Forum Moderators: martinibuster
One advertiser mentioned he tried it with some lowball bids and wasn't seeing any results yet. Someone else responded that perhaps he wasn't seeing results because the bids were low.
This was part of the advertiser's response to that statement - I added the bold:
I have success doing the same thing on the search and regular content networks. If your Quality Score is high, it'll get shown over other ads. Bids are only one part of that score. Their initial quality-score guesstimate is often wrong in my experience.
FWIW
FarmBoy
AdSense video units were introduced around mid-Oct. Has there has been any kind of significant move by adwords advertisers into that medium? If so, would it drain money from publishers who haven't been showing videos?
[adsense.blogspot.com...]
I'm assuming that the size of the pie is relatively fixed; diverting ad money to video would cause a drop in payouts elsewhere, wouldn't it?
Of course, this wouldn't explain why some publishers (including me) have reported steady or increasing eCPM...
EDIT
And, I have no idea what kind of adoption rates are happening with the video ads, so I mention it only because it happened around the same time that people started seeing the drop...
And, of course, the aforementioned other deals might be diverting revenues... who knows?
Good observation though, and something to factor in down the road...KF
When the "high click ads" advertisers dominate my site, I get a high CTR and earn the corresponding high eCPM rate they are bidding. When these companies have exhausted their budgets and the "highly targeted ads" predominate, I get a low CTR and a corresponding lower eCPM because lots of pages are showing but nobody is clicking. Probably the bid price it takes to get shown on my pages is similar at all times, but since nobody clicks the "targeted" ads, CTR and eCPM tank together.
So my point here is, my eCPM has tanked this and last month yet my CTR is the same as previous very profitable months (actually even fractionally higher). This implies that the quality of the ads being shown is no different (Which is what I notice. I don't notice any different mix in the adverts being shown. No big advertisers missing). And since I don't hear any talk on the AdWords side that bids are the cheapest they have ever been, one would have to assume that the change that is effecting eCPM is the percentage that Adsesnse is taking.
[edited by: Broadway at 2:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2007]
Raise your hand if you saw an unusual boost in performance in the first half of October. (I did)
What you saw in Oct 20th was not the glitch, but the beginning of a slow correction of an earlier glitch that had previously over credited many publishers.
This over crediting could have been from Google's share of the transaction that's why no Advertisers are reporting seeing compensation or correction.
This conforms also with what I and many others reported here around that time, we saw a small amount under debits in the payment history, some of us saw that amount come back under credits later.
This also could explain why not every one was affected, the management decided for it to be fixed slowly over a long period of time and the deduction to be applied to the publishers or the publisher niche to segment that benefited from the original glitch, possibly some of those seeing the slump were not among those that benefited, it is impossible for Google to pinpoint and trace every cent back without too much time and resources.
Now the good news if the above is true is that this is only temporary and pretty soon things will return to 'normal' for you all.
Now the good news if the above is true is that this is only temporary and pretty soon things will return to 'normal' for you all.
still ever the level headed optimist Hobbs. There is NO such thing as "normal". It's always normally abnormal...
P.S. If you did not see a boost before the slump then that was your usual roller coaster, we cannot blame gobal too warming on that glitch can we?
I've been able to raise my eCPM by reducing the number of ads I display on a page, which would indicate to me the problem is a lower ad inventory.
Where have the ads gone? I don't know. 4 years with AdSense and over a million visitors per month, and I've never seen such low CTR or eCPM.
an earlier glitch that had previously over credited many publishers.
Not for me either, everything was running very steady and normal, no surprisingly big days, so consistent it almost begged the question "When would it go wrong?"
4 years with AdSense and over a million visitors per month, and I've never seen such low CTR or eCPM.
Likewise however I am more concerned since my ads are superbly targetted! The odd one or two strange ones in AdLinks but overall 99% spot on from what I SEE being served throughout Europe.
This is what concerns me more than anything else now, what ads are being served up elsewhere, especially US/Canada? Guess I'm going to have to get someone to take screen shots for me since the preview tool is useless.
The first overpaying glitch most probably did not affect all publishers, also the debits and credits transactions were seen by few publishers, perhaps a manual intervention by the system operators to correct a post maintenance glitch, then the management took over the problem and decided on a system wide correction which is what you saw in your account and is not necessarily affecting the same people.
Anyway, it's just a theory that can be partially, fully true or even false, but it is based on solid indicators.
First half of month 5
Second half going on for a 2 down to 1
with 5 being 'steady-eddy, no-change, just-as-I-expected'
Why should I be randomly penalised since others had a good time?
Sorry, I don't buy this idea whatsoever.
I think its purely to do with the bottom line of Google.
We have our own advertising software in place which will charge on a pay per click basis. We would prefer not to switch over to selling our own adspace but if the google eCPM slide continues much further and if they keep displaying rubish off topic mfa sites on our site, we will have no other choice as the potential lost revenue is to great to continue to ignore, also the poor visitor experience created by mfa sites is not worth the benefits of having google sell our advertising space.
Come on MSN and Yahoo give us a credible alternative to adsense. Competition Commission or some Regulator needs to have a good look at what is going on here.
Here's a devil's advocate prospective:
more competition = more publishers = lower prices for advertisers = lower payout to publishers.
Competition Commission or some Regulator needs to have a good look at what is going on here.
Wash your mouth out with soap young man. The absolute last thing we need is some government bureaucrat having a role.
FarmBoy
...more competition = more publishers...
I think competition would spread the existing publishers more thinly and cause ad networks to compete for them by paying more.
Since Friday my eCPM has bounced back to early October levels and so far is holding which lends credence to the theory that it was an internal AdSense glitch since there have been no external events which can account for the sudden recovery.
added in edit: farmboy is absolutely right about government intervention, I'd prefer hostile extraterrestrial intervention to a government role in this business.
[edited by: OnlyToday at 1:15 am (utc) on Nov. 12, 2007]
FarmBoy
more competition = more publishers = lower prices for advertisers = lower payout to publishers.
However, lower prices for advertisers should result in more new advertisers and more spending by current advertisers.
FarmBoy
My God. For my tiny little site back then with adverts slapped on with no blending and ugly design, without any of the tricks I have learned over the last 3 years, I have the same if not slightly better ecpm back then than now.
Here I was just now thinking, "hey my ecpm isn't going too badly this month" but I am shocked that in all that time, with all that work, its just the same as when I was a green noob back then.
If I hadn't done anything in the past 3 years I wonder just how far it would have fallen.
Are we just running to stay in the same spot?
Are we just running to stay in the same spot?
Some might even say "one step forward and two steps back"
Oh well... We live in interesting times.
Are we just running to stay in the same spot?
That's been my experience, too. Despite 2-1/2 years of careful study (of Webmaster World and other material), optimizations, split testing, analytics, custom programming, web server fine tuning, geo-targetting, adding dynamic content, CSS, site prettification, SEO, <you name it>..., a doubling of site traffic (across two sites) and near doubling of site content (page count)...
... After all that, I am getting about the same number of clicks as 2-1/2 years ago, half the eCPM, and about the same or less Earnings.
For a couple of quality sites, albeit in very specialized, non mass market niches.
Am I disgusted? No, cynical is more how I feel.
Are we just running to stay in the same spot?
This is my experience as well. Is this perhaps behind the prohibition of multiple AdSense accounts? The recent glitch and my tenuous recovery notwithstanding I've felt this way for a long time. I have attributed it to AdSense improving their algorithm but it could also be that they over-paid in the beginning to draw everyone in and then began lowering the pay-outs gradually to cull out the less efficient.
[edited by: OnlyToday at 1:52 pm (utc) on Nov. 12, 2007]
do holidays do this?
Google may have also introduced new conservative algo parameters that re-define a valid click.
This was one of the suspicions. It could also explain why Google hasn't been transparent about the development, because it would be an admission that it had made a lot of money in the past off invalid clicks.
I'm not convinced there's a new invalid click parameter, however, because my sites bounced back to pre-glitch levels.
Still, it's possible that it did happen, but Google turned its dial back a bit, after concluding it had first turned it too far.
p/g
