Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'd made a minor navigation tweak to the page last weekend, so minor that I didn't bother checking. Somehow, the Adsense unit that was intended to go under the sidebar navigation and below the fold ended up in the HTML header, and was the first thing on the page. So visitors would just see five Adsense ads running down the left side of the page, and if their screen was big enough, the top of the article across the bottom.
All week that single page had outperformed everything else on the site, alone it out performed all but one multi-page channel. Visitors clicked away on those ads like crazy, I couldn't believe it. Any time I visit a site with Adsense at the top, I hit the back button or just start a new search in the toolbar. I also can't believe that none of the 500 or so visitors over the course of the week sent us e-mail to complain.
The really weird thing is I checked the site navigation stats for the page from the same period the previous week, and that ad block had zero impact on what visitors did once they reached the page. I guess some people are just looking for an ad to click on, and if the don't see one, they bail out.
FarmBoy (considering a one day test of my own :) )
Ads were targetted fine, they were the same as would have displayed if the ad block had ended up in the right place. It's very discouraging for us in a sense, since we have always tried to give our visitors the best experience possible. It's a good thing our primary business isn't advertising, or we'd probably end up rationalizing a move to the dark side. I'm happy to report that with the adblock back in the proper location, earnings have tanked:-) In fact, the whole site seems to be on track for a record bad day.
Also, this little misadventure may be the reason your earnings are down now. Smart Pricing may have kicked in, possibly due to the CTR or the brief amount of time spent on the page before clicking an ad or the user behaviour after clicking. This is just speculative, but Smart Pricing surely would have reared its head sooner or later if you had continued to get a disproportionately high CTR.
After about a month or two, revenues for the site as a whole started seriously sinking like a brick in a lake (way, way below average that would discount seasonal factors). I was being smart priced. I finally removed it altogether and revenues for the site have gone back prior to what it was before the move after a few weeks, but never as good as it was when I first put that adlinks. $0.02 clicks really hurt. Beware of dabbling into the gray area, let alone the dark side.
I'm not sure how this experience justifies going over to the "dark side".
It doesn't, Jomax, nor was it an experiment. As to Smartpricing kicking in, I really doubt it. The overall impact on the CTR of the site was trivial, if even noticeable, and the impact on eCPM was less than the normal variation as well. As I stated at the beginning of the thread, I've seen such eCPM increases on single pages before just due to statistical variatiion. A hundred page views a day isn't meaningful in look at site traffic.
It's a good thing our primary business isn't advertising, or we'd probably end up rationalizing a move to the dark side. I'm happy to report that with the adblock back in the proper location, earnings have tanked:-)
In case some readers didn't follow my banter, we aren't interested in playing with any shades of grey. I suppose a little humor went a long way in confusing the issue.
Your page was clearly in violation of the TOS
If I understood what happened to content_ed's page correctly, couldn't a person create a page with a skyscraper ad (for example) at the top of the page and all the page content below the ad without being in violation of TOS?
In other words, the appearance to visitors would be the same.
FarmBoy
I put horizontal adlinks once under images in a gallery section of my site, and they were doing really well . . . I thought I had found the sweet spot for this section, but in the end, I think many visitors were duped into thinking this was normal site navigation.
It's against the TOS (revised version) to use images next to links precisely because they appear like icons.
Programming should actually enable Google to redflag pages with Adsense code right near images that gets unusually high CTR.
p/g
Try that layout if you like, but sticking a skyscraper above all the content of the page will definitely get you banned. It depends somewhat on the individual user's window size, but for a great many users there will be nothing visible but a blank screen with a few ads.
I have no intention of putting that on my sites, but why would it get someone banned? Where in the TOS or program policies is there a prohibition?
FarmBoy
Anyway, that's beside the point now, since I removed them. But I'm not the type to play spammy tricks. User experience is dear to my sites.
Farmboy: Try that layout if you like, but sticking a skyscraper above all the content of the page will definitely get you banned. It depends somewhat on the individual user's window size, but for a great many users there will be nothing visible but a blank screen with a few ads. I mean come on.
There are 100s of sites with a big fat user annoying adsense megablock in front of any content, that don't get banned.
