Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Revenue from WebSearch ads may be offset at the end of the month by fees applicable to WebSearch.
How did I miss mention of fees when reading the TOS/overview?
Edit: the same clause appears in the revised TOS, with no further mention of the word fee other than for returned checks or cancelled payments. No mention in the FAQ, nor the program policies.
ASA, what fees?
If any shade of this does happen, and site search ads turn into common clicking pieces of text (many people have said that CTR is VERY high, so more ads are being clicked on from this), advertisers are not going to bid as high, and I make less for people like you that use this product to degrade the whole system. That makes me angry. I hope you do understand what a high CTR means spread over a large scale. If I pay $10 a gallon for gas I am not going to drive as much. If it costs adwords folks $10 a day when it used to cost $5 a day they are going to drive half as much. Bids will slowly creep down until this program is your standard 5 cent a click text ad program. Conversions are not going to increase as much as CTR (statistically they can not if you do not understand that go read a stats book).
Nothing you said provided anyone with a benefit of using this. Your users are not tech savvy so they need this? What does that mean? If I see a text box that says "search" next to it I assume that is for searching. How would a third party solution make it more difficult for your users to figure out it is a search box?
You are interested in making money, but you choose a route that will make you less money than another route, and has the potential to degrade the system and make less money for all of us. That is what upsets me, the implications that has on the whole program.
I just do not get it, but I will be sending you an email just to say "hi" when Google announces that it goes to a 5 cent per click platform no questions asked due to low advertiser bids.
And just out of curiosity, what in the world is a "content site"? Isn't that redundant? Any site that has anything on it is a content site. Pictures are content, text is content.
FWIW, somebody here was complaining that Google SiteSearch doesn't update often enough. That certainly hasn't been my experience: New pages are usually in Google within 24 hours.
That is a direct product of backlinks and googlebot traffic. If you have good backlinks, googlebot finds you faster, and thus your pages are crawled and indexed faster. No matter how many backlinks though, a new page will not be included in site search right away. That is a definite minus.
I am very angry that it is degrading the value of a text based link by placing 10 ads on a page with 1 search result.
I'm not seeing that on my SERPs.
That is degrading to ads of this nature and I do think that as these are more and more common to click on, bid price for ads is going to go down, earnings are going to go down...
1) With "smart pricing," the advertiser's bid is used only as a smarting point for the real price of an AdSense ad. If AdSense search ads don't perform as well as AdSense content ads, advertisers will pay less for AdSense search clicks.
2) It's true that AdSense Search ads will increase the number of impressions in the total AdSense pool, which could mean fewer clicks to go around (especially for publishers who choose not to participate in AdSense Search). But so what? That's just the nature of the business. Any time a new publisher joins AdSense, and any time that an existing publisher creates a new page, that's more competition for a finite number of clicks (assuming that advertisers and their budgets remain at a fixed level, which is an assumption that I'm not prepared to make).
3) If you're concerned about dilution of the AdSense pool or degradation of AdSense ads, you should be aiming your guns at Google's DomainPark program or Gmail. Gmail alone will suck up huge numbers of impressions (and, presumably, will generate a fair number of clicks) when it goes public.
4) As I've stated repeatedly, my site doesn't generate a lot of search traffic. I suspect that's true of most sites that will use Google AdSense Search, because heavily-searched sites are more likely to use other search solutions. If there's any "degradation" of AdSense ads from text ads on search pages, it's likely to come from sites like yours that place AdSense content ads on large numbers of internally-generated SERPs.
Nothing you said provided anyone with a benefit of using this. Your users are not tech savvy so they need this? What does that mean? If I see a text box that says "search" next to it I assume that is for searching. How would a third party solution make it more difficult for your users to figure out it is a search box?
It's the look and feel of the search results pages that I'm talking about. That, and the user's ability to search the Web (via Google) just by clicking "Search WWW" and hitting the "Search" button again. (And yes, that's a good thing for an editorial site. Helping users find what they want--even if it's not on your own site--is one of the Web's most fundamental principles. It's also a good way to earn repeat visits and inbound links from high-PR editorial and reference sites.)
Now, you may not feel that having Google SERPs is a good thing for your site. That's your privilege. You get to decide what's right for your users or your business, and I get to decide what's right for mine. (After eight years, I think I have a better grasp of my reader's needs and preferences than you do.)
And just out of curiosity, what in the world is a "content site"? Isn't that redundant? Any site that has anything on it is a content site.
I didn't invent the term, so take up your argument with someone else. (I normally use the term "editorial site," but "content site" seems to be the preferred term at Webmaster World.)
Does anyone have any ideas as to why Google has introduced this program? ie. we think we know what we might or might not get out of it, but that's not why they introduced it is it?
What do they get out of it - what do they think they might get out of it in the future - what effect do they think it might have on revenues - why, if there are x total clicks made globally on direct Google search Adwords adverts would they want to distribute some of these amongst Google search on content sites? might the total number of clicks and revenue rise and why?...etc. etc.
Or have they lost their marbles and are about to degrade the entire search based advertising setup?
Did anyone here predict the introduction of Websearch with Adsense? If not, how did the guys at Google manage to think of it given the assessments of their abilities that keep appearing here?
From what we are all used to, any more than 4 ads per page in this format is a lot. We have never seen up to 10 adsense ads on a page before. This combined with small sites with minimal pages, and specific search terms that return very few if any pages and tack on a lot of ads is what concerns me. These ads will be treated like regular links, which certainly is good for CTR, but as CTR goes up, the available ad pool goes down, and conversions do not go up proportionatly. If you would like me to find some keywords in a site search for your site that generate few results (have little "content" on the page :) but are loaded with ads.
I am not concerned with the availbility of ads, becuase the pool is very large, but the future bid prices for ads based on high CTR rates and less than proporionate conversions. If advertisers are paying based on conversions, per click price will drop, and it will take a lot more clicks to equal the same $ value we are experiancing now.
Generating a lot of search traffic from one site (which in the scheme of things your site is very insignifcant compared to overall daily adsense impressions) is not important, but the overall effect of a little search traffic and a few clicks per site spread over thousands of sites adds up. As a whole we mean something, individually we are nothing, that whole rant......
As a predicition into the future of adwords bids, i would hope that google would have a seperate bid per click for sitesearch compared to regular adsense where advertisers can lower their bid in an effort to make adsense rates similar. This would protect the inevitable lower bid for adwords as a whole. If you look at the high CTR their is noplace else bids can go but down. The quality of conversions is no doubt (statisticly) going to be better for regular in page adsense clicks than for search results, in the case of sitesearch.
The "But so what?" comes down to all of us wanting maximum EPC per click, without sitesearch lowering advertisers bids to the point where using adsense is no better than any other text based ad company. As we all know adsense has great payouts and a large base of advertisers that make this system work for our sites. The high EPC per click compared to most other companies gets us all to gather around the computer and chat about adsense until we see double. It is a great program and we all owe it a "thanks" for the results we have gotten. To ruin this program by introducing a program that has implications far beyond that of just a website search is not worth the gamble as publishers.
I will not participate in this program because i do think (and so far no evidence exists that proves my statements wrong) that the high CTR and statisticly lower conversion rate for adwords folks will drive adwords bids lower, and I will have to keep increasing clicks in order to keep me where I was.
After the first week maybe we can get some general ballpark EPC and CTR rates to compare this program with regular adsense placements and see what the trends are.
-Happy Fathers Day All-
Or have they lost their marbles and are about to degrade the entire search based advertising setup?
That is my vote. This program was not thought through, but simply tossed out for publishers to implement.
I'm sure it would have been received in a completely different way.
Which is kinda odd, actually, cause they're usually happy to beta everything..
I am not concerned with the availbility of ads, becuase the pool is very large, but the future bid prices for ads based on high CTR rates and less than proporionate conversions. If advertisers are paying based on conversions, per click price will drop, and it will take a lot more clicks to equal the same $ value we are experiancing now.
That would be true only if Google were using across-the-board discounts based on overall conversion rates. According to Google's e-mail on April 1, "smart pricing" discounts are variable. So, if AdSense Search pages are generating disproportionately high CTRs with low conversion rates, that might affect the EPC for a publisher's AdSense Search ads--but it shouldn't have any effect on AdSense "content" ads.
Also, I can't believe that Google would have launched AdSense Search without having done "what if" revenue scenarios. Lower bids aren't any better for Google than they are for publishers, after all.
Side note: As I've said before, my readers haven't been very interested in search (even when I've given them a big search box at the top of the page), so I don't especially care if Google keeps AdSense Search, gets rid of it, or bans AdSense ads from search results. I'm more worried about the issue of whether "Ads by Google" will lose credibility from being displayed on sitescraper directories and other sites that have been thrown together as AdSense platforms. As I've said in other threads, Google opened a Pandora's Box with its "AdSense everywhere" strategy, and--as a result--content spam is going to be a growing problem for AdSense and Google Search.
Searches are not a huge percentage of my page views, but over a million page views a month they add up, and it is certainly something i would want to monetize.
A high rate of anything makes it less special. I hope to god high search CTR wont lower bid prices in the future.
I think whatever discounts take place will be a result of a high CTR (high cost for publishers) with lower conversions. I think we can all see how bid price will go down if conversions are lower.
If you're referring to search clicks, bid prices won't go down, but effective bid prices for search clicks will be less than the nominal bids. That's the idea behind "smart pricing": to apply variable discounts based on the likelihood of a sale or other business action in a given situation.
Let's say the advertiser bids 20 cents and Google's "smart pricing" algorithm determines that a search click on wallys-widgets.com is worth only 2 cents. The advertiser won't pay 20 cents for the click; the advertiser will pay only 2 cents. So there's no reason why the advertiser's bid should change--or why "smart pricing" discounts for other types of content should change.
Of course, in practice, those high-CTR clicks from search pages may convert quite well, if--as many advertisers seem to believe--clicks from search results convert better than clicks from content pages. If that's the case, both Wally of wallys-widgets.com and the advertiser will do quite well.
Are you sure smart pricing applies to WebSearch clicks?
I don't know if the smart-pricing algorithm for search is identical to that used in the content ads, but it seems fairly obvious that Google is giving advertisers a big discount for AdSense Search clicks.
From what I have seen in the AdWords forum, Google has placed WebSearch in the Search Network, completely separate from the Content Network. Therefore they may not feel that smart pricing needs to be applied.
From what I have seen in the AdWords forum, Google has placed WebSearch in the Search Network, completely separate from the Content Network. Therefore they may not feel that smart pricing needs to be applied.
Maybe, but if that were true, I'd expect EPC for publishers to be higher than it is, if only to attract publishers who get significant search traffic.
Also, if Google were making a killing on AdSense Search by keeping a really big percentage of the earnings, why would it allow publishers to use AdSense on internal search results?
Finally, I wonder how many advertisers would pay full rate for search traffic from unknown AdSense publishers. I'd guess that many, if not most, would opt out of the search network unless they were getting a discount on AdSense search traffic.
