Forum Moderators: martinibuster
CompWorld
I am also ready for a new Google update because the last one was not to great for me.
I am starting to diversify my website revenue sources as I am feeling like Adsense is providing less and less each month for me.
Have been on the 'other side' of this and when we started Adwords for our car parts site we used LSD as one of the keywords without using any negatives.....yes I know that was silly but we accumulated a fair bill by the end of the first week ;-)
1) Seasonal factors. A retail site might show a spike before Christmas and a decline afterwards; a leisure-travel site might earn its highest revenues in the months leading up to the summer vacation season.
3) Ad fatigue. A community-oriented site might suffer a drop in revenues after the newness of "content ads" wears off, because the same people are seeing the many of the same ads again and again.
4) An imbalance between publishers and advertisers. If the number of publishers for a certain topic grows faster than the number of advertisers and ads, advertiser budgets will be scattered over a greater number of sites (with a corresponding decline in revenues for each publisher).
Two other things to keep in mind:
1) You can't make general assumptions based on other publishers' experiences (or on your own, for that matter). Every site is different, and for every John Doe who says the sky is falling, there's a Jane Buck who's making money hand over fist.
2) Short-term trends may be exhilarating or depressing, but they're essentially meaningless. Long-term trends are what matter. If your revenues don't recover over the long haul, you may want to consider dumping AdSense, but don't make any hasty decisions--especially if your topic is at all seasonal.
I have some pages that draw low ppc ads, and some that draw slightly better ppc ads. {no high ppc for me unfortunately}. I could pretty much tell where the money was coming from before the tracking script. The script only confirms it.
(P.S, please review the TOC of adsense, revealing exactly earnings information to public seems not allowed.)
I was wondering if it's too paranoid to think that
Google might be reducing payouts or granting discounts
to advertisers. I doubt its the latter. Perhaps the former.
I was wondering if it's too paranoid to think that Google might be reducing payouts or granting discounts to advertisers. I doubt its the latter. Perhaps the former.
The "reduced payout" idea comes up whenever someone's earnings drop, but that hypothesis would make sense only if EPC was dropping across the board.
I have a suspicion that some people start running AdSense on the pages that are the best fit, have great success with it, and then dilute it by running ads on more and more pages, and on more and more sites. Result: declining CTR, declining EPC, and declining CPM.
Wouldnt filtering out certain URLs be lowering your CPC?
Adsense will display the highest paying ads for a certain set of keywords determined by the page content. If you block some ads that were at the top in terms of $ per click, you would be getting lower priced ads, lowering the CPC.
Just because you filtered some things doesnt mean your page content changed, you will get the same set of ads, but you blocked some of the highest paying ones by using a filter. Your click through rate might go up, but the $ per click will be lower, unless google changed something, or the advertisers spend more on each ad now.
If google did not go by the displaying highest priced ads for certain keywords, than everyone would bid the same $ amount for each ad.
Adsense will display the highest paying ads for a certain set of keywords determined by the page content. If you block some ads that were at the top in terms of $ per click, you would be getting lower priced ads, lowering the CPC.
Are you certain of this? Adwords ad positioning is determined by CPC multiplied by CTR. If an ad outperforms its competition in terms of CTR (and by extension effective CPM) it could be positioned higher than ad with a much higher CPC. I think this an appropriate and smart basic positioning method. I've never heard or read anything that suggests that AdSense doesn't rank according to CPC * CTR as well so I've always assumed that the same is probably true with AdSense. If you know otherwise can you share where your information is from?
Dave.
Wouldnt filtering out certain URLs be lowering your CPC?
Not if the ads that you filter are poorly targeted and are "crowding out" ads that would have a better chance of getting clicked on.
I'm on the advertising side, and for the markets my clients are in, the keyword cost is lower on second-tier services such as Kanoodle and FindWhat than on Overture and AdWords. This can probably be attributed to a perception (real or imagined) that the quality of clicks coming from those services is lower.
When AdWords started expanding its "content match" last year, advertisers like me thought: fine, more quality AdWords clicks which provide good ROI.
After some experience, we learned that the quality is greatly inferior. For our largest client, we shut off content-match altogether. The fraud level was unbelievable. I notice that five of the biggest bidders on AdWords have now shut off content-match for that market. While there are still advertisers showing up on AdSense sites, the cost per click must have declined considerably (we exited several months ago, so I can't provide hard numbers on how much it has declined.)
For our second largest client, I figure the conversion rate from the AdSense sites is about one-third what it is from the search sites. Using AdWords controls, I shut off content match from our existing campaign, and created a new campaign with the exact same keywords, titles, and descriptions, only with these ads set to show up ONLY on content sites. I set the maximum bid on that campaign considerably lower than on the search campaign.
If my story is typical of advertisers, it explains (at least partly) the decline in money going to AdSense.
How would new ads have any CTR if they have never been published because CPC bid was so low in a competative field they were never displayed? If you go and bid $50 a click for a high paying keyword ill bet you will see your ad up at the top of the list before you have had any CTR.
Figuring out CTR for millions of ads placed in a certain sequence, Multiplying it by CPC, storing the data, and then using it to position ads is a tremendous amount of data to be processing, and to be using in real time situations the rate of millions per day. It certainly may be the way adsense ads are published, but i have a feeling that bid price has more to do with it than that model sugests.
My results with adsense have lead me to never ban any set of ads, i have no competitors since i don't sell anything, so i leave all ads open. I feel if i start blocking ads my earnings potential for that page decreased somewhat by lowering the CPC per ad, which would require a drastic increase in CTR to equal the same earnings. One day a few weeks back i plugged in my CTR rate into the trusty TI-92 and calculated the average y value to see my average CTR over the course of my adsense participation. I would find it suprising if i could increase that number by 25% if i blocked ads that would have 1/4 the CPC of the ones i blocked. My non-scientific reasoning would lead me to belive that it is wiser to take higher CPC than it is to ban them in hopes for a higher CTR as a result.
Adsense posotioning methods is soundling more and more like google algo theories!
I was wondering if it's too paranoid to think that
Google might be reducing payouts or granting discounts
to advertisers. I doubt its the latter. Perhaps the former.
europeforvisitors has given a very good response. I only play in this game with just 5-6 pages tagged, so I usually see the microscopic revenue a few minutes after the new US day has dawned, i.e. a single click. Knowing AdWords' minimum CPC, I can confirm that Google has NOT reduced the payout %.
My meagre earnings seem to go through cycles and the last 3 weeks have been rock bottom. I tend to believe the SERPs have a lot to do with it.
From the advertiser's side I can also see that there is no pattern to the performance of content matching versus search - some keywords are signing up customers only via content match and others via the usual route. I cannot risk turning off content match and search partners.
