Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site is monetized by adsense revenue and in fact the ads I pay for are in exactly the same category as the ads that run on my site--I aim to break even on adwords advertising in that I pay about as much for a visitor from adwords as I earn from a visitor via adsense (I pay for 5th-6th position ads and then some click through the 1st position, net it balances or I'd stop paying for the traffic). I view that as a way of generating a little extra exposure for my site--if a few of those bookmark me or tell their friends I come out ahead. I actually earn my income on organic traffic (search, referral, or returning).
At any rate, this puts me in a position to compare adsense revenue with adwords costs and I've noticed something interesting. By comparing the exact same time periods this year with last year I can see:
-- My organic traffic has grown 50-60%, great!
-- My adwords ads cost 2x what they used to, and since I refuse to raise my bids that means my CPC traffic has crashed
-- My adsense per click revenue is about 60% of what it used to be, per click
So advertising cost has gone up while advertising revenue has gone down, per click, for the same/similar keywords. Google is taking a very much bigger bite now than they used to.
The net result is my overall income from the site is about the same as it was last year, except that I now have much higher free organic traffic, and much lower paid adwords traffic... I know advertisers are actually paying more (I am one of them!) so google got the difference.
hehe, how about I drag you to a pub and we can hash it out over a pint instead ;)
over a pint instead
Great idea! I'll have my beer goggles on so maybe the needles won't hurt so bad :-)
JAG
Anyway, back to the size ofthe markets. One thing that has me curious is that Google pays so much more in referrals for Adsense than Adwords. It suggests to me that Google thinks it has way more inventory than publishers. It is prepared in this case to pay way more money to get publishers on board, than advertisers. Oh course, thereare other explanations.
But if Google is trying to grow publishers at a rate greater than advertisers, that will partly explain the declining CPC on Web sites. Well, you know the rest (see the start of this thread)
BTW: Google's 'loss' is not clearly defined. It could be on small-time operators who get a voucher but don't spend enough to cover the costs, it could include overhead costs of the Adwords program that are spread out on a client basis.
Plus: There is no reason to assume that the loss is at the bid end of town. It takes the same resources to set up a $1 per day Adwords or Adsense account as a $100 day account.
You say maybe there are too many publishers with too much inventory chasing the $1 bids. Well, if that were true then when I put in a $1 bid (or whatever is a good bid in my category) Google would be able to exhaust my daily budget; but Google never does manage to spend more than about 10% of my daily budget.
Plainly there's not enough inventory out there for my ad to run, other advertisers who pay more have outbid me. (And I know that they do--I can earn only pocket change from an adwords click via adsense; they can earn a few hundred dollars if they convert a customer. It's worth more to them so I'm sure they bid 10x what I usually bid.)
When I look at the performance of adwords what I measure is the number of impressions and clicks I buy for the bid that I put in.
Note one thing we can rule out here: My ads aren't being punished for being low quality or for having low quality landing pages. I have pretty high CTR and visitors spend significant time on my site when they click through one of my ads. I strongly believe that I get a pretty deep discount on adwords versus my major competitors. I can't prove it, but I suspect google's smart pricing on adwords has given me a fairly steep discount for having high CTR's and good landing pages. The reason why I don't get the clicks is plainly and simply that I can't afford to pay what my competitors can afford to pay, so they outbid me, even with my high-CTR discount.
Of course no-one can prove what Google is really doing. However, I think what I'm seeing is pretty interesting, and while you keep saying that there are other publishers out there who are in a different situation, I have yet to see anyone post an analysis like mine. What I know is that to get the same number of impressions as last year I have to spend 2x what I had to spend back then.
Are there any small publishers who run both sides and who are seeing the spread narrow rather than widen?
It's easy to make sweeping allegations that are based on your own anecdotal evidence, but that won't put more money in your pocket.
I would not describe my site as a click arbitrage site. My site is better described as a magazine with articles about a specific type of product. I advertise my magazine on adwords and I monetize it with adsense. If I'm an arbitraguer then so is any newspaper, magazine, or journal that advertises itself to the public and also has adsense on it.
I think when google criticizes "click arbitraguers" they are referring to sites with very little actual content, that exist just to try and funnel off topic searches to high value keywords. I don't do that. My ads promise information and answers to questions and I do my best to deliver exactly that.
That said if the advertising on my site is properly targetted (and I think that it is, though it could always be better) then the advertising can be just as much a part of the useful content on my site as the articles that I run. If it weren't I'd cancel it, I certainly wouldn't want a bunch of smiley ads on my site even if they were profitable--they'd make my site look cheap and crass.
I don't really believe that my site looks like the sort of click arbitraguers that Google is out to punish. If it does look that way, there are a lot of bigger fish out there who will be more pissed off than I am about it--anyone who publishes a magazine with car or camera or other reviews, for example (not my niche, but similar concept).
However, I'm inclined to think that supply and demand are the real culprit; conspiracy theorists are welcome to disagree. :-)
Must have someting to do with adverstises pulling out so more revenue has to be kept by Google to keep them in the Money as if you think about it Google has never submitted how they determine your share of the generated revenue.
For all we know and most likely the reason they have continued to increase their share to pay for the purchases they have been making.
Seems to me another drop in adsense occured around the time they announced a 600 million datacenter in NC
Seems to me another drop in adsense occured around the time they announced
Am I correct that "a drop" should be visible first and foremost in eCPM? In my understanding, eCPM tells you how well your site is monetized (because traffic is taken out of the equation).
Looking at my stats, I do not see a drop in eCPM. In fact it seems to be pretty solid (for me).
All my adsense revenue is based on a cpc. All my adwords are based on cpc.
I have bid on sites using the cpm but didn't like that as there is really no way to determine were I would be placed plus how do you track impressions, well for that matter how do you track clicks really.
I just didn't like the cpm maybe it is working for you not me.
eCPM is a way to measure your income/revenue without looking at the absolute traffic figures:
eCPM = revenue / pageviews x 1000
This makes sites comparable that have different levels of traffic, e.g.
Site A : $300 from 200,000 page views => eCPM = $1.50
Site B : $180 from 90,000 page views => eCPM = $2.00
I would say, site B is doing a better job at monetizing the traffic. They get $2 from 1,000 pageviews while site A gets just $1.50. In absolute terms, however, is site A clearly the winner (they go home with $300 compared to $180 from site B).
I argue that "a drop in revenue" should be visible in eCPM, because it does not account for traffic. Inbound traffic might see severe swings and/or seasonal changes. For example a site might get its major traffic peak in the first half of the year, while another one gets 80% of the traffic before X-Mas. eCPM helps you comparing these sites.
An example I was being paid .50 per click or .50 per 1000 views as they are basically the same I am now recieving .15 per click with an increase in page views. So in effect my cpcm has dropped more than my cpc.
were as I as well run a large adwords campaign and the cost of it keeps rising. So in effect the cpcm is going up and the cost per click is going up. 1000 views is considered a click you are just billed differently.
So in effect my adsense revenue cpcm is going down as my cpc is going down
my adwords cpcm is going up and my cpc is going up.
Bottom line no matter how it is figured,
I am getting less and paying more.
Must have someting to do with adverstises pulling out so more revenue has to be kept by Google to keep them in the Money
According to Google's quarterly earnings reports, AdSense revenues have increased steadily (one could even say "dramatically") from quarter to quarter. So the notion that advertisers are "pulling out" in significant numbers is pretty farfetched.
I am not so sure about that as I have pulled 10k a month out myself and know of allot of others doing the same.
Pullling out doen't mean out completely cutting back is a better term and this is just my point Google's revenue is growing by leaps and bounds but the ones doing allot of the work are making less and less is my case
Google is keeping more paying out less.
I am not so sure about that as I have pulled 10k a month out myself and know of allot of others doing the same.
I'm inclined to put less faith in anecodotal evidence (which tends to be more anecdotal than evidence) than in this statement from Google's Q4 2006 earnings report:
Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $1.20 billion, or 37% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2006. This is a 50% increase over network revenues of $799 million generated in the fourth quarter of 2005 and a 16% increase over third quarter 2006 revenues of $1.04 billion.
That doesn't mean every "partner site" is gaining; if the publisher network expands faster than revenues, dilution is going to bring down the average publisher's earnings (though such decreases aren't likely to occur across the board, because an "average" is just what the term suggests).
Google's revenue is growing by leaps and bounds but the ones doing allot of the work are making less and less is my case
Some are making more, and some are making less. For what it's worth, I see far more day-to-day and month-to-month variation on the affiliate side than I do with AdSense, even though I earn far more from affiliate commissions. Are my affiliate partners cheating me on some days but not on others? Come to think of it, did Google keep a bigger cut of the take yesterday (when my eCPM was its lowest in recent memory) than it on Sunday (when my eCPM was at a monthly high)?
In the real world of advertising and publishing, as opposed to the utopian world of ever-growing income that many AdSense "publishers" would like to inhabit, deviations are normal and expected. This morning, my daily newspaper was a lot skinnier than normal, and the publisher obviously earned less advertising revenue than usual. Some issues of my favorite magazines are lighter on ads than others, and on some days, my local TV stations are showing more public-service spots than on other days. That's just how the business works.
The point isn't about my adsense account rising it is about the same ads bring less and less but the cost of advertising going higher and higher.
I know what the average cost is in certain terms we have adsense for I know what it takes to get in the top 10 or 20 in Adwords for terms we target as I as did a PPC for the same terms we now target in adsense.
What we get per click wouldn't get you in the top 100 on this term. Our landing pages are excellent spot on target and will even qualify to come up in the local search.
We all know local search terms are much more expensive than the broad terms. So why would you think our adsense per click for terms I as well targeted don't come near what we payed, and our adsense ccpc is in a steady decline.
I can handle the ups and downs as I excpect the cpc to change, but it has been a long long time that we have seen the rise.
I am well aware of the ever changing rotation of ads showing on my website. Keeps the clickers from knowing when a money site is showing..I want to express this is not weekly, or monthly trend but one that has been going on for a prolonged period of time.
I am well aware of market fluctuations and a skinny newspaper showing up from time to time is all part of business.
No; this is the same skinny newspaper showing up months and months and getting smaller and smaller.
When do you call the publisher and ask "were is the rest of the paper I am paying for"
Good point but the case remains the same my cost to advertise hasn't dropped it has risen yet for a prolonged period of time our adsense revenue has continued to decline, even with more traffic, almost a 9% clickthrough ratio, and a solid landing page any bot would appreciate.
As you incline Greed is not the case here it is continued downward trend of the shared revenue Google is handing out.
Google might have paid out more makes good advertising for more publishers earger to sign up but is the ratio the same. Seems to me I read Google's profit nearly doubles in 2006 as well.
Google might have paid out more makes good advertising for more publishers earger to sign up but is the ratio the same. Seems to me I read Google's profit nearly doubles in 2006 as well.
Sure, Google's profits increased in 2007. So did the payouts to AdSense partners. But there's no need to rehash the numbers yet again. People who think Google is pocketing a bigger share of their revenues will go on believing that. More curiously, they'll go on working with a company that they think is cheating them.
In the world of a monoply what do you do work with them doesn't mean it is right doesn't mean it is wrong.
Doesn't mean I have to remain silent either
In the world of a monoply
What monopoly?
what do you do work with them doesn't mean it is right doesn't mean it is wrong.
No, but if you think you're being abused and you go on accepting abuse, you're certainly enabling the abuse.
Ahh good 'ole Google. I just added an ad block which raised my daily click throughs by 100+. That's 1/3 more than previous. Am I making 1/3 more $$$? Not even close :(
AdWords/AdSense is an auction-based system, and not all clicks pay the same (even on the same page). To put it another way:
More ad units = more lower-paying ads on the page = more lower-paying clicks.
"I'm inclined to put less faith in anecodotal evidence (which tends to be more anecdotal than evidence)" I have reread you post I supplied information or proof from my personal observations over a 6 month period on the other hand all I have seen from you is "anecodotal evidence".
You said "What monopoly" well here is a good definition to explain to you
"There are various degrees of monopoly, and rarely does anything approaching pure monopoly exist. Thus, the term is generally used in a relative sense rather than an absolute one. For example, a company can still be considered a monopoly even if it faces competition from (1) a few relatively small scale suppliers of the same or similar product(s) or (2) somewhat different goods or services that can to some limited extent be substituted for the product(s) supplied by the monopolist." http bellevuelinux org/monopoly html
Google has over 60 percent of the market with the others sharing or splitting up the remainder I would consider a Monopoly.
You said this statement
"More ad units = more lower-paying ads on the page = more lower-paying clicks"
Please do me a favor provide proof this is an accurate statement if so I will remove some of my ads so the less ads I have means the more I make, if your statement is true.
I understand more ads increases the odds of some lower ads showing up but it does as well increase the odds for higher paying ads showing up.
You said "Some are making more, and some are making less. For what it's worth, I see far more day-to-day and month-to-month variation on the affiliate side than I do with AdSense, even though I earn far more from affiliate commissions"
For what it is worth if your commisions continued on a downward move for a prolonged period of time I am sure you would wonder what was going on and look into this.
I wonder if the affiliate's began paying you less for more traffic or clickthroughs and your advertising on these affiliate sites kept increasing in cost what would your thoughts be....
The evidence I provided is over a 6 month period or very close to it.
1- making less on more clickthroughs without an change in direction so if you were viewing a graph it would be all downhill no spikes like I normally would see....
2-Paying more to advertise or PPC advertising. See in the world of advertising when more get into the picture it tends to drive the price of the service up not down as you stated.
I never said Google was stealing or cheating but increasing their share ratio of the clickthroughs as I have never seen were they have ever told us what that was anywere and I am sure if it is written anywere there is a clause "We Google at anytime may increase our share or percentage of the revenue"
Am I complaining yes and no. I am trying to see if this is just me or are more and more of us experiencing this trend.
This is the same as if there was a big up date in Google or Yahoo we get together and see if there is a common trend
europeforvisitors If you plan on rebuttal please provide something to validate anything at all you are stating as I have seen nothing but anecodotal evidence in your post.
You said this statement
"More ad units = more lower-paying ads on the page = more lower-paying clicks"Please do me a favor provide proof this is an accurate statement if so I will remove some of my ads so the less ads I have means the more I make, if your statement is true.
You're responding to something that I didn't say and didn't even suggest. Go back and reread rickhz's post. Then read my reply.
