A theory on why older pages payout more.

Ever noticed the pages you leave alone perform better?

[pldaniels]

Now, first up, I'm referring to the content of the page - NOT the layout of the adverts.

I've just been having a royal rant in another thread about SmartPricing and I struck upon an idea. If your smart pricing is based on your quality of conversions at the advertiser end relative to their median conversion rate, then it would make quite a bit of sense that long-term pages return better EPC's. . . .why?

Why... because it means that the adverts for that particular advertiser have had a chance to be exposed and probably clicked on several times (and hopefully resulted in a conversion), thus giving your page a potentially better conversion rate and hence better smart-pricing.

I personally have watched my EPC on various pages oscillate high and low with a dampening trend... trending to perhaps what is my "true" conversion rate induced smart-price adjusted EPC.

When you change the content on your pages it quite frequently causes the adverts to go random again for several days even weeks, meaning that a given advertiser cannot accurately establish your conversion rate again.

... anyhow, that's a theory - it would appear to fit my own personal data. Anyone else?

[europeforvisitors]

Ever noticed the pages you leave alone perform better?

That hasn't been my experience. But then, my site has a niche topic and audience, so new ads are generally "on theme" if they aren't targeted precisely to keywords on the page (as is sometimes the case on my home page, for example, which might have a lead story about a cruise one week and a city the next).

One thing that I've noticed: There seems to be a greater lag in targeting ads to my home page (which covers a variety of subtopics) than in targeting ads to more focused subtopic pages. For example, my home page is only now displaying ads for cruises, even though I added a big feature on a cruise last week. But a new, highly targeted page about a town in the Arctic was displaying "Arctic" ads almost immediately.

[david_uk]

I've not noticed that the age of a page, or the update frequency makes a difference either. What does make a difference IMHO is how relevant the ads are, and that is most likely to be down to page content. Also, some pages simply don't work with adsense - whatever you do to them.

[pldaniels]

Nearly all of my pages are "long term" information pages (reference pages). I get a fairly consistent number of visitors each day and the visible advertisers seem to revolve around a fairly consistent group.

By the sounds of it the metrics of my site perhaps contribute to this 'ageing makes for better adverts' behaviour?

[aravindgp]

I also belive that aging makes the converts better, however this is truly dependent on the sites traffic, minimum traffic required to measure conversion effectively, this tends to reach over a period of time and hence it makes sense to have content same for minimum length of time.(minimum traffic atleast for smart pricing to take effect)