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.
Yesterday, a Saturday and it towards the latter part of the month, was over double the income of the corresponding Saturday from last month.
I would not mind at all having this data collected and used the way I feel it was meant to be used as this can only help the good sites out there, so here's hoping Google looks at their program and fixes it. I do not believe for one moment Google is out to steal income from us, simply a flaw that they were probably not aware existed. :)
Ann
What I have seen, rather consistently, is a day with high earnings for the month followed by a number of very low earnings days - in the bottom 5. That, my friends is a consistent pattern and NOT natural probability.
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why Google would not want me to prosper, though it seems that whatever I do, I cannot shake the "one step forward, two steps back routine."
This month is a perfect illustration. The 20th was the best earnings day of the month for me, followed by the 2nd and 5th lowest on the 21st and 22nd.
One thing I am considering, though, is that I deleted all custom channels, but haven't had time to change the actual code on some 800-1200 pages. Maybe I am being penalized (or denied revenue) for clicks on ads with channels that no longer exist?
Another possibility is that Google people read this thread and just don't like that I'm trying to make more money.
So long as Google keeps secret how they operate, I think it wise to do the same. From reading this thread and using a dose of my own insight (which propounds that Google isn't nearly as bright as we believe them to be) I believe the less information - beyond our pages and meta tags - we provide, the better.
Right now, I don't regret trying Ann's idea, though I do regret posting that I have.
one step forward, two steps back routine
That's why I gave up following the daily Adsense earnings yo-yo. If I let the daily swings get to me, the first thing I fear would be I've been hit by smart pricing. It's enough to give the weak a heart-attack.
Like many others, I look beyond the daily yo-yo and track my earnings on a monthly basis. Since doing that the past nine months or so, I have noticed an upward trend, despite having really, really low days sometimes. I also track the number of days in a month when my earnings go pass my personal threshold and they seem to be increasing. In May, I had 3 such days, this month, I have already had 7 such days and more will come... so I'm ok.
"Testes - Positive or Negative "?
Is that a male or female test? :P
I am running a keyword that the top 1-3 placement in Adwords shows that the top bidders are paying on average $4-$6 per click. I know that this isn't exact and it most likely is less, but I am focusing on this keyword because I can really bring in the traffic.
Today I generated about 100 clicks and my CTR was about 14%.
I made a measly $30 bucks.
If I could easily generate $200/day, I would be thrilled.
Anyway, my view is that you know how Adwords rewards you for being more relevant? (you could actually pay less if you are more relevant than you competition). Maybe Adsense works in a similar manner.
Maybe G wants to see you set a regular number of hits per day. They won't just give you top payout on the first day. You could be cheating. They want to see a pattern to your traffic and hits.
Maybe it takes 3-5 days before the patterns is set and they pay you more.
Sometimes I average .32 cents per click in the beginning of the day and then later on my average goes down to .26 cents per click. What's up with that? My traffic is consistant and my CTR is high (I think) - Isn't 14% high.
My question to you out there reading this is have you seen any kind of trend like I am describing? Did your payout start low and then rise gradually?
I personally don't think G gets that diverse in their algo for determining payout. I know it is complex, but in many of these forums; I think people can over analyze it.
One word of you who pay for clicks on other smaller search engines, watch out; they team up with many small time search engines that send you fake traffic. They can burn through your money in an hour. If you think you are being duped, analyze their link popularity. If they only have 1-2 sites linking to them in the entire internet, most likely the traffic is fake. Just a word of advice, they blew through $300 of mine in 2 hours and not one visitor clicked on any link on my page. (sorry for the rant. I get ticked when they can get away with stuff like that. This was smaller search engines, not G or Y or M.
Personaly, I think google have random number generators on all their algorithms (search, adsense etc) (which run different rules dependant on the random number) - the only quick solution to prevent people like you and me to decode the rules.
Hope your theory works! and thanks for sharing.
Ann wrote:I would not mind at all having this data collected and used the way I feel it was meant to be used as this can only help the good sites out there, so here's hoping Google looks at their program and fixes it.
Yes, possibly there are ethical implications. In the case that the effect was due to a bug, the ethical way would be to warn Google so that they fix it.
Who knows, perhaps they did it already ;) , given that for now it's being difficult to verify that possible bug. Anyhow, it's soon to say.
My way of looking at the stats to track trends is to do it by keeping my eyes on the daily averages and the ad quality. When they are still going upward (no matter how much or how little) I know when to tweak and when to sit back and grin :} Maybe soon I can get back to sitting back and grinning!
It has been since the 2nd for me into the test and I couldn't be happier. I don't think this has "beaten" the system, rather that the system had a cold and I tried to give it an aspirin....only time will tell if this trend continues and Google does the necessary repairs.
I feel that having to evaluate a site the "old" way, by how well your clicks convert for the advertiser, consistency or slow rise of page impressions, is the better way for now.
Just my humble opinion.
Ann
Today has been my lowest in history (about 2 years) (less than $10 for 100+ clicks). Has anyone else experienced this since trialing this test? remember I'm not claiming this has anything to do with the test. My channels are gone so I will keep up the testing for at least a full week.
Still, it seems to me that it's at least possible that for some people removing channels would produce the opposite of what ann experienced. She has stated that her eCPM was in the $1 range, which I assume is below average for the AdSense program. What if you are above the AdSense average? My eCPM is considerably higher than ann's, and since she posted that information I've decided to wait and see if anyone with a high eCPM reports positive results.
In my niche .10 cent clicks are great...usually averages about 8 cents when things were going well, now they are climbing and starting to bump even higher than my old averages when the livin' was good :)
I have very high PV's and my visitor base fluctuates up and down but even with that traffic is getting higher.
I am having one of the best days today than I've had in a few months, clicks are low but high paying.
Just thought I would update a little on that. This friend of mine I mentioned before, (yes Hobbs, I do have friends as well as a son), 3 weeks into the test has jumped 300 dollars a day over his formerly very good income. :)
I can't hold a candle to income like THAT!
Ann
Yes, It was that low but not normally.
But that's what it was when you made the change, and that's what matters. If it had normally been $5 or $10, maybe deleting channels is just getting you back to your old norm. And if you had deleted channels when you had your normal $5 or $10 eCPM, you might have seen no impact at all.
And maybe if you had a $20 eCPM deleting channels would push you gradually down to $10.
These things are all possible. As you said, ann, you are just reporting your experience, and I don't see anything in your experience that rules out my speculations.
Ann
What kind of channel data did you back up and in what format?
Thanks!
I removed all the non-used channels 3-4 days ago, and see the eCPM going up and today showing good results.
So did I but I am seeing a decrease in eCPM of 2-3%. Hard to tell if it is related.
I hope it keeps going up. :)
I got so disgusted with the banner ad companies that I have just spent 2 days going through and removing them from all my sites.
A particularly noisy ad, mosquito, was buzzing every time I would visit my pages...Valueclick AND Tribal Fusion both had it and when I went to my main index page both the banner and the sky was buzzing there little heads off despite an everyday hunt and kill expedition. I would kill it in one and there would be 3 others buzzing where that one left off.
I changed my newest site back to Google and got out of the low paying YPN ads. The ads paid better than Google but no one wanted to click them, hence, low paying.
So far it has not had an adverse impact on my Google which is steadily rising.
BUT should it fall drastically I have other plans in mind.
Ann
but were those prices for search or content? i think that the only thing that's really relevant to us is keyword pricing on the content network.
google has told us that search keywords usually cost more than content keywords, because the latter does not convert as well.
Removing custom channels is only the easy part. Next comes the grunt work of going through and changing all ads that have a channel number relating to the custom channel...fun, huh?
danimal,
I was just reading in the adwords forum that Google is now reporting the % of fraud clicks for their ads....Looks like we get the worst of it---again. Maybe they will get around to ridding the content network advertisers that hop on us like fleas, a lot using other peoples content (scrapers) to do it.
Ann
SB
Ann
Mine are not as you said they would. I started the test on 20th and there was an initial rise and then fall back down. (I obviously do not blame you for this! Just telling you.) I will still give the test some more time though! Things are changing extremely unpredictably each day.
But what I will admit is that there is a relation between the channels and the earnings. I do not know what the reason for this is. It could be because of a "bo-bo" at Google. Or it could be because of the changes they are making now a days! I donno! But Google, PLEASE FIX IT!
I can appreciate the need for "SmartPricing" but, Google could you please tell me, if you have one site in your account that is considered to deliver low quality clicks, why do the others also get their click worth reduced? This makes no sense! Forget sites, each page may or may not deliver a sale for the advertiser depending on the content of the page! Then how can a whole site get smart priced?
Common Google, I thought you guys got Phd's there! Or do you just have some "simplistic" algo that does not really take the trouble to actually check whether a click produces a sale or not? It just looks at "external" factors and decides whether to smart price the whole account! I know this is hard to do. But you cant do it right, then don’t do it wrong at least! If you do, then many of these people here on WW is going to “game” you. Like they game your search engine with simple techniques of google bombing etc!
Anyways, I am looking at other alternatives now! Enough of Adsense! I am sick of having nothing in my control. I am wasting a good amount of visitors each day the way I see it. (How is CJ? Any good affiliate programs in India?)
must_learn_more
It is holding up and slightly rising--income is well above last month now. Mine see sawed up and down but I watch the trends by keeping an eye on the averages for the month to date. When that is going up I know I am on the right track.
I did some major thinking after getting so many buzzing ads from fast click and tribal fusion (also discovered they were spawning popups for heaven's sake so I went through and 86th them off my sites for lean clean look.
Hasn't seemed to make a hiccup in Google but Today my visitors were spending quite a bit more time on the sites. :)
I am considering putting the newer site into affiliate sales with Share A Sale. I have used CJ and still do for selling my widgets as an affiliate but I won't recommend it. Share a sale is a much nicer company that keeps the re directors, etc out while the others allow all kinds of dirty tricks or so I have been reading. (Been researching them today)
Got to have a fall back game plan or put away the ball :)
Good luck and keep watching the bottom line (averages).
Ann
A bit off topic, but the phrase "86th them" is news to me. I'm familiar with "deep sixed" (as in buried six feet under) - but not "86th." I assume the phrases are equivalent in meaning, right?
1, faster page load time. I have found that p[age load time is paramount in getting goog Google earnings. If it takes a long time to load the page, people have often lost interest and clicked out before they get a chance to see the ads. I have found that moving my hosting to the US where most of my visitors are from reaped dividends. Clean lines also make the page load faster, and again this may have a positive effect on earnings.
2, less for the visitor to concentrate on means that they are likely to read your content, and are more likely to click on ads anyway. I'm sure your sites were not a wall of ads before, but I absolutely agree that clean lines is better for the visitors and us :)
From your post to God's ear!
Ann :)
I picked up the 86 in doing office work.
To get rid of something or somebody you "86th" it/them
If it were papers, etc. you 86th it by putting it in file 13 (trash can)
Hopefully, investing the same time in content creation will pay better.
Thanks.
Google is having a good laugh at this thread, I bet. :)
