Major changes to AdSense

Pricing structure and ad relevance

[markus007]

Unless adsense is sending out a april fools joke, what do people think of the changes? Every site has a unique pricing model?

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]

[europeforvisitors]

Whoa there. Read what you said. If you were to teach an advertiser to convert well off of content do you think they would do it? They sure would. Why is it so unrealistic to expect advertisers to learn how to market with a different medium?

That may happen eventually, but right now, I wonder how many advertisers would want to venture into waters that are muddied by so many different types of "content" (some of questionable value).

[JohnKelly]

After a few days of channel data with the "new and improved" revenue plan there is an EPC drop across my network of 8 sites ranging from 4% to 80%. Average drop in EPC is 12%. This is for April 1-3 compared to March 18-31.

Drop in EPC for the whole month of March is about 20%. Traffic is normal, and CTR is very slightly up 0.1%. Revenue is also down April to date 21% from March.

All these sites are very different in scope. There seems to be no pattern to the drop (i.e. lowest traffic sites didn't drop the most, etc.).

[JuniorOptimizer]

I'm happy to report that money is WAY up. The ads appear more relavent, the CTR is higher and the EPC is at a record.

Triple digit days are nearly at hand.

[madmatt69]

My revenue has definitely gone down. On a travel forum site they started showing an ad for "Gay chat - Come out now!"

Better targetted ads? I have yet to see any. I really hope they iron out these bugs soon - I don't want to spend half my day blocking inappropraite ads for my site.

[rravenn]

sorry I cant resist.....

Did anyone in the forum come out?

[TonysDesigns]

I sent in a complaint and got a reply frm G. Is it against the TOS to post this reply?

[Sunflux]

Oh, man. Saturday and Sunday looked like things might be making a slight upwards turn (from horrible to merely really bad), but today it's gotten even WORSE.

CTR down 20%
EPC down 48%
CPM down 58%

I get this CPM from the stinking NON TARGETED BANNER AD COMPANIES!

Oh, and you know why I think this is the case? About 75% of the ads shown are OFF TOPIC!

[dazzlindonna]

TonysDesign, all you can do is paraphrase the reply - you cant list it verbatim

[freeflight2]

Tony: you can explain in general what they told you... very much interesed in it.

I just looked into the channel stats and it looks like this:
- CPC before: $1 to $2 => now 85% less
- CPC before: $0.5 => now 60% less
- CPC before: $0.10 ... $0.20 => now 35% less

I can see this kind of pattern on a medium traffic (high converting) and on a high traffic site (low converting), 500k impressions/day sample. I haven't seen any improvement in ad-targeting yet.

so it appears as if the "high earners" were hit the hardest... on the other side if you were in the $0.10 to $0.20 range before you might actually seen a small increase in earnings by better/different targeting. (a couple of months ago all in a sudden all our ads changed to a different topic which resulted in a 40% higher CTR/income)

[Sunflux]

I was never earning high $$$ on clicks, and I'm down... way down.