Shocking AdSense to life again.

How to make it wake up and fly right...

[ArtistMike]

Went into my channels and took off all the page targeting... so that the ad buyers could not target specific pages on my site. This seems to have shocked AdSense into giving me a better Cost Per. Click rating. See how long it lasts...

Mike

[bumpski]

So how did your test go?

I assume you meant you disabled all of your URL channels?

I've seen this hint posted several times in the past.

[netchicken1]

Recently I have used section targeting in the code to omit everything not directly related to the article - I am using a cms system.

Since then my ecpm has increased and it seems that my hits from google search has as well.

Also the entries in google now have exactly the right text and not the extranious stuff from the cms such as users name, and logged in, etc.

Its hard to say that ther eis a direct relationship between those factors, as other things are influencing it as well, but it seems a simple idea to make some increase.

[Scurramunga]

If your site is fairly small, remove site tageting and try reducing the number of ads to only the best performing unit(s) I find that that seems to work.

[ArtistMike]

So how did your test go?

===================

Almost doubled my income just by turning off the channel targeting for the ad buyers. They can no longer target a specific channel on my site.

Mike

[wyweb]

Mike, I did the same thing several days ago and have seen about a 20% increase in earnings. Well, I saw about a 20% increase in earnings. It's since gone back to the pitiful level it was.

At this point I'm willing to try anything though. I might even try looking for a job.. LOL...

[jomaxx]

Did you confirm in your stats that you were getting a significant amount of site targeting that has now ceased?

[wyweb]

Well, this is going to really sound like a noob question jomaxx, but how exactly do i do that?

I made stats available to advertisers. My sites convert. I know this. My success with pay per action advertising confirms this if nothing else does. In spite of this, I've been smart priced almost to the point of removing adsense entirely. I mean google ads are simply taking up too much real estate and returning too little profit. I thought that possibly by making these stats available to prospective advertisers, I would benefit. The reverse seems to have been true. When I make those statistics unavailable, my income rises... or at least it rose temporarily. The effect was very short lived and I'm now back to my original numbers.

How do I determine whether I'm even being site targetted?

[jomaxx]

Advanced Reports >> Show data by Individual Ad >> Show data by targeting type

[SEOPTI]

There is no option to turn it off, show data by targeting type just shows the data, not an option to turn anything on and off.

Additionally I think site targetting with millions of impressions is 0,0000001%, so turning off does not make sense :)

[bumpski]

You may write Adsense support and ask that your account not have "site targeted" / Pay per impression ads (account wide option only). You do not have any direct control over this, but they will do it for you, at least they did for me and several others in the past.

In the past when I did this my income increased quite a bit. I have a post here somewhere, nestled deep in a thread, that documents the same increase when sampled over 10, 30, and 60 days time. What was odd about this was there really weren't that many site targeted ads being shown.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Since this post like many here (not all), my sites have grown, traffics up, but earnings have tended to stagnate.

The site targeted ads can displace better paying contextual ads.

Adsense support said I can request resumption of site targeted ads at any time in the future.

I do not know if they still allow this request.

[ArtistMike]

Went into my channels and took off all the page targeting for the ad buyer... the ad buyer is now forced to buy ads for the site and not just for individual pages on my site. If they want to be seen on my site, they have to pay enough to make that happen.

It has increased my income in the last few weeks. Smart pricing may kick in at some point but it has not yet.

I can always go into the channels and turn the targeting back on for a few days to shock Adsense again... for whaterver reason the system seems to need a shock now and then to keep the cost up on the ads.

Mike

[mavi]

STRANGE....

On my site site targeted ads pay best...
About 3 times more than normal cpc ads

[ArtistMike]

Site targeted ads may indeed pay the best, but it is sometimes necessary to shock AdSense back to giving a higher paying click amount by turning OFF the site targeting in your channels page. Then after a few days, turn the targeting back on and I have seen the click payment amount go up to were it should be when this is done.

Mike

[edited by: ArtistMike at 7:45 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2007]

[ann]

Artist Mike,

I wasn't aware that you can now turn site targeting on and off. I had to email Google to turn it off.

Where is that located? I just looked through the channels page and couldn't see any way to do it.

Ann

[Jafo]

I have the same question.. Just went through about every link in the Adsense control panel with no success..?

[wyweb]

He wasn't talking about turning it on or off. He was talking about making channel information available to advertisers, which you can turn on or off.

[ann]

Didn't read that way to me....

[netchicken1]

Google were not happy with my request to turn off site targetting....

Thanks for your request.

At this time, all AdSense publishers are opted-in to site targeting, which allows advertisers to target their ads specifically to any website in the AdSense network on which they want their ads to run.

Participation in site targeting allows you to receive the most earnings possible for the Google ads on your site. Through site targeting, pay-per-impression ads compete with pay-per-click ads to be displayed on any page.

Site targeting will work to your benefit, as more competition among ads will lead to higher potential earnings for you.

Please also keep in mind that you can continue to use your Competitive Ad filter to prevent specific ads, including site-targeted pay-per-impression ads, from appearing on your site. If, however, you'd still prefer to opt-out of site targeting, please respond to this email to let us know.

[SEOPTI]

Caution, they could kill your account if you answer "yes". Just a guess ...

[ann]

Well, I opted out back when it first started with the same kind of email from them and they didn't 'kill' my account.

Site target will work, I feel sure, but you need a boat load of uniques a day. I have quite a few but far from a boat load.

Ann

[ArtistMike]

He was talking about making channel information available to advertisers, which you can turn on or off.

=================

That is what I am talking about. You can also shock the system by renaming the channel, that seems to do the same thing as turning it on and off.

Mike

[MikeNoLastName]

I'm just getting around to reading this thread from the beginning and Bumpski referred to an earlier thread about shocking Adsense back to life by removing low CPM pages. I've tried this in the past and whether the effect is real and longstanding or not, is of some debate for another day.
However, my question for thought is basically this: If YOU put ads on a page, and then do NOT set up a channel to monitor it yourself... does Adsense monitor it anyway? (i.e. if a tree falls in the forest...) Or similarly what if you set the channel line to only group its stats with, say, "page-top-banners on the entire site". Does it still get monitored individually or only avaraged into the channels WE define? In other words, what WE see as CPM is not necessarily what Adsense looks at.
If Adsense monitors them individually, then we need to ask ourselves, on what LEVEL does Adsense track and use CPM (and to a lesser extent does it apply any decisions based upon it site-wide or by individual page)? Is it measured by entire page as a whole when there are multiple ad units, by each ad unit, strictly by the individual ad position (an ad by ad level), or possibly by the average of each individual ad on the page taken separately? If it is by the entire page or an average of all the individual ads, then simply removing the lowest producing ad unit alone will help boost the entire page avg significantly. If it is by individual ad, then reducing the size or shape of the ad unit, might totally confuse them for a while.
So in short, without knowing specifically what G is using and how, any changes to shock the system are pretty much stabs in the dark, and thus, while effective in some cases, may have a wide and varying degree of effect for each site.

[jomaxx]

Enough of this. You cannot "shock the system" into performing better, at least not by making a trivial change to your channel setup. It's doubtful any advertisers are using your channels anyways.

[MikeNoLastName]

Umm, I beg to differ, but when it first started, we were confirmed (um, by multiple e-mail's from you know who , as well as report stats) to be getting about 10% traffic from channel targeted traffic and that it was paying higher than contextual. Of course at the time, there was something clearly wrong with our smart-pricing which has since been addressed. But we still get about 5% and it is obvious, via the subject and targeting.

As far as the "shocking" part, I have yet to confirm that. My suspicion, is that in certain cases, it has made it advantageous for arbitragers to leech onto certain cheap, desirable, targetable channels, with well targeted text and by the publisher turning them off and on, you "shake them loose" like the Adsense description. You're NOT one of THEM Jo I assume. If so that would be a real pain in the butt having to re-bid them every time they are de- and re-listed.

[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 8:31 am (utc) on Oct. 11, 2007]

[ArtistMike]

You cannot "shock the system" into performing better...
============================

Maybe "you" can't, but I can.

Mike

[greatstart]

I tried everything under the sun to try to "shock the system" but it failed. I seem to get the CTR up a bit, but cannot get that dreaded eCPM any better. Maybe 100,000 volts will be the only thing that can.

[RickHisself]

I've tried everything over the past four years and everytime I "improve" .. the more the money goes down. I'm thinking about dropping Adsense and just going with local advertisers.

Last week I gave them 95,366 page impressions for $58.

That sucks.

Any suggestions before I bail out?

RickHisself

[ArtistMike]

I gave them over 43,000 page impression for just over $200. That was a very poor month for me... that is why I have been playing with the channels to try and get the system to wake up and fly right.

Mike

[poodwaddle]

ArtistMike, I give nearly 100 thousand page impressions for the same so you're really not doing so bad. It has a lot to do with the viewers. Until recently I didn't know that many of mine were Spanish speakers so I had not bothered to optimize my Spanish page. I had been showing English ads. Even after optimizing smart pricing continues to hurt me. The demographics of my viewers just aren't that active of clickers.