What's considered a poorly performing page?

We are told it's ideal to remove poorly performing pages - but what are the

[pldaniels]

Quite often when reading amongst this forum, we hear people saying that poorly performing pages/adverts should be culled, else SmartPricing can have potentially negative effects on the whole account.

My question is, what defines a poorly performing page?

Some pages of mine are as low as 2% for a CTR and have a rather small EPC, relative to a high of 25~33% and a much higher EPC for my best pages.

Is it relative?

-EDIT: I'm referring to the process of removing adverts from poorly performing pages, as apposed to removing the pages themselves.

[edited by: pldaniels at 7:53 am (utc) on May 30, 2006]

[Green_Grass]

If you keep removing pages..you will harm your website.. It is better to remove the 'ads' on the pages not the pages themselves..

Just my thoughts.

If you remove the poorly performing ads, and hope to see an immediate jump in earnings, forget it.. I tried it and I started losing money. I simply did not have the patience to wait it out and wait for CPC to rise with positive effect of smart pricing. The visible loss on account of missing ads was too much for me to bear ;-)

I think it is better to simply put fewer ad blocks at the formative stage itself. The culling of ads is a painful process, though advised very strongly on this forum.

[pldaniels]

Sorry,I did mean culling adverts from the pages, as apposed to removing the actual pages.

As it stands, I tend to have one 120x90 link block in my headers, and intermediately a 720x90 wide banner near the end of the articles.

No page has more than 2 adblocks, most have only one (usually the link block in the header).

[Green_Grass]

"most have only one (usually the link block in the header). "

Only one LINK BLOCK?

I would suggest adding one more ad block if the page is reasonably long. You may be losing out on CTR..

Ad visibility is also important. Ad blindness comes after ad visibility.

[pldaniels]

I've not had a problem with the overall CTR in general, even on long pages (if the pages are long I'll have the normal AdSense blocks located within the page).

Back to my original question - basically,

If say most of your pages are at 5~10% CTR with 30c EPC and you have some pages doing 2% CTR with 10c EPC, should you remove the adverts from the latter?

[Green_Grass]

Try it and wait for a week to see any improvement.. After all, this is what all old timers recommend.

[ronburk]

what defines a poorly performing page?

A page that provides a mismatch between visitors and ads.

Example: a toy car site has a page devoted to a Tonka Hummer. AdSense is displaying ads for real Hummers there. That's going to be a poorly performing page. It attracts visitors who are liable to click on ads for products that they are highly unlikely to purchase at this time.

It's not just a page with a low CTR.

Example: a page devoted to the history of Rolls Royce is showing a limo service ad that says "rent a Rolls + driver tonight: $5,000". That ad is always going to have a low CTR. But it may have a very good conversion rate for the advertiser, and may pay quite a bit of money per click. A dull-witted webmaster thinking that low CTR == bad SmartPricing joo-joo might remove that ad and lose out.

If you're going to cull AdSense off pages by just looking at stats instead of looking at page content and ad content, then you're probably as likely to hurt yourself as help yourself. But then you'll just notice the next random variation in earnings that represents an uptick and say "ah, see, removing those ads helped". You will have then joined the cast of that popular TV show: Lost in Noise.