I understood it high value clicks are especially checked for fraud and come in possibly next day. So you have high value clicks in the morning on fewer PI. How does this not fit with a higher eCPM? :\

[elsewhen]

Am I getting zapped worse by low-paying garbage later in the day than earlier? How can that be?

don't forget that google targets ads to whoever is viewing them... in other words, if you view your page from the U.S., you get ads targeted to the U.S. - on the other hand, if you view your ads from Bhutan, you get ads targeted to Bhutan (and there probably aren't many advertisers targeting that wonderful country).

i find that most of my visitors come from the U.S. during the workday, and i suspect that a good percentage of advertising is directed at U.S. users. at 8 p.m. in the states its the workday somewhere else, and i assume that there aren't as many good ads being displayed.

also, i wouldnt pay too much attention to stats during the day - i recommend waiting until an hour or two after midnight before you form any conclusions.

[AlexMiles]

If you have your ads inside includes, you could remove them for the first few hours of the day and see if anything comes in at all. That should solve it.

I've certainly seen this happen though. 80% of days, I'd say.

And you know what, on my Adwords account I've seen some amazingly high CTRs first thing in a morning.

I figured there was some bizarre mathematical reason for it.

[Don Markstein]

Ankhenaton, the way this doesn't fit your theory is that the decline continues all day long, not just as a high early influx that averages out during the day as normal clicks are factored in. For example, I can check at 7 AM and find I've been averaging 8 million pezooties per click, then check again at 9 and find the average has gone down to 7 million. But those clicks that came in between 7 and 9 still average 6 million. Later, I'll find that the clicks coming in between noon and 1 average only 4 million, and those coming in in between 6 and 7 PM are only 2 or 3 million. Since I'm an early-to-bed type, for all I know the ones after 9 PM or so may be down to a mere six figures. But since the early ones were so high, the average for the day might still be 4 or 5 million.

It's the steady decline, all day long, that has me scratching my head. No theory of an early surge, all by itself, can account for that.

Elsewhen, my traffic is fairly international (I'm linked to in languages I can't even identify), but I still do a whole lot better when people are awake in the Western Hemisphere. Maybe that has something to do with it, but can ads aimed at some country where they really do use pezooties really pay so much more than American ones? If so, I guess I need a site aimed at Pezootieland.

As for "also, i wouldnt pay too much attention to stats during the day - i recommend waiting until an hour or two after midnight before you form any conclusions." -- surely, you're not suggesting I refrain from obsessively checking my stats every ten minutes or so.

And AlexMiles, that's a good suggestion for determining whether or not a holdover from the previous day is involved in this. But I'm pretty satisfied (see first paragraph) that if that has anything to do with it, it's not the only factor.

-- Don

[medowl]

Glad its not just me that notices a very high CTR in the morning, which declines to about 1/4 of that by the end of the day. If that's the way it is for most people, then I can start to ignore it.