Forum Moderators: martinibuster
On this particular site i'm finding:
- The highest click through rate is with just one ad unit smack in the middle of the top heat zone, nicely blended of course.
- The highest earnings per click is with the ads hidden away towards the bottom of the page, the ad up top removed.
With the ads at the bottom visitors aren't clicking off on them on the first page they visit as often. This sites bounce rate matches the earnings per click at every step. As the bounce rate goes up, the earnings per click come down and vice versa.
The site is not an MFA site by any means. Its becoming apparent that if someone clicks on an ad from the first page they visit that they increase the average bounce rate and I earn a reduced amount. Is the best way of keeping bounce rates low, and earnings high, to simply not show ads until a visitor is looking at the second page of his/her visit?
I could easily code my site to not display AdSense on a visitors first page but would that violate the terms of service? For this site at least its simply not worth having someone click on an ad from the first page they visit, it's costing me money and traffic.
Is this new? is it possibly to combat MFA sites who try to get visitors to click on ads right away? Thoughts?
We've repeatedly seen that lousy or pointless websites (e.g. parked domains) can get as good results as any lovingly handcrafted site.
The "as good results" efficiency of parked domains arises from their capacity to capture or facilitate type-in visitor intent - as expressed by the visitor typing their "words of intent" into their browser address bar, arriving "at the (parked) domain, and being present with intent matching ads served by the feed provider.
Visitor intent doesn't get much more deliberate than typing word-descriptions into browser address bars and then viewing ads directly related to the words. It's hard, in 2007, that argue that visitor expectation is subverted when they arrive at a landing page. Landing pages have been around for too long for anyone to be surprised. The only subversion is when there's a lack of domain-intent relevant ads for the landers. Pity the advertisers who haven't caught on.
Match that experience with typing the same in-domain-keywords into a search box of a search engine. How often does such a query trigger SERPs/links that lead to websites whose listed pages don't match/satisfy the search intent of the typist? I think there's a name for it: SEOed again!
Not to worry, though, about parked domains because in 2006 the dialogue at domain conferences shifted from parking to the benefits of development. In a big way.
C'ya in the SERPs, my friend. ;-P
Since when is AdSense a tool for Google to reward publishers for adding value anyway?
You're missing the point. Try to look at the issue from Google's point of view. If you were Google, would you want to pay as much for a flipped prospect from your search engine as for a prospect that the publisher supplied? Especially when you (Google) were paying most of the server and bandwidth overhead for supplying that flipped search user?
Fact is, we don't know how Google calculates its payout formula, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for Google to use time on site (or a similar metric) as one factor in deciding the percentage share that a publisher should receive for any given click or in general, for reasons that have been discussed elsewhere in this thread.
EFV: Google provide most of the traffic for the majority of websites, whether they supposedly add value or not.
A more interesting question is whether they pay differential amounts depending on the page referrer. It's been pretty well established that they know the referrer and may pay little or nothing for traffic from paid-to-surf and low-end PPC sites. They COULD also pay either more or less for traffic from their own site. I don't think there's any evidence for that, but it's a more plausible theory than that they pay more based on the number of pages in a user session, which really has nothing to do with anything.
EFV: Google provide most of the traffic for the majority of websites, whether they supposedly add value or not.
Google may be the biggest source of search-engine traffic for most sites, but it isn't necessarily the biggest source of traffic. On my own site, for example, internal referrals outnumber Google referrals (or SE referrals, period) by a significant margin. Is that unusual? I have no reason to think so. Also, on many sites (news sites and forums like Webmaster World being good examples), type-in or bookmark traffic is likely to more important than Google referrals.
In any case, it's in Google's own interest (for both AdSense and search) to encourage sites that have intrinsic value for users. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if Google had a "quality score" for pages, publishers, or accounts, in much the same way that it has landing-page quality scores for advertisers. And if Google did use quality scoring, either now or in the future, metrics for determining the difference between real publishers and mere "traffic flippers" could play a useful role in calculating quality stores.
they don't "add value" to the user
jomaxx, if I wanted a hamburger and, by typing "hamburger" into my browser address bar, a burger would magically pop out of my DVD drive I'd be a pretty happy user.
The "added value" to a user of direct navigation - when it works - is the burgers, i.e., being taken directly to the object of your intention.
You can pound away at search boxes and waste time sorting through the links - hoping to find the real thing - or exploit the added value of direct navigation.
Especially when you (Google) were paying most of the server and bandwidth overhead for supplying that flipped search user?
Google wouldn't make a profit if others wouldn't spent more than them. It's kinda in the nature of profit to sell stuff more expensive than you got it.
Millions of users and webmasters work for them for free that has to be paid by someone, Daddy, the state, the pension or the overworked wife.
We have 87 Million active webservers. Now if on average 20 webservers run on one physical machine that's still 4 million computers.
Then server hosting fees. 4 million physical servers at maybe an average at $30 a month (We have 4 dedicated and pay 90 Euros a piece at a discount provider, they are probably cheaper in the states but more expensive in the UK, so let's take a low estimate) that's 120 million a month 1.440 billion a year minimum, then the work hours webmasters put in + all the adwords users money.
And that's not even mentioning the 1.17 billion users and what they had to spent on computers and ISPs to be Googles users.
Let's say 70% of all internet users use Google a day that's 819 million users. Let's say they have 100000 servers that means a server can handle 8190 users a day, easily possible. I have around 10000 users a day on one of my machines. For a normal search user I pop out 3.4 GB a day, Google operates on text for crawling and searching. I proably outdo them easily for a text user on bandwidth. For most text user that arrive I pop out several images per page and text, for image users I pop out the image they had to retrieve the image and pop it out. If I pay 90 Euros a month, I pay over a year 1080 euros, probably the actual value of the server, to the mass provider we have.
Google will get mass discounts.
If you assume one person per 87 Million webservers (some will be operate by serveral webmasters and some webmasters will serve several webservers). Unless Google has 87 million employees it will have here one of the biggest profits. 87 million people have to get money elsewhere to provide the content for Google which it then uses with the help of a hell of a lot less employees. Then the adwords users pay them a lot of money for obviously also more than they spent.
We pay for the content and Adword users pay us for content and Google to transfer the users. Google needs to spent less per user than us and less than what the adwords user pays for the transfer. Hence they won't pay the most for bandwidth per user or servers ..
