Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For this day (17 May), does it mean that they will pay for April 1-30 earnings, or for May (1-18) also?
Actually, this has been known for quite some time that AdSense uses AdWords conversion data to determine how well each publisher's clicks are converting for advertisers. I covered this nearly a year ago on JenSense in a detailed post about how smart pricing works, and what factors go into determining it.Postscript by Barry Schwartz : Ouch! I stand way corrected.
Shoemoney's post was non-news.
I think shoemoney's quote is very relevant in today's context.
If G is going after sites with low conversions starting with MFA's, anything could happen.
Previously Low Conversions = smart priced.
Now? Low conversions = Banned?
Just conjecture , of course.
MFAs were flipping low bids for higher bids. If they were being smart priced then arbitrage wouldn't work. The inference from their success is that MFA clicks were worth more, i.e they weren't being smart priced and their clicks were converting. If their clicks weren't converting then the arbitrage wouldn't work because they'd be smartpriced out of a profit.
If it's true that MFA sites were converting for advertisers, which clearly they did because MFAs weren't smartpriced according to Kim Malone's statement that they'd whack anything that didn't convert, it's pretty clear that Shoemoney's quote is irrelevant to this discussion, and was in fact non-news when it was posted on his blog.
The situation is that Google is offloading profitable partners, and they're doing it with a hug and a kiss. The important question is, why would they get rid of a profitable partner that converted for their advertisers?
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:12 am (utc) on May 24, 2007]
Just talked to another person that got shut down about 2 hours ago with the same email......this person had just started and had made like $3,000 so far this month...
Those making the most money have done the most damage to Google and the publishers.
I don't know that the arbit crowd realized the damage they could do to Google Adsense or Google in general when they started doing their thing.
It's certainly possible consumer confidence could erode beyond Adsense ads in the Content Network to the Search Network, which would led to greater losses for Google, where its prices are higher. Brand dilution inevitably is going to pass from one part of the company to other parts.
Google is probably not only trying to clean up Adsense and AdWords, but also its SERPs. There's much less motivation to game and spam the engine if you can't put Adsense on your site.
As those sites are taken out of the engines, our sites will go higher, which will lead to better publisher revenues.
p/g
The cheap clicks come mostly from content and keywords which are not expensive. The ads pay more because of imperfections in the system. It is the CTR which determines, if you make a profit or not. A consistent CTR of 50% + on traffic which costs 5 cents , and ads that pay 10cents( even after smart priced) or more is a profit and was doable for MFA's.
For example , I parked one domain on Sedo and this pays 15 cents a click. But sedo does not accept PPC traffic. The organic traffic has a CTR of above 35% and is profitable. The only problem is the amount of traffic.
My cumulative but by no means complete knowledge on this to date is that one or more of the following behaviors get your adsense account disabled:
1. Unrealistic CTR of 20% or above
2. PPC of some type was pushing traffic to pages
3. No site navigation or poor site navigation on landing pages (with or without a little or a lot of unique content)
4. Detecting of MFA sites may be automated but human review is most likely used for the final say.
5. The following statement is made in the absence of my knowledge so could be wrong by my assumption: Banned adsensers did not sell a product or service (that alone could arguably make it an MFA especially if it was created AFTER the adsense account was opened, even though we all know there's the rare case of writing it for good of humanity)
6. Having or not having organic traffic isn't the issue.
7. Historically Adwords accounts are NOT disabled when adsense accounts are. I suspect disabled adsensers would be hard pressed to get the same volume of traffic for the same price from adwords to their MFA domains even if they switched to YPN or some other contextual advertising network. (because afterall this can't be totally an adsense move it's most definitely a quality of the adwords experience as well)
8. Google is likely also looking at technical statistics like high bounce rates, low page views per unique ip, average length of time a visitor spends on site, etc (all of which can be easily gathered via the regular adsense javascript with or without analytics code on your site due to the nature of javascript) These are really simple metrics to look at when trying to assess a users experience on your site.
I would be very interested to know if these banned publishers were accurately representing their landing pages in their ads with Adwords or other PPCs they used.
Also my take on how this is going to effect the adsense/adwords marketplace is that even with adwords accounts still active these advertisers will have to find a better business model to profit from adwords and most banned adsensers still using adwords will not be able to profitably continue at their former adwords spending levels. This will offset demand in the recently reduced adsense network, so mostly in the short run it should be business as usual for everyone else (besides hopefully getting a slightly better ROI from adwords) In the long term my view is pretty much the same as everyone else: Better internet experience with adwords and adsense = more trust in googles model = more funds allocated to marketing with Adwords.
The organic traffic has a CTR of above 35% and is profitable. The only problem is the amount of traffic.
That's organic traffic and not relevant to this discussion. Try feeding AdWords to that and see how much you have to pay to show up on your parked domain, and then report how profitable it is.
The ads pay more because of imperfections in the system.
So are you contradicting what shoemoney heard Kim Malone say at SES?
Well actually, what you posted about shoemoney's blog post is incorrect. Jeremy said nothing, zero, about advertisers/MFA'ers being booted or even being targeted for booting. The whole point of the Shoemoney's post was that he was shocked to hear that AdWords and AdSense were sharing data between each other. To which Jenstar responded that the information was stale by about a year.
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:00 am (utc) on May 24, 2007]
Well... if you have this on authority, then our logical thinking is all wrong.
Then they REALLY hate arbitrage now, and have decided to knock off sites in this genre as a corporate decision.
They problem, is someone like me. I have four sites. Got adSense on all. All have privacy policy/contact us/ 30-40% add to favorite/ 20-30% repeat visitors.
Adwords sends a lot of traffic to them. This brings in links and upward movement in SERPS. A few pages show a 'arbitrage' profit, some show a loss, overall some momths a minor profit/ sometimes a minor loss. I am really worried.
Y/day, got an optimisation suggestion from the adWords team. The guys want me to increase traffic by changing my Ads. What they suggest does not strictly reflect on my site. I donot know, why, they would suggest something like this in times of such 'danger'.
Adwords sends a lot of traffic to them. This brings in links and upward movement in SERPS. A few pages show a 'arbitrage' profit, some show a loss, overall some momths a minor profit/ sometimes a minor loss. I am really worried.
I'd say you're the ideal AdWords advertiser under the current conditions. You're doing it for the traffic and exposure, not necessarily for the clicks. One can grow a forum by targeting "niche forum" phrases. You may not convert those clicks to more clicks, but you are converting those clicks to more awareness and word of mouth about your forum, and down the line growth to your profit, links, SERPs, etc.
