Forum Moderators: martinibuster
For AdSense, all my site earnings are down ... especially those tied into the service industry. Even though my search rankings have remained consistent and I have done work to increase CTR, traffic is down on my sites and the number of clicks right along with it. Earnings per click is also down.
For AdWords, with many search terms, I can now buy placement on the first page of search results for .02 per click, whereas a month ago the same placement would have cost .20 to .30 The cost for all my campaigns has decreased by nearly 90% ... a stunning number.
I've seen fluctuations in AdSense and AdWords ... but nothing like this. Hang on to your wigs folks!
Brad
Austin, Texas
[edited by: martinibuster at 3:42 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed political comment. [/edit]
One possible result of a drop in Google's AdSense earnings might be a purge of accounts that don't generate enough revenue to justify their overhead. I'm not just talking about very small accounts--I'm also talking about publishers who put heavy demands on the AdSense support team, publishers with poor "smart pricing" scores, publishers of dubious quality whose accounts are flagged for review because of questionable clicks, etc.
I understand you are speculating here, but trying to predict google's behavior is pointless. I question, though, whether there would be any point in purging the network, for short term financial reasons. What exactly do you think the "overhead" is (maximum) for any one regular publisher?
Given they already have the infrastructure, and paid for it, why bother?
...unless to improve the quality and perceptions of the network. That would be nice. Make it premium tier. Or split it into a true broad based quality network, and something for "the others'.
Perceptions are the issue. What are the "average user's" perceptions of google ads now? How do they behave with respect to them? Has it changed since inception?
Dunno, but AdSense revenues have grown steadily since the network's inception, so if users' perceptions have changed, those changing perceptions haven't shown up in quarterly AdSense revenues.
...unless to improve the quality and perceptions of the network. That would be nice. Make it premium tier. Or split it into a true broad based quality network, and something for "the others'.
I used to like that idea, but I doubt if it's going to happen. A less radical approach might be to do one of two things:
- Allow CPC and CPM placement targeting by "smart-pricing percentile," as in "We'll bid $X for the top 40% of the network based on anticipated conversions", or...
- Use smart-pricing data to group publishers in star categories, from five stars through one star). An advertiser could then bid on 5-star sites, 4/5-star sites, 1/2/3/4/5-star sites, or whatever struck the advertiser's fancy.
Well, if Google counts them, I count them. ...
OK, here is what I've encountered with this over the long haul. I've run 1,400 or so pages with a single 300x250 adblock and a single 160x90 AdLinks unit on each page for the last, I dunno, pretty much since Adlinks came out.
The 300x250 has never approached being full, on an average. The average has never been over 3 ads and usually fell into the 2.6 - 2.8 ads per block range.
So I tried reducing the adblock size to a 250x250, which has a max of 3 ads. (Seemed reasonable to me).
The average fill went down.
The arrows came along and the fill rate went DOWN even further.
Of course that's just one site, so take it for whatever it's worth, if anything.
(I swap adblock sizes every so often just to break up the ad blindness issue a bit, and to see what's working best at the moment.}
Average Number of clicks per day 14% down.
This means the value of 1 click is rising, because there is a shortage of clicks available in the whole network.
This means the value of 1 click is rising, because there is a shortage of clicks available in the whole network.
It isn't quite that simple, but with Google's number of active advertisers way up and many publishers experiencing a drop in CTR, there may well be a shortage of click inventory. That might explain why Google has opened up parked domains to rank-and-file publishers.
It isn't quite that simple, but with Google's number of active advertisers way up and many publishers experiencing a drop in CTR, there may well be a shortage of click inventory. That might explain why Google has opened up parked domains to rank-and-file publishers.
Dunno, but AdSense revenues have grown steadily since the network's inception, so if users' perceptions have changed, those changing perceptions haven't shown up in quarterly AdSense revenues.
Accounting practices are critical here, and since we don't know what is used, we can't determine the reasons why the revenue is increasing. Is it, for example, because their continues to be influx of new small publishers (there are)? Or any other cause that is covering the lower consumer interest in the ads.
As I said, in good economic times, flaws in the fundamental behavior of a company get masked. They emerge and become obvious in tough times, which is exactly what happens to the auto industry and what happened in 99-2000.
Now we are seeing it.
I mean we are not looking at the same data sample that google is looking at but we do have several million uniques per month spread across a wide assortment of topics and ctr is down across all channels by a healthy 40% average now over 5 year samples.
Our ad copy is better then ever and epc is rising at a steady clip. No changes in advert layout or traffic.
It is pretty clear in our case that the consumer is now closing up the wallet which will serve to only push this recession into a macro effect nightmare that will play out for years and the worst is yet to come.
