Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1) What CTR value causes you to remove AdSense ads from your pages, to avoid diluting your statistics?
2) And, if a page/group does have that low CTR, at what impression count to you begin to worry about it?
A clarification on question #2. I have a web site with a lot of pages. Suppose 100 of those pages have a low CTR, but only get a tiny amount of hits per month. Will they significantly impact my eCPM, or since they get very little traffic, can I leave them alone?
Thanks.
I watched for a couple of weeks and realized the only difference was having lost what those pages were earning... so I put them back.
Additionally, it never appeared to have had a significant impact on the eCPM for the high traffic/high CTR pages.
I have, however, removed the ads from any high traffic/low (very low, >.2%) CTR pages as that DID seem to have a visible affect!
Chapman
[edited by: Chapman at 5:24 pm (utc) on July 20, 2006]
I agree that high traffic/low CTR pages are the ones most likely to give you an actual increase in earnings as well as eCPM. (Increasing your eCPM while seeing your earnings go down is a hollow victory).
My rule of thumb is that traffic for the page has be above (perhaps well above) your per-page average for the site, and CTR has to be a small fraction of the average. Say, less than a tenth. Start with the highest traffic/lowest CTR, do a few at a time, and stop when you no longer see a positive effect. As a further rule of thumb, I disqualify a page if it has a low CTR but gets clicks that are above average in value for the site.
You can easily overdo this. After going through about three rounds of tests with adding/removing code from various pages, I have concluded that there exactly two pages (out of over 200 on the site) where I'm better off with no ads than with ads.
I've decided I'll cull any pages not getting over $5 eCPM or any pages with less than 2% CTR (site average is about 4%).
Will be interesting to see how the site goes now...
Recently I took the ads off my low traffic/low CTR pages. I watched for a couple of weeks and realized the only difference was having lost what those pages were earning, so I put them back.
This was my experience as well.
It all adds up.
Consider, if you have a lot of similar pages, then AdSense may start populating some of them with lower-paying adverts (I don't know if that'd be true, but I'm hypothesising), combine this with the fact that the person browsing the site tends to go blind of the adverts, more so if you have fairly consistent positions and you can somewhat see how you r EPC/eCPM starts to go a bit weak - since there's a higher probability that the visitor will click on a poorly paying advert.
Trimming off low performing adverts can well mean that there's less ad-blindness and higher EPC/eCPM returns.
Just another crazy theory.
I guess it varies between sites, especially since we all have different types of content and visitors.
I'll do it as an experiment (I don't have incredibly high earnings, so it's a useful time to try these things) and see how it goes.
The CTR (looking back) cutoff was a big agressive, I should have written 0.5~1% as some pages are as high as 15% CTR.
Another way to look at it is like the pruning of a tree. You do cut off some immediate earnings - but on the /prospect/ of improving the long-term quality.
No doubt I'll report my findings :)
Paul.
I'll know for sure this time next week.
The real figure to watch though is the /total earnings/.
There's no point having a higher CTR and EPC if the total earnings are down. This experiment is to see if low eCPM pages drag down your total earnings more than what they contribute.
