Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I came up with a theory that smart pricing was not really all that smart and tried to figure out what the bot does to determine your "smart pricing"
I think that there is an algo that ties in your poor performing pages and uses them to weight your site for worthiness.
The more pages you track the lower your quality (to the bot).
On the 2nd I deleted all custom channels and saw a 400% jump in income. Went through the 4th of July weekend with better than average earnings. Daily income going up by 2 to 8 dollars a day.
Ctr and ecpm are doing better but slowly, with ecpm rocking down and up.
Payout per click went up from 3 to 9 cents and had 5 .19 cent clicks on search...unheard of in the past. (my average payout per click was 8 cents for my niche)
Noticed better ads began showing up that had not been there before and no crap ads that I could find.
Things slowed down and started rocking so I thought, "hummm, mr bot has found another way". So I started going though my site page by page and changing out the channel ads for regular ones and adding them to pages that did not have them...more page views...:), and have seen the ctr and epcm renew their upward creep.
This weekend was higher than the weekends I've been having for several months now.
For me it is working, I still have over 800 pages left to examine and check for adsense channel ads, (doing this in alphabetical order.)
I am not saying anyone else should do this, that is your choice. All I am saying is it is working for me and judging by the payout and the better ads I can tell the worth of my sites have gone up.
My argument is that making such drastic changes to your adsense implementation should be approached a little more carefully. We should not look at what G hands us to play with because to me that's all smoking mirrors.
I like pondering on ideas, and welcome the discussion, however, I was preturbed by the sudden reception of "YEAH! Lets blow our channel data!" Now if someone what's to test their month's of work on such an idea, go for it... However, I wont, and truly wish anyone else that does it the best of luck. If it works, I lose and thats a decision I can live with...
[edited by: Yippee at 8:20 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
I know I don't but not too sure about you.
Ann
I see you said you dropped Google as of Dec 4 in favor of YPN. Did you then go back to adsense? Just curious.
[edited by: ann at 8:43 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
No one is insulting no one, and no one is knocking on anyone's idea, and if you want to claim that removing poor performing ads is your idea or that you have set the standard for it, so be it.
Not claiming it's my idea - just that I was an early adopter of the idea and it's fair to say a bit more vocal about it than some :)
I basically agree with what you are saying - removing all of your channel data is not something to be done lightly. I'm not going to try it as I need the data to work out the performance of my pages. I think that removing unused channels might make a difference (think it's been discussed before) but that's not an option for me as I have always done that to make the reporting a bit tidier.
I have to say that I'd balance a lower potential income against the usefulness of the channel data which might help me increase earnings if you see what I mean.
But I would make one comment in that as the whole Adsense / Adwords system is in chaos at the moment thanks to the "Let's drive advertisers away to YPN" algo (Google call it quality scores apparently), that now isn't really a good time to conduct experiments.
Could you confirm something? Take Publisher A, who doesn't use channels, and Publisher B, who uses them exhaustively. Otherwise, their sites, content, traffic, rank in SEs, etc., etc. are identical. And Publisher B will see lower earnings at the end of the month than Publisher A, if I understand your theory correctly. Do I?
If I could quadruple my income by not using channels, I'd do it in a heartbeat! I tried the remove-ads-from-low-performing-pages approach, for example, and it worked. But in that case, the change made sense to me, and I'm still struggling with this.
Here's the kicker, I see all kinds of flux on the Internet, however, it does not seem to effect me. I read a post on here a while back that talks about focusing on the EPC strategy, and from that day it all hit home for me. It's a time consuming strategy, but it truly works and gives you a slow but sure growth. And when things are up and down, you somehow maintain...
If I find the link I will post it here...
[edited by: Yippee at 8:57 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
How are we supposed to do that again? I hope you aren't going to say by using the "Competitive Ad Filter" ...
My sites have several hundred pages ... there are 24 hours in a day ... Google showing different ads to different regions ... no thanks.
[edited by: Play_Bach at 8:58 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
Because that data is at hand! They've done the tracking, storage and analysis.Why not use the data for their own (and their advertisers) best interests as well?
Sure, but why rely on publishers to present that data to Google via channels? Some publishers track all kinds of things with channels, others use channels casually, and still others don't use channels at all. Google can track a publisher's ad performance just as easily (and far more consistently) without outside help.
And back to David_UK's point, removing unused channels is definitely a start. Furthermore, removing any ads that generate anything below a .5% CTR is another move in the right direction. I guarantee you that with a small number of ads that generate a good CTR, you will find your ECPM go up.
Think about, this circles back around to smart pricing...
[edited by: Yippee at 9:08 pm (utc) on July 17, 2006]
My clicks are slowly going up, I suppose it is the better ads. Sure don't have any formula to make folks click. ;)
You all have my "secret", for what is worth, and if you use it I wish you all good earnings. Just save all your data for reference if needed, before doing it. I saved and printed it out.
I work better with papers spread out on the kitchen table, takes me back to my tax consulting days, lol
Ann
Sorry I missed your question.
I would not leave unused channels as I, personally feel they will weigh against the site in the long run. I deleted some channels that had not been used for months and seen a small upward bump, this a few weeks back.
Right now I can barely see so will cut this short. Will answer more tomorrow or maybe later tonight...BAAAD case of eyestrain.
Ann
My last experiment on our site was removing Adsense from the lower performing half of our content a couple months ago and replacing it with search. Our income is down about 20%, seasonably adjusted, eCPM is through the roof, and search doesn't earn much of anything. The funny thing about search is the most frequently searched on phrase is our domain name! We did consider using another advertising network on all the ad-free pages, but decided to stick with the clean look for the time being.
however, I was preturbed by the sudden reception of "YEAH! Lets blow our channel data!"
Yippee, it's all about perceived reputation. Since I've been on these forums, Ann has been a steady influence. Reading your comment the first time round, it did come off rather harsh. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. I think we are ALL better off knowing (another theory) about how someone else is making it good in Adsense. Better than ONLY knowing one way. Pretty much like enjoying tea all your life and suddenly seeing someone put a twist of lemon in and hey presto! you wonder why you never thought of it before!
Ann... appreciate your sharing. You could have just kept it to yourself and gloat, but you saw the possibility that your discovery could help someone out. Indeed, many who read this forum but never participate will try out your theory and they may just make it big!
As for me... I've been using channels since they first became available. Removing custom channels for me is really simple since I generate the ads via a script. I DO notice some channels get really awful response, so I might JUST replace them with non-channel ads.
Cheers...
I would not leave unused channels
Must they be deleted? Or is converting them to inactive good enough?
Ann
Highest day in 3 months and still have 2 hours left to go.
something is working that's for sure, even the clicks are up.
Ann
...Deleted sarcastic comment. What do I care what other people believe anyway?
Back in mid April, I did a site redesign. Not aware of the consequences, I removed all the old pages thinking that would help the search engines pick up all my hundreds of new pages with new URLs. Nope - that's not what happened. The old pages fell out alright, but the new ones did not replace them. Bad idea - not making that mistake again!
Unfortunately, this redesign was also around the time that Google's 'Big Daddy' roll out was begininng to hit many sites and my traffic plummeted to about 1/3rd of where it had been. With only a fraction of the regular traffic coming in, earnings went down right along with it. Bummer. Bonus to this sad state of affairs was that a slew of garbage AdSense ads from ringtones to "surveys" began appearing in frequencies I had never seen before. So to try to fend off the garbage, I put the most visible links in the Competitive Ad Filter and that's where they stayed - that is, until today.
During the last week of June, Google finally seemed to have all the new pages of my site in it's index and traffic shot up dramatically. So today after reading Ann's post, I was motivated to take all those ads I put in the filter during the dark days of the search engine indexing and just see what was what - would the junk ads actually be priced out now that traffic was more or less back? Well - no. They're still there but I'm seeing far fewer of them and I'm once again believing that it's probably best not to try and help Google do their job of running AdSense because each time I do, I eventually begin to wonder way too much about things I have far too little data on in the first place.
[edited by: Play_Bach at 6:55 am (utc) on July 18, 2006]
Ann seems to have found the connection, for me anyway, about 4 weeks ago I installed adlogger, straight away I realised that I didnt need to setup channels anymore for specific pages etc as adlogger gives me the info I need.
I removed all channels from the admin panel AND from the pages that had them, eCPM HAS increased by around 20% seems to have stabalised now though but remains HIGHER than when I had channels activated, I didnt de-activate them I removed them totally.
Now after reading this thread, I must say what Ann has stated IS plausable.
Well spotted Ann ;)
david_uk : But I would make one comment in that as the whole Adsense / Adwords system is in chaos at the moment thanks to the "Let's drive advertisers away to YPN" algo (Google call it quality scores apparently), that now isn't really a good time to conduct experiments.
I fully agree with you. It's not the good time to conduct experiments. An AdSense representative told me "not to change too many things on my websites for a couple of weeks". Basically there seems to be something new in AdSense that still needs to stabilize. The test Ann did is extremely interesting and I will eventually apply it in the future, but a test conducted during the past three weeks has a lower validity to me as it took place in a highly changing environment.
Play_Bach: Along with the "Test and test results" of Ann's theme, I decided to take off the dozen or so links in my "Competitive Ad Filter" to see what would happen. So far, earnings are up to the second highest day since July 4th (which was the day after I removed the border around my leaderboard).
I cleaned up the competitive ad filter a few days ago and restored it the very day after as almost everything sank.
This is a last ditch try for me as if this didn't work I would simply have to move on to some other way to maximize income. Even though Google is not my only ad source they are by far the most lucrative. :) (until this year).
I saw a dramatic increase in income, and all other figures across the board at Google closing tonight so I am very encouraged.
I am also glad to hear that some of your tests are showing good signs.
I know there are those who think I am completely bananas as with this theory and test but if all works out I will be grinning on the way to the bank.
Ann
However I've got quite a few channels listed in the adsense admin that I've not been paying much attention to, and will remove these and see how the next few weeks go.
Thanks for sharing, Ann!
Thanks for sharing your hard work Ann.
I will report back if i find anything interesting as a result.
I will not give anymore "updates" for a few weeks to let things settle or whatever.
Folks, I am not talking about witch craft here, just a flawed Algo. I believe that Google had all good intentions when this (and remember this is only my idea) Algo was implemented.
Advertisers complaining about non converting ads and showing their ads on the junky sites. Publishers complaining about low paying scraper an MFAs, needing a bigger filter, etc.
This was something supposedly designed to help both sides but with the secretive nature that Google has shown I am sure that each programmer was allowed to do a slice of the pie and add it piece by piece to the system. Someone could have made a teeny tiny error and thus threw off the calculations...flawed...the Algo.
We all know about flawed Algos, Adwords is reeling under one now.
Do you think crap sites with millions of pages bother with custom channels? I don't. They get better ads than most of us, I know, I took the time to look.
Without custom channels I can fight them in my own backyard, website versus website. They may have more pages than I do but I have better quality sites.
There is my thinking when I went into this...do as you wish. :)
You are all quite welcome. Good luck on your tests.
Ann
I am not talking about witch craft here
Much of my AdSense success can be attributed to trial and error especially that we do not have access to all the data needed to base scientific decisions upon, and the darn thing keeps changing under our feet by the minute: For years I have been unable to fix all variables and measure the effect of one change, frustratingly impossible.
Want few witchcraft examples?
- My current (successful) test of empty block filter list.
- Most of my blending color choices are based on long term trial & error in different sections.
- Who would have thought that less ad units per page earns you more.
- Can you believe that AdSense on 1/4 my pages only earns more than when I have AdSense on all my pages?
It's voodoo, its voodoo I tell you!
So don't knock an herbal remedy till you know that it does not work for you, no explanations needed Ann.
It's voodoo, its voodoo I tell you!
Yahhahahaha! See Igor... I have created the ultimate antidote to Smart Pricing..... Behold.... the Smart Pricing Voodoo Doll...
Now where are the pins?
Hunderdown wrote:And what if you only tracked the highest-performing pages on your site? Would that improve your smart pricing?
But it would be also really strange if Google needed the help of our channel data. I always thought Google stores much more detailed data than our channels, at least recent data by url. Perhaps that was just a wrong guess? Or not?
I'll wait to see if this does anything at all then I may go ahead and remove the channels from a few pages to see what happens. Thanks for the idea Ann!
I strongly concur, which was my original point. Hence driving up your smart pricing... Personally, I use a few channels to identify good and bad performing ads, so I couldn't make do without them. Having spikes are too nerve racking and always found that where there is a spike, some G geek is looking at it under the microscope.
>> According to that new theory (based on scarce, anecdotal evidence for now), it would be like "helping" Google to find specific high performing pages for their best quality ads.
I concur AGAIN!
[edited by: Yippee at 4:09 pm (utc) on July 18, 2006]
