Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Of course you pretty much need channels, lots of them, to see this, because of course averages hide these 0 eCPM occurrences.
Anyone else seen this?
Actually with CPM off, I was surprised to see site targeted ads, but the help implies I can't stop it, at least without the Ad Review Center which I can't seem to get to!
All I can think is a placement ad showing on an extremely high traffic site will end up with a very low eCPM on a small traffic site. This is less the a penny per thousand impressions, I don't think I need this ad! I actually am fortunate to have many pages that might only have 1, or a few, impressions per day, BUT, frequently there is one click also, that typically pays well! Talk about eCPM! The benefit of highly targeted topical page content. These are pages I don't want 0 eCPM ads on.
This is not a transient effect the eCPM remains 0 even when reviewing data from days ago.
For reference:
I also do not use referrals.
I do not have any image ads.
Long ago I have requested no CPM ads on my sites. (You must email Adsense to turn off CPM ads.)
Also my post on Adsense help
Adsense Help Post [groups.google.com]
in a few cases I see eCPM's of 0 (zero). That seems ridiculously low.
I, too, had a bunch of days where CPM targeted ads resulted in an eCPM of $0.00 - yes, zero, nothing, nada, zip, nichts, de rien. Apparently there are folks out there who manage to get a CPM of less than $0.005!
The CPM program was OK in comparison to PPC for a long time. On average I saw 2x to 4x the eCPM of PPC.
This was replaced in January 2008 with eCPM values that were "on par" with PPC.
And starting in May, I saw the average eCPM dropping to levels *below* PPC, with several days earning indeed $0.00 despite showing healthy views.
Actually with CPM off, I was surprised to see site targeted ads
Someone on another forum had the same problem, and he asked support about it. Advertisers can target "specific categories" which will not show up in the ad review center and will display automatically. And they go on to suggest that you can still use the competitive filter to block such ads.
I'd never have noticed if I hadn't set up a channel specificaly for three of those articles a couple of weeks ago.
I can't talk about amounts but I will say two things.
#1 - why am I getting placement targeted ads when I haven't opted in?
#2 - how are these ads getting away with such rediculously low rates?
I need answers because they are getting a lot of clicks at a very small fraction of what similar cpc spots are getting on the same pages.
Edit: I have found no answer as to why someone is able to target my site - it's not opted in, cpm is disabled and the site doesn't appear in the cpm directory.
I HAVE found a possible answer to #2 - not enough placements. No competition leads to low cpm - cpc ads apparently don't compete or if they do, perhaps the lowest bid in a 4 ad unit is getting used?
I've decided to leave the targeting disabled - targeted ads represent a small percentage of impressions. The deciding factor was that placement targeted ads aren't always savory and they bump out the other contextual ads from that ad unit.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 12:49 am (utc) on June 10, 2008]
I reviewed their performance for the last few months... Horrendous. Essentially it is close to free advertising for these folks.
Hopefully I hear back from our rep with good news that they can turn it off for us... Those ad slots were designed to show contextual ads for a reason, to add value to the user's experience and earn revenue for us. They were not created to show cheap off-topic ads about weight-loss and other unrelated spam...
Channels don't tell the whole story, if that's so.
Not to mention the fact that many of the ads were spammy. Too much headache and maintenance to try and keep track of them all and review/approve them via the tools provided by Adsense. I just had them turned off.
