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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.
I really don't understand that mechanism that's supposed to be at work here.
People often assume that Google has infinite resources, based on the search engine side of the business, where mind-boggling amounts of data are collected and mined.
But make no mistake, the AdSense side of things is not the search side of things. Why is everything stuck on a per-account basis, rather than a per-website basis? Why is the number of channels limited to such a small amount? Why do they (unlike the search side) regularly have to shut things down for "maintenance"? Limited resources, and a high cost of changing an existing database schema are plausible explanations for all these behaviors.
So it's entirely possible that AdSense is essentially restricted to the channel structure that publishers choose for obtaining per-page data for Google to analyze. Especially since ideas like SmartPricing may have come along after the existing (highly limited) database schema was already set in stone and difficult to change.
lol... yes, you are.
you are gathering data at the same time that adwords has altered their program standards, which means that the current data cannot be used for comparison purposes with older data.
in other words, there are two seperate sets of control factors being used in your experiment, so your conclusions can't possibly be valid.
the premise that adsense uses channels to alter publisher payouts can't be determined at this time... or probably any other time, for that matter.
So it's entirely possible that AdSense is essentially restricted to the channel structure that publishers choose for obtaining per-page data for Google to analyze.
There's no reason to even postulate that channels affect anything, and this is certainly not strong evidence that they do.
There are more factors than I can count that affect my site's traffic and visitors behavior, but at very high traffic and many years, I can predict almost everything I am seeing to a science.
AdSense on the other hand is the weirdest unpredictable experience in my whole life (and trust me I have seen many years). Empirical cannot be dismissed, hell it is the only thing to go by sometimes!
Please be assured that using channels doesn't
affect your AdSense earnings. We appreciate your understanding.
(Sorry if someone has already posted a similar reply from Google. I did look to see if this had already been reported, but may have missed it.)
So one of three things is happening:
I'm in no position to guess which it is.
[edited by: Hobbs at 9:47 pm (utc) on July 18, 2006]
Because I, after deleting 30 unused channels last night, am having the worst day in 2 months
I might experiment. After this thread started, I realized that I've been watching my channels and really DON'T KNOW what I'm watching. There is NO pattern emerging after one year of watching. I can have high clicks in one particular channel one day and the next day, it's the worst! So to quote Hobbs....
AdSense on the other hand is the weirdest unpredictable experience in my whole life
ditto... it's voodooooo
Here is what I did:
1. Delete ALL Custom Channels (keep your URL channels if you wish)
2. find the pages that were being tracked and CHANGE the ad to a non channel ad.
3. On those pages use just one ad
4. Give your site at least a week to see a trend.
5. add more one ad pages as you can (giving more page views to enhance your sites productivity)
6. If traffic is low then concentrate on getting visitors.
But remember, do it all, steps 1 through 4, or don't bother trying as this method works ONLY with the steps above.
(still seeing good numbers today)
Ann
Initially I was sceptical.....but then who would have believed 1 badly converting site could smart price a whole AdSense account with multiple sites :)
Ann
Your theory is certainly no more illogical than the idea that removing adsense from entire websites can increase income overall, but I think this is generally accepted as true now.
The only element in your advice that makes me question your results is that removing all but 1 ad block on pages has been known to increase revenue, (another theory which defies logic) so part of your increase could be due to this.
We need to maintain a list of adsense advice which may defy logic but has seemed to help some webmasters. Your advice would certainly make that list.
dataguy,
See post #:3013043
I did every suggestion I read about in here and each time the results hung around about 2 to 3 days EXCEPT for this time, 18 days good and counting. Not every day higher than the other but enough that I can SEE how the numbers did what they did and the pattern of growth they have begun. LOL
Yippie, if the site is clean and goes strictly by the TOS then don't worry about red flags. Yes I had a 400% increase at the start then for a week daily increases of 2 to 8 dollars which has now slowed also but the trend upward has begun. I was so low by the time the test was started I was ready to give up on adsense so I really don't sweat the "flags" as long as I am "legal". :)
Before the disaster (Disaster = I discovered the wonderful world of custom channels) I was a very high earner with a steady pattern of growth. I am seeing some of that coming back. Just call me Ripley, believe it or not. :)
Ann
I have always been very skeptical when google tells us something is good for us. Given their track record, I always assume that it will do more for them than us.
My adsense earnings are not a major portion of website revenue ... yet. So I'm really not risking much, and there may be an upside.
I leave on vacation tomorrow (but with wifi enabled notebook in the backpack) so it will take time to implement.
If I stop using custom channels, I will greatly reduce the amount of time I waste messing around with them!
And that means more time spend on more productive things.
3. On those pages use just one ad
If you did all these things simultaneously, how do you know the whole effect isn't due to #3? Sorry if you've already answered this, but I got dizzy scrolling when trying to catch up with the whole thread. It's pretty well accepted in some circles that content sites benefit from only showing one ad unit - on our site, we usually place that unit at the bottom of the content.
Sometimes, the simpler way is better. I, for one, would prefer to know roughly what I am going to make if I take a certain action. With Adsense, it's always more like a roll of the dice. At least they always pay on time...
That's how I feel as well fearlessrick. My new strategy is to have really good content, put one leaderboard at the top of the page, below the header and above the start of the content, and a search box at the bottom. That's it.
I have never really used the competitive filter, except when ads were really off base (trying to sell parrot tulips, getting ads for grey parrots).
I'm rearranging my site though, so I won't really be able to say that this change did much of anything, except it will cut down on time spent looking at channels.
Ann wrote:3. On those pages use just one ad
Thank you for sharing your results with all of us.
[edited by: Juan_G at 8:56 pm (utc) on July 19, 2006]
The others are all staying the same but I am going to add more pages and use just one ad on each of them. This isn't difficult to understand...just that a lot of people expect Google and adsense to be complicated so they may think this is too...really, it is simple to do..the hard part is the waiting! :)
Ann
Ann
Ann your theory has certainly a merit. Thank you verymuch.
Take care of your health. Where are you located. Do you have access to good medicine?
