Forum Moderators: martinibuster
The automated solution to this problem imo would be to have following feature made available for adsense publishers:
"Don't show ads paying less than $x.xx per click".
With that option/control a publisher could simply raise the level of earnings per click above those of MfA ads, but keep it below those of legit ads so MfA ads wouldn't show anymore and MfA sites would soon vanish. The process of determing the level of earnings per click would be a market finding one for the publisher and the level would depend on the topic of his website.
This will work and won't hurt the adword advertiser by raising the levels of cost per click for him, because if a publisher would raise his level too high (above the market price) no ads would show on his website. So he would be forced to lower it again, until enough real bidded ads appear. aso.
I am puzzled why Google hasn't implemented this feature yet, since they love automation. Atm, they have to manually clear out MfA sites, so why not let the publisher do the work?
What do you think? I, as an publisher would love to have this tool.
We are already projecting to double our advertising budget in the next three months because it is a safer way to advertise.
...publishers will either follow the advertiser dollar or find an alternatives.
Most likely the latter. The reason I left CJ was because PPA doesn't work for me. It relies on too many inderect factors, like cookies on the clients' browsers and honesty on the part of the advertiser. Advertisers can game the system more easily than a publisher.
You may very well be better off going with PPA, but that doesn't mean that every advertiser will go that route. You're projecting a little too much. There are a lot of advertisers that want to be on a specific site, and if that site isn't PPA, they will go with whatever advertising method that publisher has chosen.
Except for a few select pages where I have affiliate ads, PPA would be far too much work to optimize for all my pages. That's work that I don't want to do.
You may very well be better off going with PPA, but that doesn't mean that every advertiser will go that route.
Especially when site-targeted CPC ads become available.
Especially when site-targeted CPC ads become available.
I hope I don't get targeted by off-topic, yet local companies like insurance sales, lawyers and CPA's. Actually Google's current method of targeting is working well for me, and almost all text ads are relevant. When site-targeting becomes available, advertisers might cue in on the geographical aspects of our sites and disregard the actual topic. For example, imagine coming across an ad for a London bookkeeper on your website (assuming the "europe" is in your URL).
I hope I don't get targeted by off-topic, yet local companies like insurance sales, lawyers and CPA's. Actually Google's current method of targeting is working well for me, and almost all text ads are relevant. When site-targeting becomes available, advertisers might cue in on the geographical aspects of our sites and disregard the actual topic. For example, imagine coming across an ad for a London bookkeeper on your website (assuming the "europe" is in your URL).
Advertisers can already do that with site-targeted CPM ads--usually at less cost than with contextual ads, since the idea is to use those CPM ads as "fallback ads" when higher-paying contextual or keyword-targeted ads aren't available.
By the way (in case Trinorthlighting is listening), I don't really care much as a publisher how ads are priced--CPC, CPM, or CPA--as long as:
1) Google serves the ads that it thinks will pay most;
2) Google can control advertiser fraud in cases where it might occur (such as with CPA ads); and...
2) I can simply paste AdSense code into my pages and let AdSense decide which ads to serve.
In a nutshell...
Q: What do I care about?
A: eCPM and total earnings.
I hear you. Our eccom sites are projected to pay out more via PPA. FY08 we have already commited to double advertising expenses via the content network PPA. I am sure many other businesses will start following suit as well.
As far as branding goes, if its a good brand and starts selling and your making money, does it really matter? The nice thing is the publisher has control of what ads to display.
As far as branding goes, if its a good brand and starts selling and your making money
It matters because a branding campaign should be run CPM. The idea is to get the ads repeatedly out there to get people to think about the brand. It has almost nothing to do with clicks, and very few immediate sales.
Imagine that Toyota wants to introduce their new car. They just want people to know the name. Sure some people will want to know more and will click, but that isn't the point with flooding the market. No one will buy the car from the toyota website because it isn't sold there. The appropriate form for this branding ad is CPM, not CPA or even CPC. If they were to run it as a PPA campaign, they would neve have to pay because there would be no sales.
advertisers might cue in on the geographical aspects of our sites and disregard the actual topic.
Hunh - that's exactly what I want, and once it started happening, all my numbers started going through the roof. Just goes to show - one person's garbage is another one's lunch.
With PPA advertisers are trying to externalize the risk of conversion to publishers WITHOUT paying them for it. Publishers won't take that, since it would only make sense for them, IF they are compensated for the risk financially. But when adv have to compensate pubs, then they could also run CPC ads, because the compensation is the lost revenue for pubs when they switch from PPC to PPA. PPC is the golden middle between PPM and PPA and therefor will remain the dominant ad type.
The only way I could see PPA ads get popular is if the ads are combined with CPM or CPC, meaning an ad pays a smaller amount for impression or click AND and again on conversion.
Interesting thing about Google PPA is, that an indirect "min earning" feature is actually implemented, because a publisher can choose the ads to display. I can look at the PPA payout and only select ads that pay more than $1 on conversion for example. So here, Google is already giving that min bid feature to pubs.
However, that is still a lot of work for the publisher and too inefficient, because I have to redo it all the time for new ads. Easier for me would be to just enter a minimum conversion price level and only ads above that price are displayed.
So, I would love to see my minimum bid proposal for all forms: PPM, PPC and PPA. It saves time and would be more efficient than a global minimum ad price that is set by Google.
Would you rather play whack a mole with MFA's/ARB's or monitor a few PPA advertisers who pay out larger sums? Experimenting is the key. We have done that on some of our publishing sites and we have doubled ad sense income on some sites and have no more MFA’s/ARB’s in our competitive filter list.
It is a solution to get rid of the arb/mfa's, it can potentially make you more money. It just takes a little work and experimenting. Just make sure you find the right advertisers who are not branding like the Toyota example. Pick reputable companies and once you find the right ones, enjoy the additional Ad sense income.
"You're eligible to use pay-per-action advertising if you have received more than 500 conversions through a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) campaign in prior 30 days."
[adwords.google.com...]
Would you rather play whack a mole with MFA's/ARB's or monitor a few PPA advertisers who pay out larger sums?
Some publishers are doing just fine with the default "set-and-forget" code.
I'm 100% in favor of having a minimum bid to show the ads, if they don;t have inventory I'll gladly show on topic alternate banners that generate more revenue for me than the bottom feeders of at adwords/adsense.
Unfortunately GOOG doesn't seem to want to let it evolve in a marketplace, and handicaps us by not allowing us to set a higher low limit than the $ 0.005 or so we're getting for the real bottom end.
How high would you raise your minimum clicks?
$0.10?
$0.25?
That means the advertisers selling products will be starting at a higher price bidding on the ads, assuming you don't price them right off your site, and the arbitrage sites will experiment until they hit the minimum and just keep doing what they do.
The only thing it might stop is the low budget arbitrage operations that can't afford to bankroll a higher price, but the big arbitragers will step right in and take over where they left off.
monitor a few PPA advertisers who pay out larger sums?
Erm, this is another misconception about PPA.
Yes, I had a look at some PPA offerings, including Google's PPA. Often these are attractive upon the first glance. But don't be fooled by the "larger sums" that you get for a conversion.
A real world example:
One widget eCommerce site that sells expensive widgets (like, starting at $800) pays out as much as $50 per conversion. Wow! A quick comparison, however, brings me down to earth within seconds:
On my sites, $50 in revenue means about 250 clicks and about 15,000 page views. In other words: for the PPA program to be more profitable for me, I need less than 250 clicks and/or less than 15,000 page views to achieve ONE transaction. That is 1 out of 250 clicks, or 0.4%.
Remember, their widgets start at $800. Now, how likely is a conversion? From the affiliate programs I run, I know that it is damn hard to sell one $800 widget with a conversion rate of 0.4%. People -at least in my niche- do not just click an ad, have a look at the site, get out their credit card, and order a widget.
Also, please note that some of the PPA campaigns demand that "sales are done in the same session". Hah! Not where I sit. People like to research, they like to look here and there, they like to compare. Unless you are very sure about what you are doing, and how your visitors are behaving, you can lose a lot of money with running PPA ads on your sites.
Don't be fooled by the "larger sums". These come at a price. The price is the full risk (or is it fool risk?). The publisher is taking the full risk that the transaction actually happens. The advertiser takes no risk whatsoever. Not good.
This is a Catch-22 because raising the prices just mean the arbitrage sites have to pay more to make the same penny but they'll still be able to operate and earn a buck
I do not think this is entirely true.
In order "to make the same penny" the MFA needs to get a better price for their ads as well. Often, the MFA is not using Adsense for monetization, so the prices will be raised on another ad network (most likely YPN). Will advertisers on YPN be willing to pay so much more, just because the price on a different network is increasing? I don't think so. They just won't raise their bids on YPN to allow the MFA to "make the same penny".
Thus, the MFA could live with a smaller profit margin (advertisers on YPN do not increase the price). Given the size of the market and the big number of market participants, their profit margin will shrink fast. You see, most publishers are optimizing their sites, and once the word is out that minimum bid is cool, they will soon squeeze out the last penny from the MFAs. This increases the risk for the MFA to a degree that many MFAs will go out of business.
I do agree with you on the high dollar items, we have a few sites that sell high $$ item and I am with you there.
What we looked for on our publishing sites and seems to be working well:
Newsletter sign ups from celeberties, low dollar items that are a good deal and a hot seller, and believe it or not debt relief/payday loans seems to be doing well.
None of these topics really have anything to do with our publishing sites, but we are making money.
just use YPN .. their stuff pays more per click and is way less relevant..
Not according to a lot of threads I've seen on the YPN forum here--and in any case, Yahoo is too U.S.-centric for many publishers.
YPN and other solutions (AdBrite, AdSonar, etc.) may work better for some publishers in some cases, but they may perform terribly for others. Fortunately, it's easy enough to test and see what works on your site(s).
