Does CTR affect the EPC

[daunk]

I suddenly had an idea, on my site I ran 3 channels one had CTR of 5% from 800 impressions another of 0.3% from 14,000 impressions and one which has about 10,000 impressions/day and a CTR of 0.0% to 0.1%. For me the money raised by this one channel is not a huge amount and so I am putting my site under a test.

In particular with the image ads it does not make sense for google to display them on pages with super low CTR because the cost of loading a 50kb image in bandwidth 1000 times for 1 click doesn't make sense. So what I am doing is removing the channel with a super low click through rate.

Could google's share of cash for payout be somehow determined by the amount of click through rate. It would make more sense for them as it will cost less for each click gained.

I will post back my results after a fortnight. But will look on with interest at anyone else's opinions or anyone else who has conducted a similar test :)

[richmondsteve]

daunk wrote:

Could google's share of cash for payout be somehow determined by the amount of click through rate.

It could be, but if it's an attempt to measure the value of the click to the advertiser I'm not clear what the correlation b/w CTR and ROI for the advertiser would be. In Google's AdWords announcement about smart pricing, they said they take into account many factors including keywords that triggered the ad and the type of site it's on. Some believe that conversion rate is another of the factors.

It would make more sense for them as it will cost less for each click gained.

Can you elaborate on what would make sense for Google and why?

[jomaxx]

The problem with these theories based on deductive reasoning is that someone could just as easily make a case that Google would want to decrease EPC as the CTR goes up, or as clicks and impressions go down, or whatever.

My personal experience is that adding or removing a high-traffic site had no obvious effect on other channels.

[daunk]

It would make more sense for them as it will cost less for each click gained.
Can you elaborate on what would make sense for Google and why?

I don't know the details of google's robots or of their system for serving ads, however surely a site with 5% click through rate 1 in 20 visitors = a click. Is much less maintence/strain on their load then a site with 0.1% CTR or 1 in 1000 visitors = a click. Surely as such they will want to "reward" sites with higher CTR and "punish" sites with lower CTR.

Obviously "reward" and "punish" are loose reflection of the situation. In reality they aren't really rewarding or punishing they are merely factoring in their costs which thereby affects the amount of money you get.