Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We can't do anything about that right? Their ads, their wording, publishers don't have control over that.
If they have a bad ad and a crappy landing page, doesn't that mean our conversion is gonna suck too?
[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:46 pm (utc) on June 3, 2009]
[edit reason] language edit, TOS #3 [/edit]
Smart pricing keeps advertisers from bailing out of the content network--the idea is that they pay for what they get, the value of which can vary from publisher to publisher. Having said that, of course most advertisers don't have conversion tracking, and then smart pricing is based on the characteristics of your site.
Also, by the way, advertisers DO have a smart pricing of their own. It's called quality score. Advertisers with low quality scores have to pay more for clicks.
It's a pretty fair system, on the whole.
It's a pretty fair system, on the whole.
So publishers always end up to have to also carry the very low paying long tail once the decent ads are sold out. Even if the visitors are worth more to us than to let them go at the ridiculously low price per click they sometimes do go for.
Except for one detail:
- advertisers can set a maximum price they're wiling to pay or else not show their ads
- publishers can't set a minimum price under which they don't want to display ads
Advertisers are the paying customers. As the saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
- publishers can't set a minimum price under which they don't want to display ads
Sure they can. If the average EPC isn't satisfactory, any one of us can just stop using AdSense. That comes to the same thing--it's just not unrealistically granular.
At the same time, they have to spread the wealth to publishers to keep them. At some point, publishers will take adsense off their pages if the payouts get too low.
The question I have, is how much does your AdSense revenue need to drop to switch to another ad network?
publishers can't set a minimum price under which they don't want to display ads
Yes, they can, if they use Google Ad Mangaer.
At some point, publishers will take adsense off their pages if the payouts get too low.
At some point, some publishers will take AdSense off their page if the payouts get too low. Others will take what they can get, either because they don't have alternatives or because they regard AdSense revenue as "found money."
The question I have, is how much does your AdSense revenue need to drop to switch to another ad network?
It isn't quite that simple. For some publishers, AdSense is merely one of several revenue streams, and if other sources of revenue are performing better than AdSense is, AdSense may just get pushed to a less desirable area of the page. Other publishers may not be in a position to switch because they're located outside the U.S. or get a lot of traffic from outside the U.S. (which limits their ad-network options).
publishers can't set a minimum price under which they don't want to display adsYes, they can, if they use Google Ad Mangaer.
Have you tried that? If so I'd love to see how it's done explained in understandable and easy to replicate instructions. Ad manager is a mess like no other Google product ever had been.
I tried, can't figure out the overly complex ad manager (programming something from scratch is easier than merely using that).
Other publishers may not be in a position to switch because they're located outside the U.S. or get a lot of traffic from outside the U.S. (which limits their ad-network options).
I live outside the US with for a site I care a lot about a mostly US visitor base on a site that easily leads in its narrow niche (travel related). Most other ad networks don't even bother to answer, I guess due to me not being US based, even if I meet their published requirements easily, some don't even offer the courtesy of a "no" reply.
I'd love to see a decent alternative to adsense, but aside of selling it myself directly to serious businesses (which involves too much work and difficulty due to small US businesses not knowing how to deal with foreign suppliers), I've not found much that works for me.
BTW: setting the minimum price for me has two goals:
- get rid of the bottom feeders advertisers (I understand google wants them, I understand they want their clicks cheap), I just don't want to be associated with them and they junk.
- keep visitors if the CPC would be too low and give them other ways of bringing in a few bucks (by e.g. affiliates that work quite well for me.
I work on hard my site. Then I optimize my site, and I get a nice CTR boost of %.85 more. I get like .45 cent more in my CPM and I'm like "wow, I did a good job" I spend like a week or so optmizing. So my ctr is like .90 and my ecpm has been nice for one day, but then i get smart priced and my ecpm is now 50% less. what the heck google?
I spend a whole week optmizing and testing and get jack from that? I can only optmize so much, but I can get smart price every day. Some web sites you can only go up so high, after that it ain't going up any higher.
And I blame it on the advertiser's ad and landing page more than I do my visitors, because 80% of my visits are from Serp's.
Just one advertiser pulling out can drop the prices the advertiser need to pay to get onto your site significantly, yet you'd not be smartpriced.
So my ctr is like .90 and my ecpm has been nice for one day, but then i get smart priced and my ecpm is now 50% less. what the heck google?
As swa66 points out, smart pricing isn't the only reason why your earnings might drop, but never mind that for the moment.
Let's assume that your hypothetical 50% drop is the result of smart pricing. Are your clicks now being undervalued? Isn't it equally possible that those clicks were being overvalued before smart pricing cut in? One could argue that, from an advertiser's point of view, some of the money that you and Google were earning on those overvalued (pre-smart pricing) clicks should be refunded. Fortunately for publishers--and for Google--smart pricing looks forward, not backward, and (as far as we know) retroactive adjustments aren't part of the smart-pricing scheme.
As for how much work you've put into optimizing your site, etc., what does that have to do with the value of the traffic that you send to advertisers? The editor of the WIDGETVILLE WEEKLY SHOPPER may work just as hard as the editor of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL does, but that doesn't mean the WIDGETVILLE WEEKLY SHOPPER is entitled to the same ad rates that the JOURNAL collects from its advertisers.
what does that have to do with the value of the traffic that you send to advertisers
Most publishers don't have control of their visitors. I mean...no one is going to stop a dude from china from typing in your address bar, unless you really want to start ip banning people. But why would you do that? How much control can you have over visitors? You can't control what they click.
Basically what google says, is don't show ads, to non-us visitors, non-english. Other countries except us suck big time. Right? That's pretty much the quality argument IMO.
Once they click an ad, and they land on a page that just says "Download, 1000 free icons" or "Insurance at 50%" and no info about anything, of course they won't go any further.
So, how would a publisher send "quality" traffic?
Most publishers don't have control of their visitors.
Sure, they do. It's all about content and target audiences.
Let's look at Google's classic smart-pricing example: a camera review vs. a page of photo tips. Ad clicks from the review are more likely to convert for advertisers than are ad clicks from the page of photo tips, because someone who's just read an in-depth review of the new OlyNiCanPen digital camera is more likely to be in "buying mode" than someone who's just read suggestions on how to avoid red-eye and camera jiggle. That means the review site's clicks are likely to be worth more to the kinds of advertisers (such as camera retailers) who buy AdWords/AdSense direct-response ads.
Now let's say that you're Buddy Brown, and you've decided to publish a site called Buddy-Browns-Camera-Reviews.com, rather than a site called Buddy-Browns-Photo-Tips.com. By determining the focus of your site, you've defined your audience (people who are interested in buying cameras) and set the stage for a workable revenue model (earnings from AdSense pay-per-click ads and affiliate links).
The fact that clicks from a camera-review site are likely to convert better than clicks from a site devoted to photo tips doesn't mean the latter can't be successful; it simply means that the "photo tips" site might be better suited to display ads than to direct-response ads. The reader who's trying to eliminate "red eye" from her photos may not be shopping right now, but she may be a great target for a branding campaign that makes her think "Nikon" or "Canon" the next time she's walking through the aisles of Best Guy or "Walgreen's" or "Snapfish" the next time she's ready to print the photos that her family took over Christmas or on summer vacation. (Of course, if you're the publisher of that photo-tips site, it's your job to figure out how to attract those display ads.)
You CAN reduce the likelihood that a random surfer will click on an ad. That's what you need to focus on. Don't try to change what you can't change. You need to accept that the advertiser is a given, and that poor advertisers get hit with quality score penalties.
Of course, to some extent, you're stuck with the site you have--download sites attract a certain kind of visitor, and Google knows that.
So, how would a publisher send "quality" traffic?
You do have control over your traffic. If you have pages on "free wallpapers", your traffic will be worth a lot less than pages on "affordable wallpapers", because the traffic on second one would be more responsive to spending money on the advertisers site.
I have a site that deals with computers stuff. It's a download site. My visitors come to download stuff......no one is going to stop a dude from china from typing in your address bar.
The first thing that comes to mind is that your site would attract ads from software companies, and often they can't export thieir products out of the US.
That's unfortunate for your niche. But AdSense pays well for non-US clicks that are useful. Travel ads, for example.
