Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.
[edited by: markus007 at 8:08 pm (utc) on April 1, 2004]
I've just had the worst day to date (04/04/04). It's a pitiful thing.
:(
I think this change is a little premature.
Content advertising is a whole different ball game and should be treated as such. Trying to force the market to make it work like search engine advertising (Adwords) will fail in the long run.
Content advertising should be seperated first from search engine advertising by allowing seperate biddings for each and let market forces decide. When advertisers start to figure out how to market to content traffic effectively then you will see bids reflect. Only after this and a bunch more testing is when Google should look into poor converting sites/pages.
Advertisers themselves should realize that it isn't necessarily the publisher's fault for poor conversion rate. It is largely due to the same marketing strategy being used for content sites as it is for search engine marketing!
Any publisher who has dealt with affiliate programs probably has seen totally different conversion rates for the same products on two different affiliate sites. It isn't the traffic is bad it is how the affiliate site itself converts the traffic. Each has a different marketing strategy.
Do you suppose Google could be tracking coversions via the toolbar (ex. - see if users visit checkout.php)?
I recall seeing that Google will manage your entire adwords campaign FOR you (if you have lots of traffic and plenty of money). Perhaps THIS, along with their big-partner sites, is where they drew their conversion info from.
Content advertising should be seperated first from search engine advertising by allowing seperate biddings for each and let market forces decide. When advertisers start to figure out how to market to content traffic effectively then you will see bids reflect.
That wouldn't work unless advertisers could bid on specific sites or at least specific types of content (e.g., editorial, forums, gmail, parked domains, and whatever else Google defines as "content"). Why? Because the difference in conversion rates between, say, an article on widgets and a gmail e-mail message about widgets is likely to be even greater than the difference between the difference in conversion rates between a widget ad on a SERP and one in a review.
Advertisers themselves should realize that it isn't necessarily the publisher's fault for poor conversion rate. It is largely due to the same marketing strategy being used for content sites as it is for search engine marketing!
"Largely"? Partly, maybe. But it's unrealistic to pretend that there aren't intrinsic differences in value between leads from different media--and it's also unrealistic to expect advertisers to jump through hoops to increase conversion rates from traffic that doesn't perform well and which they'd just as soon avoid altogether.
Google's automated variable-pricing scheme is obviously intended to compensate for the fact that advertisers have no say in where their "content ads" appear. It's as if Google were saying to advertisers:
"We won't let you pick your advertising venues, so we're going to offer variable discounts based on our testing of different types of 'content' media. And because we're crunching the numbers at our end, you can get more value for your advertising dollars without having to invest time or money on research."
For advertisers, that message is likely to be more appealing than:
"We're going to continue charging the same rate for low-value traffic as for high-value traffic (even as we add more low-value traffic to our 'content' mix), and it's your job to figure out how you can turn non-converting leads into leads that make money."
I suspect that most of the complaints on this board boil down to one thing: Publishers aren't happy with a drop in earnings. I can sympathize with that; my own EPC and revenues have taken a hit that's in the -25% range at the moment. But I'm objective enough to recognize that all traffic doesn't have the same value, and that Google can't expect advertisers to pay top dollar for every click on a "content ad" when Google's quality standards for "content" media are minimal and are dropping even lower with the introduction of contextual ads on gmail.
BTW, I think there may be one silver lining to the recent changes from a publisher's perspective: Variable click pricing (and compensation) will discourage the quick-buck crowd from cranking out "AdSense sites" that have no real content and which invite clicks because readers can't find any information on those sites' pages. This should help to prevent dilution of AdSense click inventory for competitive keywords, thereby making it easier for legitimate publishers to earn revenues from AdSense.
BTW, I think there may be one silver lining to the recent changes from a publisher's perspective: Variable click pricing (and compensation) will discourage the quick-buck crowd from cranking out "AdSense sites" that have no real content and which invite clicks because readers can't find any information on those sites' pages. This should help to prevent dilution of AdSense click inventory for competitive keywords, thereby making it easier for legitimate publishers to earn revenues from AdSense.
Well maybe if Google was really serious about making sure that its advertisers were getting people genuinely interested in their ads, they wouldn't allow such sites to run their code in the first place.
This is not just discouraging "adsense" sites. This is also discouraging legitimate content sites which brought Google many thousands of dollars in legitimate revenue.
I would urge publishers to look at this from the ad buyers' perspective. G had to do something to increase the ROI to the next step.
What folks in the industry have been saying is that they are trying to move contextual ads to the next level, closer to the cost of yellow pages where the average lead is worth a dollar. Right now, it's closer to 35 to 40 cents. And, it was going to stay there unless G made some kind of move.
To some degree, Overture/Yahoo is where G is heading. Overture has been more selective in their publishers and, in turn, is thought to be getting a better rate of return for their ad buyers. Who knows for real? Well, this move by G indicates there is something to Over's claims. And, it's just common sense, of course.
I've been working with small and medium newspaper web sites. They works soooooo hard on their sites, but they can't get the ads to cover the investment they've put into it. They're annoyed that these guys working out of a spare bedroom are getting the same PPC as they are.
In the past I've said it's all about traffic. Now, however, it's getting to be more on the quality of traffic, too. (Alas, is news high quality e-commerce traffic? My data says it's not.)
Which means that you've got to get into the business that provides high quality e-commerce traffic.
A great example is the new theatre section of the New York Times. That's high quality, e-commerce traffic. They deserve a higher PPC than, say, a chat room on theatre and entertainment.
