Preserving big players' ad inventory

For when they work best (bring more money)

[elfred]

This is something I'm brainstorming on. Let's assume there is one advertiser that has a budget. If we have a website that shows that advertiser and the advertiser runs out of budget, we are losing money. When the day is over, the advertiser comes back because the daily budget regenerated. Does this mean that we should understand which countries access our website at the beginning of the day (in Google's terms) and focus our attention there?
In other words: how can we manage to be the first to get that money? :-)

[vincevincevince]

I don't think the daily budget works like that - if you buget enough for 240 clicks a day then G will try to send you 10 clicks an hour rather than sending you all 240 in the first 10 minutes and stopping delivery all day.

[elfred]

Mine was just a guess. How would you explain that some advertisers stop showing when it's early in the afternoon here in Europe? And that they tend to disappear a few hours later during weekends (when there might be less traffic -> less clicks -> less expenses)?

[elfred]

Furthermore: whichever is the algo, none of them can be perfect. For some advertisers, for example, the hours in the day are not the same. IMHO ads are shown based on smartpricing only. When the budget is over, it's over. There are too many variables for Google to be able to predict how many clicks (and with which value) will be generated on a per advertiser basis.

[ken_b]

I'm not sure a publisher can do much about an advertizer running out of budget. For one, it would require publishers to work together to make any real difference, and that is not likely to happen in our lifetime.

When it comes to ads that stop running during the day, that could be an advertizer who is aggressively managing their account by turning it on and off at peak times.

Not all advertizers watch their accounts closely, as can be seen by the number of threads in the Adwords Forum complaining about their daily budgets being exceeded by Google.

[Jenstar]

You also need to take into account an advertiser's geotargeting options. Some advertisers set up different campaigns for different countries. Perhaps the budget is set at $100 for US traffic, $50 for Canadian and UK, and $25 for all the rest of the countries. Unless you are using a variety of IPs, it would be hard to tell exactly where an advertiser is advertising and targeting.

And yes, it is correct, they will spread the traffic out so the daily budget will last the entire day and not only the first couple of hours.

Geofiltering traffic can be useful for other reasons, but it really isn't going to work so you can be the first at an advertisers ad budget.

[7_Driver]

I wonder how many advertisers have set a daily budget that curtails the amount of clicks they get.

The evidence from the AdSense side seems to indicate that quite a few are set up that way - high traffic sites seem to get a lower CPC than smaller sites, and CPC also tends to decline throughout the day.

I find it a bit odd though - because my Adwords account is set up with very high daily limits - far more than the clicks I expect to get.

My ad budget is determined by the ROI I get - if I'm not getting a positive ROI, I stop advertising. If I AM getting a positive ROI, I want as many clicks as Google can send me - if it's profitable, my budget is infinite!

Ok - there's a cashflow implication to be considered, and a daily budget helps protect against sudden spikes of low quality traffic - but even so, it's surprising that it the budget seems to have such an effect on the AdSense market.

It may be an indication that many advertisers don't know whether their advertising is profitable or not - so they rely on a daily budget instead.

[jomaxx]

Why would you focus the strategic direction of your website on a mere side-effect of a single advertiser's whim in terms of when they adjust their ad budget? You've got to think Big Picture.

Other problems (challenges) with this idea:

- Very hard to know what ads are running on your site in different countries.

- Same ad in different countries may pay different amounts due to supply/demand differences.

- You need multiple advertisers interested in being on your page, or you're going to get the minimum. A single large advertiser won't skew your results that much.

[elfred]

Jomaxx, you are right and you ask the same questions I ask myself. What I'm trying to understand is if there is any way to determine the best performing ad on any page. I mean: if I discover that in the second half of the day I get less money mostly because of a lower EPC, I would like to know the reason why. Please, note that I live in Europe. This means that when I wake up in the morning, it's about midnight in the US. I can clearly see a pattern, but I still need to explain why it is happening. The things I'm focusing on are:
- visitors' country (or region)
- time of the day.
If I could create 8 to 10 AdSense accounts I could use a different account for each major region and now I would know how are the earnings related to that. Then I should figure out how earnings are related to the time of the day.
I don't think that a single large advertiser is unable to change the figures. We might be talking about an advertiser that in quoted on the NYSE. Or two such advertisers. Furthermore: if them both follow the same pattern (and they do), either they are being "AdWorded" by the same person or there must be something I'm missing.
I'm sorry not to be able to fully explain what I'm trying to understand, but that's the reason why I'm asking questions and not writing plain truths :-)

[elfred]

Jenstar, are you absolutely sure that an advertiser's budget is spread over the whole day? If this is true, this would mean that the pattern I'm looking at is due to something else. Since I don't think an advertiser can change his advertising based on the time of the day, could you tell me the reason why his ads basically disappear about 5 to 6 hours after Google's midnight? Is this due to SmartPricing? Since this pattern repeats devery day, it would mean that SmartPricing resets each day. I don't think this is true. And consider that this advertiser disappears from ALL the websites he appears on, not only from mine. Actually, this is not a single advertiser, but they are two. At first (starting from a couple of months ago) only one of them showed this pattern, but now them both show it. They are both on NYSE.

[etnu]

They try to spread it out throughout the day, but their algorithm still has flaws that cause many of the top-paying advertisers to hit their budgets early in the day. This is why you almost always see much lower CPC in the evenings than you do during the morning and afternoon.

The sites that I deal with adsense on earn about 75 % of their daily revenue by 2pm most days, but we only get about 40% of our daily traffic in those ranges. CTR remains consistent throughout the day.

[21_blue]

etnu wrote:
>their algorithm still has flaws that cause many of the top-paying advertisers
>to hit their budgets early in the day

I don't think you even have to be a top-paying advertiser to fall into this trap. We use Adwords for one site where we don't pay much (only just into double figures of pennies) and we still hit our budget early in the day. Eg: today we've already used all our budget and it is only half way through.

We set our prices manually because we can get many more clicks than the budget optimiser. When we initially put in a bid price high in relation to our budget, we run out very early on in the day. We are reducing our bid slowly to try and find the lowest point when we can spend just under our daily budget, but we are not there yet.

As we reduce our bid, and our position falls, so does the price per click, and we still use up all our budget, just getting more clicks for our pennies. If this continues, we'll soon be in the category of advertiser that most members of this forum would want to exclude because of failing to meet a minimum value for the click!