Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Have any of those who opted out (hunderdown, Mthiessen among others) still found it to have been beneficial? Even with a very small percentage of site targetted ads, opting out raises EPC for the content ads?
Consider:
1) Site-targeted ads are served only when Google thinks they'll earn more than CPC ads (for you and for Google) on a given page at a given moment in time. This makes them useful as "filler ads" when higher-paying click inventory for a page's keywords isn't available.
2) Site-targeted CPM ads can pay extremely well if an advertiser really wants exposure on your site.
So, it would seem now that the falling earnings and EPC I experienced in the last 3 months were largely a combination of:
- advertisers withdrawing due to depleting budget.
- smartpricing
My thoughts on the matter are that these ads could be a negative thing if there are too many ads on your site from the same advertiser. That was my experience.
I noticed about a 20% rise when I gave them up. (people in my niche are fanitical low ballers)
Also there is the advantage of using less filter spots for the bad guys.
Years ago I requested 'no site ads'.. someone at G must have reset some switches last fall.. anyway:
On my site the targeted ads took over nearly the entire site taking up a whole 4-ad block with one ad.
In addition the ad wasn't 100% on target for any page.
The payment per view or click was dismal and CTR dropped significantly.
If targeting folks could target to the page-level then it might be ok but not as it is now.
I do like the idea that the "advertise on this site" message is no longer on my ad blocks. It's a little more professional.
I would guess that a site with a large number of pages, each attracting a relatively small number of visitors, but with a high CTR on PPC ads would not benefit from site targetting. A CPM ad could receive few views, but keep out a PPC ad that may have earned from a few clicks.
On the other hand, I would expect some sites that have very high traffic, but generally have low CTR to benefit from site targetting. For instance, a very popular Blog or forum could perhaps do well out of site targetting.
For my own site, I think site targetting would not be good. I haven't blocked it, but when I check I find I have few if any site targetted ads showing most days.
If your site averages a CPM of 20 and targeting pay per view ads have a cpm of $2 to $5 then how the heck will these targeted ads help?
Anwser: They won't
If you have a blog site averaging 3 for cpm then maybe it'll help
Could I have more than 1 CPM Ad showing per page? What if I had a PPC Ad on a page and a CPM Ad?
But I guess if you look at the average CPM for your site per adblock it works on average. If the difference is marginal, there may be occasions when, say, the CPM ad replaced a low paying PPC ad.
If your site averages a CPM of 20 and targeting pay per view ads have a cpm of $2 to $5 then how the heck will these targeted ads help?
Because not every page will earn a CPM of $20 at every moment in time, and site-targeted CPM ads will be served only when higher-paying CPC ads aren't available. In other words, they're "filler ads" under most circumstances.
Also, don't assume that all site-targeted CPM ads pay badly. They don't. Remember, the ads are site-targeted. What they earn depends on how badly an advertiser wants to reach your audience with site-targeted (as opposed to take-potluck-with-the-content-network contextual) ads.
efv, that's what google wants publishers to think.
putting adsense on pages that have a really low cpm, when the majority of your site pages get $20+ cpm, could drive your average overall epc down, and your total income could be less in the long run.
an extreme example of that was the photo site that was posted out here a few weeks ago.
>>>What they earn depends on how badly an advertiser wants to reach your audience with site-targeted (as opposed to take-potluck-with-the-content-network contextual) ads.<<<
"potluck?"... wrong, do you understand how contextual ads work?... i recently dumped site-targeted cpm ads, because the advertisers were NOT putting up targeted ads... they are looking at demographics, not how targeted the site is... that way they don't have to pay the high contextual ad rate, because it's targeted much better... there is no "potluck" about contextual ads, unless google has screwed up the targeting.
besides, not everyone out here wants to duplicate your banner ad farm approach, including the guy with the photo site.
no advertiser will pay google a $40 cpm for banners, so that publishers can earn $20 cpm... it's not realistic, because they can pay a $2 cpm for banners somewhere else.
Ain't no site targeted ad that came close to that.
I don't care what EFV says (often).
Google may think they will only show cpm ads if they beat cpc ads but like with most of their systems - they suk.
I've seen a lot of the targeted ads and not one was over $2/1000. And, this is in the software niche.
ps. Today is the lowest CPM day ever. I've given up and switch to ypn today. 1st click was well over $1 :)
Pengi.. sure - pile up your pages with ads - go ahead.
putting adsense on pages that have a really low cpm, when the majority of your site pages get $20+ cpm, could drive your average overall epc down, and your total income could be less in the long run.
You guys are missing out on a very important point, and that is that the decision to show site targeted versus contextual ads is NOT made on a page by page basis, but on an ad unit by ad unit basis.
Your LEAST lucrative ad units on a page are much more likely to show CPM ads, AND, they are also the most likely to show lower paying CPM ads.
So, there isn't "an answer" to the original question, because it's going to depend on a number of factors, like number of ads per page, current success of each ad unit per page, and so on.
putting adsense on pages that have a really low cpm, when the majority of your site pages get $20+ cpm, could drive your average overall epc down, and your total income could be less in the long run.
EPC and income are two different things. If you want to obsess about EPC, you can remove AdSense ads from all but your highest-EPC pages. That will result in a higher average EPC--but your revenues will drop, which means you'll have less money at the end of the month.
Still, the biggest factor in whether site-targeted ads are worthwhile is what advertisers are willing to bid for your site's audience.
my data shows that is not very relevant to a page that has low cpm... removing adsense entirely has a far more positive effect on overall epc.
putting adsense on every page is not the answer, as we saw from that photo website that was posted out here a few weeks ago... he put adsense on his worst pages, then couldn't understand why the site-targeted banner trash paid so poorly.
>>>you can remove AdSense ads from all but your highest-EPC pages. That will result in a higher average EPC--but your revenues will drop<<<
no, my overall income went up after i removed adsense entirely from a bunch of pages, strictly because the epc increase more than made up for the difference.
publishers who don't know how to monitor epc will never understand that, of course.
no, my overall income went up after i removed adsense entirely from a bunch of pages, strictly because the epc increase more than made up for the difference.
How did you identify and control the other variables? To use a statisticians' phrase, "correlation doesn't imply causation."
Also (how can I say this nicely?) not all sites are equally attractive to advertisers. Google's CPM ads are, by definition, site-targeted, which means that advertisers know the site(s) they're getting and pay accordingly.
(scratching head)what specific variables were you thinking of?
[edited by: jatar_k at 2:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 12, 2007]
In any case, what I think--or what you think--is less important than how advertisers vote with their dollars. Fact is, site-targeted CPM ads can pay well, and asking to have them disabled can be counterproductive unless the publisher knows from experience that advertisers won't bid more than a pittance for his or her site.
1) Site-targeted ads are served only when Google thinks they'll earn more than CPC ads. This makes them useful as "filler ads" when higher-paying click inventory for a page's keywords isn't available2) Site-targeted CPM ads can pay extremely well if an advertiser really wants exposure on your site
My experience has been a lot different than what some try to portrait here.
On a busy niche portal (non-commercial niche) once in a while I see site-targeted ads take over the site (we are talking more than 100,000 pages). eCPM and earnings go down, the ads are everywhere, even when Adsense preview shows all 12 other ads available. It almost seems like the opposite of statement (1) is true - they are taking precedence (albeight occasionaly) over all other advertisings. When I block the site, eCPM and earnings go back to where they should be - up.
On statement (2), in my experience these are folks who look for cheapest widest possible exposure, so opposite is true i.e. "they pay extremely low". Being blocked, as I said, everything returns to normal.
On one occasion I was able to negotiate an exclusive deal with a site-wide advertiser, obviously on much, much better terms than what I was paid through Adsense.
Hey, maybe it's just our niche.
On statement (2), in my experience these are folks who look for cheapest widest possible exposure, so opposite is true i.e. "they pay extremely low". Being blocked, as I said, everything returns to normal.
My experience has been different from yours, and I've seen ads for some pretty decent advertisers (some of whom have paid a premium for exposure). I think it depends on the niche, the site, the audience, the advertiser, and the specific point in time. The message I'm trying to convey isn't that site-targeted CPMs are going to perform well for everybody; I'm merely saying they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It's easy enough to monitor the AdSense statistics and see how they're performing (or not performing) on your site.
I'd prefer not to disable site targetting as that immediately negates any possibility of garnering another site targetted advertiser like the one I had in the past .
What I would love to be able to do is specify a MINIMUM CPM rate above which site targetted adverts will run on my site.
they vote with their dollars by paying more for contextual ads than they do for site-targeted banners, because the targeting is so much better.
prove it to yourself, efv, go over to the adwords forum and ask 'em if banners cost more than contextual ads.
so publishers who think that google banners are lucrative will of course have low epc/ecpm to begin with... their traffic simply isn't good enough for contextual adsense.
we saw that with the photo site... google base banners were on all the forum pages, but contextual ads were on the non-forum pages.
they vote with their dollars by paying more for contextual ads than they do for site-targeted banners, because the targeting is so much better.
Not in all cases. I targeted a highly popular software download site that sent us great traffic. The placement right on the home page received a tremendous response. It wasn't cheap, but the ROI on the CPM bidding couldn't be beat.
What the advertiser is selling comes into play, too. A cruise line that has a dozen ships and scores of itineraries around the world could justify buying site-targeted CPM ads on a cruising site, because most of the site's readers would be prospects for what it was selling. A small cruise-travel agency that specializes in upscale adventure cruises in the Arctic would be better off with contextual ads (assuming that the ROI was adequate), because only a small subset of the cruising audience is interested in (or can afford) such cruises.
and i think we'd all agree that contextual ads are the overwhelming majority of google's business?
as an aside, did the publisher have a dedicated site-targeted channel on the home page for you to bid on? now if they just gave us control over the minimum bid, as stuart mentioned...
they vote with their dollars by paying more for contextual ads than they do for site-targeted banners, because the targeting is so much better.prove it to yourself, efv, go over to the adwords forum and ask 'em if banners cost more than contextual ads.
I have some site targeted ads running. The thing is that people here are trying to generalize way too much with their conclusions.
Targeting may be better for context, but often it isn't. What IS different is that for site targets the advertiser is responsible for choosing sites that result in great targeting AND positioning.
FYI, the reason why generally (generalization here) site target ads appear to be cheaper is that there huge challenges for advertisers in making them work, because google's interface system is absolutely terrible for advertisers doing site targets.
Also FYI, and to thread issue, just looked at my own stats in adsense. The range of CPM rates that we RECEIVE (the actual bids are higher factoring in google's take) run from about $2 - $6 CPM.
Total volume is small because we have relatively few ads on our pages, and our ECPM for contextual ads is high, so few site targeted ads get shown.
Targeting may be better for context, but often it isn't. What IS different is that for site targets the advertiser is responsible for choosing sites that result in great targeting AND positioning.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if and when Google introduces site targeting for contextual ads. That could be a boon for publishers who deliver qualified leads or prospects--and a whack upside the head (or at least a big missed opportunity) for publishers who don't.
