Enabling channel targeting dropped earnings 50%

[drall]

I never bothered with enabling channel targeting for advertisers to see except on a few channels. Well after getting a notice from the Adsense team letting us know this could lead to greater earnings potential we enabled channel targeting for hundreds of channels.

Within 24 hours earnings dropped by 50% across every website. Being the rational fella I am I figured I would give it a week and see if it was just a temp glitch. Well it wasnt. So we turned off all channel targeting for advertisers across the board and within 24 hours earnings bounced back.

Now what makes no sense to me is I didnt see much in the way of placement targeted ads by advertisers. So what the heck would cause a drop like that?

I want to turn this back on but with earnings already at a 7 year low I dont want to earn less. We only run adsense on a handful of channels and I thought this may be a way to return our earnings to previous levels.

Anyone ever turned on channel targeting and watched earnings tank then turn it off and watched earnings go back to normal? Any ideas what could cause this?

[walrus]

I recently deleted all channels for almost a week in an attempt to sort of reset it. Seemed better for a couple days but after that was the same again, so i put the channels back.
I've read on this forum a number of times about how analyzing changes over a short time span can give you the wrong impression , might be 2 days was not long enough to really tell. May have to bite the bullet and make the testing time a little longer. Channels definitely didn't lower my earnings, I would urge you to try again, good luck.

Seems there's been more 'lowest earnings in years' posts than usual this year. I'm in same boat but mainly due to traffic loss, not keeping up with the comp, etc. Generally AS has still been pretty good, especially morning visitors for high CTR and EPC.

[netmeg]

I've got a few of my channels enabled (not all of them) and I'm breaking all previous records this year. YMMV.

[drall]

Hi walrus, I actually ran it for a week and not a couple days. It was really wierd. I turned it on and instantly earnings dropped by 50%, I turned it off and instantly earnings went back up by 50%.

Maybe it was to many channels at once and it caused the system to freak out. Ill try enabling a couple channels at a time over a period of months and see if that works better.

Some of my channels are rocking Netmeg like you with all time highs for CPC. Problem im facing is CTR is now around 1/10th of what it used to be. People are just not clicking at least on my sites like they used to.

[londrum]

you should probably give it some more time. i remember an age old tip that said if you want to "shock" a stale ad into life then you should change its name, or turn the channel off. it seems that google then resets the ad's stats back to zero, meaning you might see a few new higher paying ads which were otherwise never going to appear.

i never saw the benefit in doing it myself though, because after a while the stats will just end up how they were in the first place.

[netmeg]

My CTR dropped down too, but it's actually gone up significantly in the past month or so. I can't explain it really, except that instead of waiting for traffic to find me (which it usually does without my doing anything) I went out to find new traffic. Maybe that helped.

[SEOPTI]

This is an interesting topic, I have enabled some channels today and will see what happens.

[bumpski]

SEO how did it go?

I'm thinking about channels too, but I actually suspected an earnings drop would occur.

Google has a huge inventory of ads to display, but perhaps there are not that many targeting channels available. So in essence Google may be forced to show lower bid ads on targeted channels.

Face it Google has to show all legitimate ads over time, so they must rotate through all ads no matter what the bid. When you allow targeting I would suspect in essence you diminish the inventory of bidders.

Sure some targeting relationships probably work out well for advertiser and publisher.

My first thought about "comments to advertisers" for a targeted channel would be "If earnings on this channel drop, the channel will be dropped".

[dataguy]

I've been told that placement targeting ads don't usual work well on user generated content sites. There are sites which get 90% of their adsense revenue from placement targeted ads. I get less than 1% on my UGC site, so I was told to turn it off.

[netmeg]

As an advertiser, UGC sites usually wouldn't be my first choice for a placement campaign.

[walrus]

I guess I read that to fast Drall, thanks for the clarification, it will be intersting to hear how the latest experiments went for you and SEOPTI.

There are a lot of good points here regarding pros and cons of channels. I can add that I want to keep the advertisers satisfied and hope they can get a fair ROI (in whatever form). At the same time we want decent earnings they want performance. Channels must help them attain that essentisal ROI, i think thats another good reason to impliment them.

[digic]

Just in case if you have 2 ad blocks, what block is best to be channel targeted. In my case, I have 2 ad block, top ang bottom, both square ads. Most of the time, only 1 ad is showing at the top while 4 ads displayed at the bottom. Channel targeting is disabled, so what is supposed to be the reason why only 1 ad is showing at the top ad block?

[drall]

Just an update, after disabling all channel targeting I have been re-enabling it slowly one channel at a time and I have not seen earnings drop at all.

So I disabled all channel targeting again and then re-enabled all channel targeting at one single time and whammo earnings cut in half again.

I have no idea why this is happening but it seems that when I slowly enable channel targeting for advertisers everything is fine but when I enable a few hundred channels at once earnings plummet.

[bumpski]

Drall

Sounds like a great time for a binary search.

Try half your channels then the other half, etc. Perhaps it will come down to one (or a few) advertisers that might be reporting terrible conversions, then smart pricing kicks in. After nine or so "half's" you would be down to a single suspicious channel.

I really don't know if there is any advantage for an advertiser to legitimately report their conversion rate. Google obviously makes a guess at conversion rate via analyzing site content.

[drall]

That's a great idea bumpski, I will give it a try and let you know.

[bumpski]

Drall

Did you have any luck?

[Rockyou]

Drall Channel targeting is a very bad idea. Google will know exactly what your site is worth.I want Google to be in fear to keep it guessing the value.After all its worst fears are coming true in future with Microsoft pubcenter.You will make more money with keeping them puzzled.Further instead of thinking of making more money in adsense think how you can increase advertisers ROI. Google, Microsoft all will be behind you.Play the opposite game.

[DaStarBuG]

If placement targeting is enabled advertisers can directly bid on specific channels you selected.

These bids are taken into auction with all other contextual advertisers which will increase not decrease your income.

There is no reason for placement targeting to reduce income other then a bug that I would report to Adsense.

I use placement targeting for a long time and recently split my major earning AD into several sub-ads and made them bookable.
There was no decrease of earning on the contrary

Read my post here for a good idea about how to use placement targeting:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Atomic]

There is no reason for placement targeting to reduce income other then a bug that I would report to Adsense.

How about a really ugly ad that has nothing to do with your site? I've had to block several such ads that have been targeted to my sites.

[DaStarBuG]

So? This happens all the time with standard auctioned ads as well.
Who ever pays the most gets displayed.
That is the Adsense Game.