Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Now that we are a few weeks into this feature being widely available I'm wondering who has tried it and what your experience has been.
Has it been a success for you? A failure? No big thing one way or the other?
Personally I felt they introduced it at the wrong time of year...pre Xmas...however when would be the right time?
I have seen new advertisers on my site this week but whether that has anything to do with the promotion I have absolutely no idea other than to say my earnings are well-ahead of expected.
I was getting the same, single ad block in half the spots on my one of my main sites, instead of the nicely targeted sets of ads that normally appear.
I have not seen any major changes to revenue.
I might be wrong but I believe that if you are to leave it on then it is best to leave it on for quite some time.
The reason I say this and my thinking is as follows. G has a big pot of advertisers who target specific keywords, these advertisers compete against each other to some extent through bidding and other algo formulas. These are the advertisers we get through regular AS ads.
When people want to advertise directly on your site then at the beginning, depending on your site, your own pot may be quite small as there are less advertisers competing specifically for your site.
Over time however this number would increase, which means there are more people wanting to target your site specifically which should mean higher bidding etc and consequently I hope revenue for the publisher.
Just a theory but I am leaving it on in the hope of above.
Even if the above is not correct G has said it tries to display the most accurate ads.
Lets say if an advertiser decided to advertise on your site and the advertiser is only willing to pay 1 cent per click. Are you actually depriving yourself of other advertisers who are willing to pay more if you do not join this "Advertise here"?
I am thinking of disabling this feature.
The result may vary case by case, I would say at least let it run for 1-2 weeks. If it is not working, disable.
In my case, with it on, my earnings dropped 40% in the first week and I had to disable it quick.
At least that's my understanding of it.
So the only reasons I can think of that would cause someones income to go up right away after shutting off this feature are:
1) Coincidence
2) Customers who were just interested in what the ads were all about were clicking on the "advertise here" link instead of on your ads.
3) The movement of "ads by Google" to the left caused a similar problem.
I don't know. A good way to guess would be to look at CTR if you have enough impressions to make it statistically valid.
As to the effect, earnings are currently up, but I don't have enough historical information to determine whether it's a seasonal thing or not or related to this feature. Would be interesting to know clickthrough numbers for it.
i am disappointed with it. here are my thoughts:
earnings have gone down since the link appeared on my sites. that might be coincidence.
however, i have the same suspicion as 'Visit Thailand'. in order to force some kind of competition exclusively for your ad space and due to the very low conversion rate for getting new advertisers, you have to enable the link for a very long time, even if you got decent traffic. otherwise, if you only have one advertiser who is excited about your website, then an income drop may result. i still don't see, why the adsense algorithm allows these low paying ads to appear on your site then, as it was pronounced, that these cpm ads compete with the regular ppc ads for the best performance in your ad space. this seems not to be the case in an environment with only a few low bidding cpm advertisers. at least, it is not only my experience, that earnings drop, when cpm ads come into play.
other factors for being not successful with the new feature (some have already been mentioned):
- visitors clicking on the link instead of clicking an ad
- visitors not clicking an ad because with the link, they now realize, that it's an ad
- visitors clicking on an ad only out of curiosity how it all works thereby lowering your conversion rate and triggering smartpricing
for what it's worth, my ctr has gone up again, since i removed the link. maybe i'll give it a chance again, when google offers unique landing pages per site, acceptance of advertising per ad block and acceptable stats for cpm ads.
It looked like my CTR dropped because of the additional visual barrier.
I started running AdBrite exactly because I liked their "Your Ad Here" tagline (and AB does indeed bring me a small amount of revenue too, though I spend far more with them than I get, and I don't even have my first cheque from them yet).
So I like the AdSense equivalent.
I had by far and away my best month from AS last month, much better than I would expect even from the usual Christmas advertising boost. Not big money by some standards, but about 20% better than ANY previous month. PLUS my CPM campains alongside from other ad networks did well.
I like any scheme which makes it easy for a potential advertiser to part with their budget and push it in my direction.
My general tactic with mixed PPC/CPM models such as AB and AS both are is to run at least one more slot than the peak number of CPM ads so that there is at least one slot for the PPC ads to compete for, and the best ones at that. It seems to work reasonably well.
Rgds
Damon
