Forum Moderators: martinibuster
On my site, the CPM ads often pay like .02 per thousand views, which is ridiculous. On text ads even if I get just .20 cents per click and a 1% cliokthrough (which is VERY low) I am going to make $2.00 per thousand views (100 times the CPM ad earnings).
What I think I am seeing is advertisers are somehow targeting my most popular pages and putting CPM ads there. It must be a good return for them, 50,000 page views for only $1.00 (plus google's cut, so maybe they pay $2.00 max). But it certainly kills my bottom line.
Some of you are going to say the ads are targeted to maximize return, however that cannot be true. I know for a fact that text ads pay much better than CPM ads on these pages. And a dollar for 50,000 page views is just plain insulting. That is the same as $20 for one million views!
How do you turn off CPM ads? There seems to be no way to do this in the adsense control panel.
I think that are one or two aspects of your maths that may be misleading.
The clickthrough you need to consider for comparison purposes needs to be a per Ad CTR not a per page CTR. I think a 1% CTR per Ad would not be very low and may even be very high for a number of sites.
An average of $0.20 earnings per click could also be pretty high for a number of sites.
For some types of site (e.g. forums) that are poor performers for PPC but have high traffic CPM could be better than PPC.
Some of you are going to say the ads are targeted to maximize return, however that cannot be true.
The ads aren't targeted to maximize return, and your earnings don't depend on how well targeted the ads are--your earnings depend on what the advertiser is willing to pay for exposure.
Site-targeted CPM ads are supposed to be served only when they're expected to earn better than CPC contextual ads on a given page at a given moment in time. That means you shouldn't see them very often if there's an adequate inventory of well-paying contextual ads for your pages (unless advertisers have bid fairly high CPMs, which can and does happen).
I know for a fact that text ads pay much better than CPM ads on these pages.
But do contextual CPC ads (which I assume is what you mean by "text ads") pay better than CPM ads on every one of your pages in every geotargeted location at every moment in time? If they do, then you shouldn't be seeing low-paying CPM ads.
And a dollar for 50,000 page views is just plain insulting.
It isn't meant to be an insult; it's just how an auction-based market works.
In any case, you can ask AdSense Support to disable site-targeted CPM ads for your account, but you may find that you've made a mistake. Site-targeted ads are becoming more common, they're useful "filler ads" when better-paying CPC ads aren't available, and their CPMs can be quite decent in some (not all) cases.
