Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We as publishers were not quite sure what you meant with that carefully worded letter at he beginning of April, however we now realize what it meant. You would think that a straight forward statement that targetted ads will be replaced with lower priced themed ads, would have saved a lot of email server space.
That this would result in lower revenues, reduced click through rates and a reduction in earnings per click would have been readily apparent to us.
To move farther at the beginning of May (now really why were the servers down Saturday) away from anything resembling page targetted ads is really uncalled for. You have made us suffer enough over the past four weeks. We now readily conceed that Google is the real power on the internet....the master of the search world...the controller of our destiny.
That said...could we have just a little bit of the revenue back from you? Perhaps an occasional ad that is targetted to a page rather than the same ads served across our entire site? Perhaps you could spend a small portion of the anticipated IPO income stream to repairing the media bot's performance.
As a sidenote the redesign of the ads, removing the separators, although approved by some ad guru, has met with total rejection in our web surveys. These of course are just the joe average web surfers...you know the ones that actually click on the ads. Perhaps they have been blinded by the "four year old, crayon designed" PSA's ads you recently implimented.
Well its time to move onto more constructive things to do. Just wanted to take the time to congratulate Google on their success in ruining a good thing. Job well done people.
<edit note: speeeling was never one of my strong points>
[edited by: Visi at 11:09 pm (utc) on May 4, 2004]
Just wanrted (sic) to take the time to congradulate (sic) Google on their sucess (sic) in ruining a good thing.
This sure seems to be the opinion of many on this board, but certainly not all. We have not been impacted at all --- EPC is up and CTR is holding just fine. Ads are targeted much better than they were before April. The last two days have set new daily highs in earnings for this year.
YOU WON'T BE AFFECTED.
I DIDN'T FACE ANY PROBLEM AT ALL.
p.s. I Imagine since they make *some* money on Adsense, they are trying to make it better.....
We have noticed a shift greater on the averages than we experianced during the "November Crisis", the "January Blip" or the "April Dive". May is starting out slower than any previous month, especially in the CTR department. It was a major hit starting after the "server shutdown" leading me to believe some more "tweaking" was done this month. By the way this is based on 11 months of data comparison and I find it hard to believe ads were good enough on Friday but same ads not enticing on Sunday.
We thought that perhaps the ads have changed....leading to some investigation....seeing common (non page targeted) ads on multiple pages, new pages not targeted....and a sudden re-occurence of PSA's. Nothing changed on the site, not revisited by media bot....leads to the conclusion another algo change.
Glad for you, that you came out on the top side of this one. However many of us did not and will can only voice our displeasure through forums such as this, after getting non responsive replies from google. We did not expect the quality of the ads to be changed, both in content and display quality resulting in lower click through rates.
The good news I would have to believe is that these changes will result in google seeing lower revenues and adjusting back to their previous algos.
By mid April I had seen my CTR fall slightly and my EPC rise giving higher total revenues. Now in early May my EPC has risen further and my CTR is above even what it used to be... that's a big increase... and I haven't touched the adpanels.
