Mutliple ad blocks revisited

stayed with them, bailed out---if so, why?

[ownerrim]

Just wondering what the verdicts are on this.

[mike schmitz]

My take is that if you have a page that doesn't have a vertical scroll bar - i wouldn't use them.

If you have a scroll bar and users are scrolling down and thus making the first set of ads disappear - use them.

M

[howiejs]

Good statement / recap. I agree - it is good for long pages that require scrolling.

[AZEvil]

I have decided that it's not worth it for me to lose a visitor for a $.05 click on the second or third ad unit. Some people may only be getting that for a normal click, but I am averaging over $1.50 per click right now and would rather keep a visitor in the hopes that they click on a higher paying ad.

[alika]

We still use the multiple ad blocks. We have long articles where users scroll to get to the end of the article, and we are seeing a very nice CTR for our bottom-page ads. The skys (3rd ad block) on the sides generate a so-so 2+% CTR, so we don't use it for shorter pages.

Our EPC and CPM decreased, but our revenues (THE MOST important metric for us) increased in Sept and looks on-track to for another healthy increase this October. So we're definitely keeping the multiple ad blocks.

[ownerrim]

Alika, just curious---are you in multiple content areas?

[Atomic]

My first attempt at multiple ad units resulted in nothing more than an increase in impressions and a lower CTR so I removed them. I thought about it some more and added smaller ad units in the center of my content and placed them very carefully so that the "Ads by Google" are against borders. The eye seems to lose them a bit if you place the ad in the right spot.

My revenue, CTR, CPM and everything good tripled.

[alika]

Ownerrim -- yes, we have multiple topic sites (e.g. business planning, internet marketing, etc.)

[freeflight2]

my observations (based on 3 completely different sites, 500k adsense impressions per day (and I am showing adsense on only 10% of all pages)):
- pages with (very) high CPC: don't use multiple ads, might bring your overall earnings down actually (plus, multiple blocks might 'scare' users away right away)
- pages with many repeat visitors (forums, etc.): might make some revenue but not really worth it in the long run (users get annoyed)
- sites with many unique viitors making only 1 or 2 page views each: worth it, 40% increase in earnings here.

[level80]

My first attempt at multiple ad units resulted in nothing more than an increase in impressions and a lower CTR so I removed them.

Of course multiple ad units will lower the CTR and increase impressions.

Hypothetical example:-

Before multiple ads:-

10000 impressions
1% CTR
$0.7 CPM

putting two ads on each page (same CTR per page) goes to

20000 impressions
0.5% CTR
$0.35 CPM

Not understanding that your CTR will go down with multiple ads seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the statistic!

[Oetzi]

Not understanding that your CTR will go down with multiple ads seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the statistic!

I would argue that is a fundamental bug in the reporting. I do not understand for what reason a page is counted twice (or three times) just because there are multiple ad units on the page.

Google should fix this asap

[darkmage]

Oetzi

Nope, I completely disagree. It makes perfect sense for AS to count ad impressions and it's not a bug, but an important way to view the statistics.

The stats would be useless if they were combined. If your site had varying numbers of ad units per page, this would make the stats meaningless.

You could always use channels if you need to track the ads.

What would be useful is a statistic on blank/default/PSA views where AS ads are not shown.

[edited by: darkmage at 2:46 am (utc) on Oct. 15, 2004]

[alika]

AdsenseAdvisor's comment msg#29
[webmasterworld.com...]

If I may throw my 2 cents in, you might consider measuring the results of multiple ad units by examining your overall revenue as opposed to EPC and eCPM. These figures are based on ad units, rather than page performance, so multiple ad units on a page will alter their value. I'll pass your thoughts on to the team, so that they can come up with solutions to reporting based on the way publishers use their reports

[CherryHintonBlue]

We use straightforward wide skyscraper ads on the left-hand edge of pages of continuous text. If there is sufficient text on the page, we've added a second and a third wide skyscraper ad beneath the first, all channelled up nicely. We also have enough pages and visitors to have run controlled tests against pages of equivalent lengths but without the stacked ads.

The result is that the *total* clicks on pages with two ads is anything up to half as much again as pages with one ad; comparing two pages of equal length, if a one-ad page gets ten clicks, the two-ad page gets typically eight for the top ad and four to six for the bottom one.

Pages with three stacked ads which are about the same depth as the three ads give a similarly improved result. However, pages which are much deeper than this give very low results, as by the time the reader gets to the foot of the page, the ads have long since disappeared. We'll be moving the third ad down to the bottom for these cases.

So thumbs up to multiple ads used in a very simple way!