Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have a page that deals with a subject that has been in the news lately. Without going into great detail, the page shows the side of a product that a manufacturer might not want to show.
Interestingly, this page has generated a fair CTR and good EPC over the year or so that it's been live. Did I mention that the ads clicked-on have generally been for people selling the product? At first I thought this was a bad thing, but then I realized that my page is kind of one side of a comparison site, so after people have checked out all of the pros and cons, and have decided to purchase anyway, they might as well do it from my site. EPC has remained quite strong, one of the best over all of my sites.
A few weeks ago, the manufacturer has decided to start an image campaign. I know for a fact that they are aware of the page, as many people have emailed it to them, and they have responded to them that they are aware of it. I am pretty certain that the manufacturer has targeted my site. I am seeing their ad on completely irrelevant pages in that site.
The ad is titled something like "Get the real facts on widgets" (I won't disclose the exact wording). My CTR went through the roof, going up by a factor of about 2.5 times. The ad always shows in #1 position. After a day or two, the EPC went through the floor.
The thing is, this is an image ad by the company, so a "conversion" is really someone clicking and viewing the landing page. If they are defining successful conversion as anything other than that they are in effect committing a fraud, in my opinion.
How is it possible (or fair) that AdWords allows the company to define what is a successful conversion? Lord knows if *I* were in that business, I might be tempted to define a successful conversion very stringently, so that my ad could take advantage of SmartPricing. Shouldn't low conversion rates also increase the price that an AdWords advertiser pays? I mean if you have a 5% conversion rate and someone else has a 10% conversion rate, shouldn't you pay more for your ad because your poor page is lowering my page's overall conversion rate?
Anyway, My subject on this page was covered by a large television news organization last week, and I got 800 hits on that one page in one day, as I am in the #2 spot on MSN search. If this had happened when I was #1 on Google for the term (as I was for a few weeks) I can only imagine how many hits I would have received.
I think I completely drained my advertiser's budgets that day, as near the end only 1 ad block was filled and even the manufacturer's ad was gone. The clicks I got at the end of the day were worth about 3 cents each. All in all, the page generated lots of clicks and about 5x the average day's revenue.
Perhaps other advertisers came to look at my page after getting a large surge in referrals from it, and decided not to advertise on a "negative content" page. Also, the site is large and other things are going on there as well. Of course and as usual there's just no way of knowing what happened to my nice EPC on that page.
Any comments?
I have always been interested to know how an advertiser 'reports' back sucessful conversions to Google. I could have only imagined that Google would make assumptions based mainly on ctr. If that's the case how would it work with impression ads? It might be worth starting a new thread about this.
Shouldn't low conversion rates also increase the price that an AdWords advertiser pays? I mean if you have a 5% conversion rate and someone else has a 10% conversion rate, shouldn't you pay more for your ad because your poor page is lowering my page's overall conversion rate?
I believe advertisers DO pay more in such circumstances. It's part of an "ad quality" factor that they work into the pricing... You might be able to find out more about it in the AdWords forum here, or in the AdWords help area at Google.
If I ban the manufacturer ads, my CTR may drop again, but my eCPM will probably climb... as long as nothing else has caused this effect.
Would you do it?
If the advertiser targeted your site specifically to show image CPM ads, it doesn't look like they would have an issue with the conversion ratio for your site.
Aside from that, it is possible that this particular company is targeting your site. Adwords allows advertisers to target specific sites they wish to advertise on. When they do that, their ads can be adjusted for your site.
The bottom-feeder rate for site targeting is 25 cents cpm, but an ad won't really show up very often at that price. Yet if you spread your campaign around to a lot of sites then you'll start to get visitors at the bottom feeder rate. But this doesn't seem to be what is happening to you.
Ads gain more impressoins the higher you bid, and it seems to me that the closer you get to the former bottom rate of $2.00 the more frequently the ad will show up.
Assuming that they're bidding a minimum of $2 CPM, do you think it's worth it for you? If yes then leave it. If no then either filter the domain or opt out of site targeting.
opt out of site targeting
How?I don't see an option?
This is not like "advertise on this site" I guess.
site targeting was there since long back then when google start adding "advertise on this site".
Not so?
How?I don't see an option?
Send an email to support.
I don't allow AdSense Image Ads on my site; only text. When I said it was an "Image Campaign" I meant it was a marketing campaign by the manufacturer/advertiser to boost their public image (by spinning/indirectly rebutting the info on my site).
These are all text ads on my site.
These are all text ads on my site.
You could always use the competetive ad filter to get rid of the ad.
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