Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have not yet reached this goal but I have become very close - and them Boom! My earnings went down drastically, however I still managed to have the same number of clicks and impressions
my question is, on average, how many clicks would I need to acheive this goal! Thank you!
My advice is, that instead of setting a future target and trying to achieve it, you walk up the hill looking backwards - aiming only to beat what you made last month, last week, yesterday.
It really depends on how much your clicks are worth. One-cent clicks are common, but two-dollar clicks are not unheard of. So it will take you anywhere between 25 and 5000 clicks to achieve $50 a day.
In my own personal experience, it's around 200-250.
tim, are you saying i should chase the 'hundred dollar keyword' so to speak, I suppose I could do this by putting my ads in an iframe and filling the iframe with high paying keywords - however is this against the google TOS?
There's no point in attempting to do that--you'll either get found out and kicked out of the program, or if you're lucky, only get smart-priced.
Which is what I think happened to your site, by the way. If I were you I'd be working on improving the site in ways that will help you get your smart-pricing penalty reduced. This is possible to do--check old threads on smart pricing for ideas.
I suppose I could do this by putting my ads in an iframe and filling the iframe with high paying keywords - however is this against the google TOS?
Sheesh, do you really have to ask? Use common sense.
tim, are you saying i should chase the 'hundred dollar keyword' so to speak
Nope. What I meant is that the answer to your original question depends on your average earnings per click, and that varies by site. In order for anyone to accurately answer your question, you need to tell us how much you are making per click. In another post, you indicate that you're making around 2 cents per click. So then the answer to your first question is that it will require 2500 clicks in order for you to make $50.
I have a feeling that the intent of your original question might be: "Is an average of 2 cents per click a typical number?" If that's what you meant, then my observation is that 2¢ per click is kind of low.
Would blocking ads from ebay, shopping.com etc help the Cost Per Click? as I beleive their ads will be the 1-2c clicks?
Would blocking ads from ebay, shopping.com etc help the Cost Per Click?
They may pay better than you think but people tend to know eBay and Shopping.com and I think the brand awareness actually hurts those ads because people know what to expect there and may have already been there before coming to your site.
FWIW, I've blocked all those types of brands for a long time now and will never reverse that decision.
As for getting higher-paying clicks generally, click value depends on what advertisers are bidding. Your site's topic, even before you were smart-priced, just doesn't seem to be a very high-paying one. You will gain nothing if you try to fake AdSense out, so if you want higher value clicks you need to start another site, on another topic.
I guess I'll just have to wait and see, and go back to the dreaded paypopup
what can i do to increase ads with higher CPC then?
I think a good starting place is to view a bunch of pages on your site, and look at the ads. Use either the AdSense Preview Tool or the "Copy Shortcut" method to view the destination of the ads. It should be pretty easy to determine the difference between a quality advertiser and a junk advertiser. Just look at their landing page. Look for quality content, or an obvious product or service for sale.
Once you identify the "junk" there are a couple of approaches to remedy the situation. The obvious one is to add their URL to the Competitive Ad Filter. Another approach is to try to figure out *why* this ad appeared on your site. Is there a particular keyword that triggered it? Could it be the name of the page? Is it something unintentional, like a navigation label?
Another thing worth mentioning. It's my personal theory that those who target high-paying keywords *might* get some high-paying clicks. On the other hand, that might also attract MFAs who are also targeting those same keywords. Those advertisers certainly aren't paying very much. If your site doesn't rate high enough to get the high-paying clicks, you might end up with a bunch of junk ads.
Ah, I didn't realise that the rating of your site determins the ads placed, this answers pretty much all of my questions as my site is barley two months old and my alexa rank is approx 310,000 :) (which I think isn't too bad considering the age of the website)
It's also my first attempt of a website which I hope to make my career :-) (I want to be a man of lesuire like the rest of ya :D
It's possible.
A friend of mine has a different plan, going for higher value clicks, and does $50 in 150 clicks. His click through rate is also 2 1/2 mine.
Lucky, my traffic is 15 times higher, though our rankings for key terms is similar.
My point is, cost per click is not the main factor, you need ot look at
Likely traffic for your main phrases.
Difficulty in getting rankings for them.
Quality of advertisers - there are many niches with lots of traffic, but few advertisers.
Liklihood of site visitors to click on an add.
Once you identify the "junk" there are a couple of approaches to remedy the situation.
Another tool I find useful is called Googlock. It's an online preview tool that returns 20 results within any geo location you wish to view your ads from. You'll be surprised how many junk sites are lined up waiting to appear on your slots. I don't rely on this tool alone as I also use proxy servers to geo-target ads showing in various countries.
Contrary to what some members here claim I find it almost essential to screen out junk ads as in my case it will almost certainly make the difference between receiving $25 dollars per 120-150 clicks or $50 per 120-150 clicks. mind you I only display one ad block so although the task does require one to two hours of hunting and blocking per week, I only have to worry about one ad block on one URL.
:(
Well, if you were happy with your CPC before, then you need to look into what you can do to rework your site to get rid of the smart-pricing discount.It's possible.
what techniques would you suggest to do this? Changing Page Titles etc? Looking forward to your advice :)
Changing page titles isn't going to help, by the way. This isn't SEO.
Smart-pricing is based on a simple idea. Advertisers should get what they have paid for, and publishers should be paid for what they've provided. If an advertiser pays $1 for clicks in the content network in the hope of, say, getting someone to come to their site and ask for an estimate on a service, then they want as many as possible of the people who click to actually do that.
But all sites are not created equal. Some sites may have visitors who click out of curiosity and don't follow through (or worse, click because they can't see another way off the page), while another site is set up in such a way that the people who click that advertiser's ad are really interested in the advertiser's services. Why should the advertiser pay the same to both of these kinds of publishers? if a top publisher sends visitors who "convert" at a 25% rate, and another site sends visitors who convert at a 5% rate, why shouldn't the advertiser get a discount, and pay 20 cents on the dollar to the less effective publisher?
That's smart pricing. The problem for publishers is that most advertisers don't provide Google with conversion data, so they have to find characteristics of sites that they believe will lead to better conversions or not as good conversions, and pay out accordingly. Yes, like everything Google it's done algorithmically.
What factors does Google consider in smart pricing? There's been a lot of speculation, but no one really knows. What you CAN do is to look at your site from the point of view of the advertisers. When a visitor sees an ad on a particular page, are they likely to be a serious shopper, or a casual browser? Try to set up your site to attract serious shoppers and not vaguely interested surfers and you'll likely make changes to it that Google will see as making your site more likely to provide good-converting visitors.
One clue that Google did provide early in the program was to say that pages that reviewed specific products or services were more likely to be good for ads than pages with general information about some subject. That may be a factor in smart pricing.
What I have personally found to be effective is to have no more than one adblock per page, not to place it where it's all someone can see when landing on a page, and to remove ads from pages where the ads don't seem targeted (after trying to get them to be better targeted).
What will work for you may be completely different, of course.
Good luck!
Maybe this is another thread entirely, but I just wanted to follow up on what PurpleCape said.
Any factors that lead to smart pricing would be purely speculation on my part, or interpreted based on what Google has said. I presume that there is a select bunch of advertisers that do track and report conversions to Google, giving Google enough statistical information about conversion rate per publisher. But I could be wrong.
The only other thing I know for sure is that smart pricing is algorithmic; accounts do not get smart priced because they were flagged manually by a human at Google.
My husband's topic has ads that make over twice what mine do. But I have better traffic.
BTW I suppose some people here are living the good life with very little work but most of us work pretty hard. But I'd rather work hard on something I'm interested in than be stuck in a job that I hate.
