Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I run a review site that does about 60-70K Adsense impressions a day. For the last five months, CPM has been climbing steadily. As Adsense earnings grew, I began to look for ways to increase its coverage on my site.
Prior to the fall, I was running Adsense on most of our review pages - stuff like travel, products, people, etc. Each page was very targeted, with some very profitable verticals, and some very low epc verticals. The common characteristic was how targeted each page was towards some theme.
In an effort to expand Adsense coverage in the face of rising CPM's, we ripped out a rival network that had been serving on our reviewer profile pages, which accounted for about another 10-15K impressions per day, and replaced them with Adsense.
Now these profile pages were not very content targeted - while many profiles had some content, e.g. favorite movies, places, etc. of the reviewer, they were not product focused pages.
What I found was staggering. I ran the experiment for a month. Shortly after expanding Adsense to include profile pages, my CPM fell 40%. As total impressions were up only 15-20% with the increased coverage, we saw our total earnings go down fairly sizably for the duration of the experiment.
Yesterday, we took Adsense off of our profile pages again, and our total earnings are up week over week for the weekend, despite serving significantly fewer impressions and making no change to the product page coverage.
The lesson: adding non-targeted pages to your Adsense coverage can not only impact your CPM, but it can significantly impact your total earnings.
Including new pages should not affect the performance of your existing pages earnings if that is a per page basis.
It might encourage some people to experiment by taking AdSense off of some pages.
That is rather a technical constraint, it might not be feasible for AS to keep "an inventory" at each page level.
The more sections you have, uncontrollable fluctuations, design, ad location & ad size changes, the more time it takes to pinpoint the effect of one single factor, I think for some it can be an everlasting non stop experiment.
The general theory is that Google's algo is designed to be selective and reward good targeted content, while us as publishers are mainly geared towards increasing earnings before anything else, more experimenting only leads towards us giving Google good target content.
That is not to say that we as publishers are cornered and without options, once you know for sure which inventory is premium and which is not, you can work on improving the non-premium sections, and maximizing the earnings from the premium ones.
For premium pages options include ad formats, ad locations, ad sizes .. For non premium pages you can either improve the content quality or make money via other networks or Google referral banners as I did.
Sorry, but it's too soon to make a valid conclusion based on your comments.
You ran the experiment for a month, but are basing the recovery statement on one day apparently, and one day simply isn't enough time.
Please come back in a couple of weeks or a month and let us know how it's going.
You're probably right Ken_b.
But I promise you, if you understood the tight band of earnings and CPM we operate in and you were looking at our numbers, you would agree with me.
I'll check back in a week or so...
I ascribe the drop to coincidence, though. (Maybe, as someone else suggested, the relatively new separate bidding for search and content ads is having a negative effect.)
you didn't mention ctr patterns, which might have allowed us to quantify how well the pages were targeted.
long story short, i sent ~40% of my lowest ctr traffic to ypn at the end of last month, and so far this month my average ctr is at record levels, up by several percentage points.
this month i've handed google the same number of clicks per day as december, but the epc is still waaay down... adsense is simply paying me less; and i'm not in a seasonal sector.
i'm working with well over 20k uniques a month, no forums, no mfa garbage... in the middle of january, adsense quit paying out like they used to, as many people have reported.
for me, the patterns that adsense displayed for months disappeared in january; it may have been triggered by a spike in my search engine traffic, but i doubt it... these do not appear to be good times to be making changes and predictions about what adsense is going to do.
i'm working with well over 20k uniques a month, no forums, no mfa garbage... in the middle of january, adsense quit paying out like they used to, as many people have reported.
I get 500,000+ unique visitors a month, which should be enough for a reliable statistical sample for my site (note the disclaimer). I saw aboout a 12% drop in EPC for the last half of January, compared to the first half, but it was still better higher than December's. I'd be very skeptical of claims that "adsense quit paying out like they used to, because that hasn't been my experience or the experience of many other publishers who have posted here.
Adsense earnings can go up or down for many different reasons: seasonality, ad targeting, advertiser turnover, changes in where a site's traffic is coming from, smart pricing, etc.--either individually or in combination. In my opinion, short-term "trends" aren't really trends at all--they're just fluctuations--and they're to be expected when your earnings come from Web publishing or most forms of self-employment.
i'm in a niche within a sector where the keywords always cost more than they do in your travel sector; in fact, it's the biggest advertising sector in america, and it's not seasonal.
my earnings trends throughout last year reflected that stability... your travel sector, on the other hand, is a seasonal market, so your observations are not all that relevant to what google did to us in january.
it's not a coincidence that both of our epc's dropped at exactly the same time, but in your case, it's only meaningful when compared to previous years... and with the way that google changes the algorithms, companies change budgets, competition, etc., it still probably doesn't mean much.
At any rate, you seem to have found a solution to your troubles: "second sourcing" of ads with YPN.
it would be interesting to know if your ctr dropped along with the drop in epc.
there is no solution to google cutting the payouts.
This hasn't been established as fact (as many others earnings have gone up during the same period).
there is no solution to google cutting the payouts.
Again, if you really think Google is cutting its payouts, check the figures in the 1Q 2006 earnings report when they come out. And if you're wrong, I trust that you'll come back here to say so. :-)
it would be interesting to know if your ctr dropped along with the drop in epc.
My CTR is pretty consistent. It's rare to see day-to-day or month-to-month variations of more than 10% from the average. For that matter, my average EPC doesn't change dramatically, either. When I said that my EPC for the last half of January was lower than it was for the first half, I wasn't talking about a big drop. And for all I know, it could have been the result of taking ads off my root-directory pages and blocking a couple of big advertisers. Whatever the cause, it's no big deal.
it was definitely a fact for my website, and many others as well.
i did not make any changes... the epc went down, and while it's recovered a bit, it's still not where it was for most of last year.
efv... the quarterly report refers to gross earnings, without deducting traffic acquisition costs... there is no data in there that is all that relevant to what adsense publishers receive.
The first number is the delta in impressions, the second is the delta in earnings. Week over week since limiting Adsense coverage:
Saturday: (-6%, +8%)
Sunday: (-10%, +23%)
Monday: (-9%, +3%)
Tuesday: (-2%, +23%)
Wednesday: (-18%, -15%)
Thursday: (-17%, -11%)
Friday: (-12%, -1%)
For the seven day period (-11%, +3%)
In real terms, we served 54K fewer impressions, and made $50 more.
I know there's lots of factors that go into Adsense earnings, so you all can make your own conclusions about my hypothesis that in some cases, increasing Adsense coverage can decrease your total earnings.
increasing Adsense coverage can decrease your total earnings.
Makes sense to me, since Google has flat-out declared that they plan to pay less money for less-qualified traffic, on a (regrettably) per-account basis. If you can correctly identify (there's the kicker!) the pages that provide significantly worse-than-average return on investment for advertisers, I would sure yank the AdSense off of them, since I believe that Google's doing what they've been claiming they're doing in this regard.
ROI and CTR are sometimes correlated, but certainly not always. Hence, the also-sincere admonition from Google to not yank AdSense off of pages just because they have a low CTR.
Found 3 underperforming pages and removed all adsense off of them. (about 10,000 impressions overall that Google isn't getting) and watched my ctr and epcm start back up, dragging the earnings up with them so that the end of next day, yesterday everything was up again.
My ctr rose a few percent as did the ecpm but the earnings showed a 30% rise.
I believe one CAN tell right away in a case involving the impressions.
Ann
In my experience, however, more ads is always better.
I believe one CAN tell right away in a case involving the impressions.
I bet there are cases where you're right. For example, if all your content is about antique cars, and all your advertisers are pretty equally matched, then your belief will likely coincide with reality. Just drop AdSense off the worst CTR pages.
OTOH, if all your content is about jewelry, and your advertisers bids range from a nickel to $30, and you decide to take AdSense off the 10% worst CTR pages that happened to be content about huge diamond rings, where all the $30/click advertisers were clustered... then in that case, I bet your belief will turn out to be completely wrong.
ROI!= CTR
Often it is maybe, but certainly not always.
