Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Is this just me or is anyone else noticing this?
They'll probably be phased in along with the rest of us. In fact, I found a top-tier advertiser who's text is not clickable: LA Times Travel section. They're part of the Tribune News group. As EFV pointed out, they're not using the same code that we use.
RE: the OT, regarding CTR:
My CTR is usually steady. However, early last week I noticed a drop. So I looked at my site and noticed a new advertiser. Their ad occupied full ad blocks, and had a blue border (my AdSense ads do not have a border). The ad was completely off-topic from my website, and it appeared on around 75% of the pages. I added it to the competetive ad filter and voila, soon afterward my CTR went back up. So the ad was either a distraction, or created ad blindness.
My suggestion, stop wining about CTR and start paying more attention to your eCPM.
A while ago, the whining was about EPC, and there were AdSense publishers who removed ads from some pages in the hope of increasing their average EPC at the expense of total earnings. Go figure.
As I had speculated before the whole change in click area, eCPM has risen as CTR has dropped. This is because eliminating many false clicks has stretched advertisers budgets and improved smart price ratings.
poodwaddle, I agree with your observations, however not your total theory. I would like to reword and suggest an alternative
I have seen a reduction in click - through percentage (eCPM), however when I back calculate my effective eCPM with previous click-through rate (%) I am technically making more money than before per click.
In my view, this is the first provable evidence that Google can and is applying creative pricing manipulations (aka: Smart pricing) based on allowed total publisher earnings. I do not believe that Adword publishers have caught on this fast to the new click area changes as you may have suggested. Google has simply removed or modified their algo to reflect their so-called effective confidence (smart pricing).
With this recent change, I believe I (and you) can create an equation that estimates their smart pricing algo. This is actually the first measurable (well documented) payout vs delivery event I am aware of. The reason I say this is that other payout reduction events tend to come out of the blue without a measurable reference (hence - speculation and complaints).
BTW, I'm not sure knowing the eqaution or mathematical relationship will help increase revenues beyond what everybody already knows.
[edited by: Edge at 4:08 pm (utc) on Dec. 10, 2007]
I also was able to set my budget. When the daily budget was met my ad was no longer displayed. Logically one can surmise that higher bid ads would show more frequently and potentially reach their budgets before the end of the day, especially for those advertisers who have not optimized their max per click and daily budget. Fewer ads will be available at the end of the day and perhaps more penny ads will be served.
This is one of the reasons I feel that the lower overall CTR has had a positive and immediate effect on eCPM. Those publishers who optimized their sites to exploit false clicks are suffering, and perhaps we are hearing them whine here. As an honest publisher I have seen an immediate rise in earnings and slight drop in CTR. Obviously the ads I am receiving must be paying more per click (or I am receiving a larger %).
I theorize (and I could be full of #*$!) that advertisers budgets are stretching a bit further. Every false or fraudulent click reduces the advertisers budget and robs both the advertiser and the honest publisher who would have received the commission. Correcting this positively affects both.
I gotta go now. Seams I have won the European Lotto.
A CTR drop over the course of a week or even a month could be temporary, and down to factors that may reverse.
But I don't think that the OP is talking about a temporary drop, or even one due to one of the recent "glitches." I believe she's talking about a long-term trend.
I've had a similar experience. On my site, I have not made many significant changes or seen any big swings in traffic since I first got into AdSense over 4 years ago. And what is striking to me is that CTR has steadily declined over the last year or more and is now approaching one-third of what it was in 2005.
This is NOT due to my having more pages with ads. I do have more pages with ads, but there are some channels that have stayed unchanged all along, and they are as affected by this as the site as a whole is. Until several months ago, the average payout per click was rising to the extent that it compensated for the drop in CTR, but that's no longer helping. My overall AdSense income is hovering at a bit more than half of what it was.
And I do get a healthy amount of new traffic, so this is not regular visitors learning to ignore ads. I attribute it to people having learned to ignore AdSense ads as they learned to ignore banner ads.
I have experimented with placement, adblock types, and colors, to little effect. I'd like to see more customization options, but I'm not sure that would help much. I don't have a solution. All I can say is that for my site and others like it, this is a long-term problem.
Those publishers who optimized their sites to exploit false clicks are suffering, and perhaps we are hearing them whine here. As an honest publisher I have seen...
The change in clickable area was probably intended to reduce the number of unintentional clicks. It would be difficult to trick someone into accidentally clicking the text.
Now users have to click directly on the title and URL or nothing will happen.
I have seen CTR drop about 1 percent.
People usually click on the links don't they or am I missing something.
Are people getting bored with AdSense
Add to it a lot of low-quality MFA websites; users who spend a few hours a day online (more and more of them) are really bored/fed up with the websites that host Adsense/Yahoo/Bidviser etc. ads. If you are bored and angry with something, you don't click on ads but rather close the window or move on to another website.
Let's face it, there is no more room for Adsense (or similar concept ads) to grow - blending, playing with ad positions, adding colors, adding graphics, adding Youtube, changing clickable area, etc. will not change that. The recent resignation of the Google Adsense chief clearly indicates that the Adsense era is over.
[edited by: menial at 5:29 am (utc) on Dec. 11, 2007]
Let's face it, there is no more room for Adsense (or similar concept ads) to grow - blending, playing with ad positions, adding colors, adding graphics, adding Youtube, etc. will not change that. The recent resignation of the Google Adsense chief clearly indicates that the Adsense era is over.
Also, if you read this article: [itnews.com.au ]
you will notice that according to the study:
"Web shoppers take an average of 19 hours from the time they first visit a site to actually making a purchase, a study released this week showed."
If you visit a website that has Adsense (or other contextual ads) on it, and even click on the ad/s, there is very little chance you will actually buy anything from that site. Especially that when you visit the original website on another day (assuming the "19 hours" have already passed and you are ready to buy), you are not likely to find the advertiser's site you clicked ads on any more.
So the overall value of Adsense clickers to advertisers is very, very low and there are no prospects for improvement. Exactly the same situation was with banner ads - they died a natural death after a few years of being introduced. Those who tried to "re-invent" them by introducing flash or Ajax technologies (like Google is now trying with Youtube Adsense ads) have annoyed the users even more - and that's where the web browser ad blocker ideas have popped up.
So the overall value of Adsense clickers to advertisers is very, very low and there are no prospects for improvement.
I wonder if people said that about TV commercials 40 or 50 years ago...
I wonder if people said that about TV commercials 40 or 50 years ago...
TV commercials and full-size movie/ads are something very different than Adsense. They cover 100% of the monitor/TV size and the user knows "what to expect" when watching them. Plus, with such ads it's possible to do brand recognition campaigns.
With the current Adsense or banner ads that are "dropped and blended on page," that's not possible. Unless you can point me to a TV station that shows a few designated commercial ads (placed in the "hot spot" areas of the screen) while the show is being broadcast.
So the overall value of Adsense clickers to advertisers is very, very low and there are no prospects for improvement.
Yes, the internet era is over, nobody goes online any more.
Google's stock being near an all time high is peculiar though, all those investors are being duped. Has anyone called the Wall Street Journal with this story? It is huge, Enron all over again. Run, head for the hills! The sky is falling.
Anyone else seeing a lower CTR?
Yes, I do. CTR dropped on Dec. 5th and I just compared the clicks reported by my click tracker and the clicks counted by Google.
Dec. 1 - Dec. 4: The 'click-gap' was 93% (93% of the reported clicks where counted by Google)
Dec. 5 - Dec 10: click-gap is 72%.
Only about 77% of the originally valid clicks are considered valid since Dec 5.
There seems to be a new and tighter detection of invalid clicks in place.
(BTW: With a total numer of X0.000 clicks in both periods these numbers should be fairly meaningful)
tim222, I wanted to make a similar point too, if a legit publisher who does not blend it ads a lot, who links color are different to that of the links of the ads, how can they suffer such a huge drop in ctr. I just don't get how a clickable area would affect the ctr so much.
People usually click on the links don't they or am I missing something
I have been thinking the same thing. I don't blend at all and have seen approximately .7% reduction in clicks. My ads are a vertical 160x600 on the very left column. I currently suspect that more is going on than a reduction of clikable area.
I currently suspect that more is going on than a reduction of clikable area.
Given Google's history and continued hiring on a mammoth scale a constant tinkering seems almost inevitable. Since contextual ads comprise such a huge component of their revenue it makes sense that their tinkering would be isolated and confined to smaller experimental segments.
I think the recent famous glitch was an experiment that went out of control and that some of the current instability may be a hangover from that.
BTW my intraday stats are still very unstable though overall earnings have recovered some of the old consistency. As an example, my CTR, eCPM and earnings before noon (PST) yesterday were extremely scary--extrapolated to the entire day would have been a 50% reduction. Yet by the end of the day they had recovered to near average. This morning my stats and earnings are abnormally high but I know enough to not be excited.
The ebb and flow of click dumps has become much more pronounced for me and those subject to the same AdSense experiments.
The recent resignation of the Google Adsense chief clearly indicates that the Adsense era is over.
Look, the guy has 50 million bucks, and he's starting his own company. How many people with 50 million bucks are content to remain employees, especially in an environment (Silicon Valley) where entrepreneurship is part of the culture?
As for the idea that "the AdSense era is over," the quarterly growth in total AdSense revenues would tend to disprove that. However, it may be fair to say that the era when any fledgling Web entrepreneur could earn easy money with AdSense is over, just as the era when anybody with a boilerplate "thin affiliate" site could make money ended several years ago.
Fact: Direct-response advertising performs best when targeted to interested users. That's why you see ads for camera dealers in POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY, ads for mail-order tire dealers in CAR AND DRIVER, and ads for widget-processing supplies in WIDGET INDUSTRY NEWS. As Google refines its AdSense program and advertisers continue to become more savvy about what works and what doesn't, publishers who offer content of intrinsic value to users who are motivated to buy (or to make inquiries) will prosper. Publishers who don't understand the value of content or targeted audiences, or who lack the skills or commitment needed to prosper in a competitive environment, will fall by the wayside. That's how the publishing industry works in the offline world, and there's no reason why the same basic rules of survival shouldn't apply on the Web.
The other important flaw in Adsense (or contextual ads) system that make it very incomplete is that it LIMITS the user's choice. If you have a few ad blocks with cameras on one page, the user has only a few possible choices (in reality one or two since not all ads present what the user is actually looking for). It's like doing a search using directories, back in the old days. If someone is really interested in buying a camera or other product/service, he gives himself a much better option by using a search engine. If you add the research about "19 hours" (above), you'll see that Adsense clicker isn't very valuable to an advertiser.
...he gives himself a much better option by using a search engine.
If someone is really interested in buying a camera or other product/service, he gives himself a much better option by using a search engine.
The purpose of using AdSense is to generate leads from potential buyers who aren't searching for vendors with search engines at a given moment in time. Example: If I'm a travel agent selling inner-tube cruises in Elbonia, it makes sense to reach the person whose "moment of decision" comes while reading a review of an Elbonian inner-tube cruise.
As Joseph Jaffe said in an article for iMedia Connection, it's important to connect with consumers "through the medium, message, and mindset." [Italics mine.]
The purpose of using AdSense is to generate leads from potential buyers who aren't searching for vendors with search engines at a given moment in time. Example: If I'm a travel agent selling inner-tube cruises in Elbonia, it makes sense to reach the person whose "moment of decision" comes while reading a review of an Elbonian inner-tube cruise.
OK, but what do you think about the study and the fact that online users are NOT impulse/"moment of decision" buyers?
It is a content site so the ad clicks are going to come about because someone noticed something that is especially interesting to them.
No other program can come close to how well AdSense does on matching ads to pages. I've tried some so as not to be so AdSense dependent with poor results.
OK, but what do you think about the study and the fact...
What do you think about the fact that Google has reached a $220 billion market capitalization faster than any company in history, largely on the performance of contextual advertising.
You are disecting gnats and ignoring the thundering herd of elephants.
What do you think about the fact that Google has reached a $220 billion market capitalization faster than any company in history, largely on the performance of contextual advertising.
I think I would like to be in Google's shoes then. But I wouldn't like to be one of Adsense publishers. If you, as a publisher, are happy about Google's success and don't care too much about your own earnings, I'm happy for you too ;).
what do you think about the study and the fact that online users are NOT impulse/"moment of decision" buyers?
Maybe advertisers can't track a buyer directly from adsense clicks, but if buyers in generally discover a new site through an ad and bookmark them, advertisers will still experience a growth in sale in the long run that would not have happened without advertising, enough to justify their investment in the adsense program.
Google can track many other variables other than direct conversion for their smart pricing algorithm, such as bounce rate, time spent on site, number of pages views, etc.
