Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Did it improve anything?
Why?
Because if Google really knew which keywords I made the most money on they would probably find some way to make me pay more for those keywords!
Few advertisers are dumb enough to let their supplier have this kind of information. Especially a supplier like Google that refuses to disclose how much their cut is or how the prices are arrived at.
the numbers I feed Google are not in any way representative of my real income
A perfect example of why "Smart Pricing" is rubbish.
Google is basing publisher income on false information.
Google is basing publisher income on false information.
Sure, they're just sooooooooo much stupider than AdSense publishers (who can only speculate on how Google implements smart pricing). Or maybe they're just randomly picking publishers for extreme "smart pricing" discounts while leaving others alone, simply because they enjoy listening to the teeth-gnashing on Webmaster World.
Is there anybody here who seriously believes that Google doesn't have gazillions of gigabytes of conversion data that can be used for statistical modeling? So what if commerce-site-x.com or affiliate-site-y.com doesn't use Google's conversion tracking--Google doesn't need conversion data from every advertiser; it merely needs enough data to make reasonable judgments about how different sites, types of content, etc. perform for advertisers.
Also, as has been pointed out in other threads, there are two "Googlefactors" that determine how much of an advertiser's bid price is actually earned by a given publisher. One is smart pricing, and the other is the AdSense compensation formula. It's certainly possible that Google favors certain types of sites or content when allocating revenues, or that there's some kind of sliding scale. (There may be other variables--besides advertiser bids--that come into play, but those are two that readily come to mind.)
people who I report as "conversions" did something that indicated they were interested in my site when they got there. Not necessarily something that earned money, though.
Sure, and Google clearly states that a "conversion" can be any business action that meets the advertiser's criteria. That's something that a lot of members here don't seem to grasp. (It makes sense that a conversion doesn't have to be a transaction, since the purpose of direct-response advertising is often to acquire leads, not to generate an immediate e-commerce or affiliate sale.)
For my main site a conversion is NOT a transaction and does NOT have a financial value per se. I use AdWords and other ad mechanisms to get users to my pro-bono site, since simply building the better mousetrap won't have people find it and use it.
Not ALL users of AdWords/AdSense are in it for the money (and are certainly not MFAs) but that doesn't stop our conversion data going into the Google data wharehouse just for starters.
Rgds
Damon
Is there anybody here who seriously believes that Google doesn't have gazillions of gigabytes of conversion data that can be used for statistical modeling?
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to use the data to maximize their revenue? They can call that "smart pricing" if they wish.
Another example is how they claim that CTR is a measure of "quality." Google is obviously very good at obfuscasion. :-)
-- Roger
