3 Clicks = 6 Cents

[rannans]

that's 2 cents per click !

google adsense has lost any respect from me now

after 6 years, and i have a pretty solid website, approx 1000 people a day (400 uniques) , if that is what they are paying, they can get stuffed !

it's not as if i have a blog or churning scraped content, i make quality website templates, totally unique, and have done for years...

maybe this is the future, absolute minimal return, while google pulls in 99% of all traffic $$

[HuskyPup]

that's 2 cents per click !

Hey, that's where my money's gone!

Believe me, I could show you loads of sites with 1 cent clicks recently, it's Stupid Pricing gone wrong again...well, that's the only solution I can come up with and it happened immediately after the last maintenance day.

[incrediBILL]

i make quality website templates, totally unique, and have done for years...

Are you giving them away for free?

Sites with free stuff do the opposite of sell stuff, therefore your ad space isn't worth much except to others giving away similar free stuff simply because people looking for free stuff tend to not buy stuff.

[Cancellara]

This is why AdSense is such a mess. They should not allow anybody with 400 uniques to even qualify for Adsense account. These small websites are (usually) the abusers and all the legit webmasters have to pay the price for it. Please set some kind of reasonable requirements for new publishers.

[incrediBILL]

They should not allow anybody with 400 uniques to even qualify for Adsense account.

That's a real misguided elitist attitude as volume has nothing to do with quality.

The best information on the web could be at the bottom of the barrel as far as traffic is concerned simply for the webmasters lack of SEO skills and nothing more.

There's a lot of big publishers pushing crap that shouldn't be allowed in AdSense either, you can't just judge quality by quantity of pages, traffic, etc. nor even popularity because often the declining literacy level of the masses can't tell when they're being fed garbage in exchange for AdSense.

Sheesh.

[rannans]

nice reply cancellara

sounds like your site is going well ;)

if you would have actually read my post, i'm 6 years old in adsense, not NEW :)

the fact remains, i'm getting buried in #*$! sites above me, that only provide crap ! pretty much what incrediBILL explains

when i search for what my own website provides, i'm swamped with spam sites, most of which offer ONE Free website template, along with absolute #*$!e..... How those sites get above me , is a disgrace to google's so called quality search algorithms.

[HuskyPup]

They should not allow anybody with 400 uniques to even qualify for Adsense account.

Oh...ok, I'll go and remove 80% of my niche widget, some highly technical, not available anywhere else specialist sites that allow advertisers the chance to be seen nationally and internationally for their services and supplies on my newtork of 17 year old sites at a reasonable cost to them.

Nah...too much hassle, I'll just ignore your demand:-)

[piatkow]

I have seen clicks pay anything from 2 cents to 2 dollars for many years. Its just chance that you happen to check a low traffic channel when three low paying ones come in together.

[ron15]

There are many factors that may cause an very low click rate. A site I recently managed would typically get clicks in the 60 to 80 cent range. Periodically I'd get the 1 to 5 cent clicks, sometimes they would come in pairs or more. I wondered why. I ended up analyzing the logs after an occurrence of these low paying clicks and found that the traffic came in from an Asian country. I suspect Google was able to classify the traffic as low potential conversion for the advertiser and priced it as such.

[DanAbbamont]

I can't imagine AdSense working really great here for either the publisher or the advertiser. Any sort of template affiliate program might bring in an occasional sale though. Maybe hosting, get some scripts and test it out.

That being said I do think AdSense is great for a lot of things.

[ember]

This is why AdSense is such a mess. They should not allow anybody with 400 uniques to even qualify for Adsense account. These small websites are (usually) the abusers and all the legit webmasters have to pay the price for it. Please set some kind of reasonable requirements for new publishers.

Hey! We are small but have been at this for however long Adsense has been around. We do quite well, thank you. How much do you make? What makes you think smaller sites are not legitimate? Ever heard of quality over quantity?

[DanAbbamont]

Smaller publishers are kind of annoying from an advertiser standpoint. If one site sends 1,000 clicks at $1.00, you can check your conversion data and either go harder or blacklist the site so tomorrow that's $1,000 you won't waste. When 1,000 sites send 1 click each at $1.00, you might convert or you might not, but the data isn't worth anything.

But I'm not suggesting they ban low traffic sites. Maybe they should allow different bids for sites with different traffic.

[ken_b]

low traffic sites

How much traffic does it take to be a "low traffic site".

Is that visitors or page views?

Is "low traffic" relative to all the sites in the web, or sites in the same niche?

.

[netmeg]

Maybe they should allow different bids for sites with different traffic.

That's essentially what smart pricing is. But it's not based on the AMOUNT of traffic, it's more likely based on the QUALITY of traffic. Which I, as a longtime heavy duty advertiser can tell you is of far far more importance to me than the amount.

There are TONS of reasons for low value clicks. Sometimes AdWords has inventory it has to place. Some times the user clicks on the last ad in a block of four (where the first ad is supposedly the highest paying one) Sometimes the number of available ads might dip at the very instant of the click, due to advertiser budget or day parting or competition or any other number of reasons.

But you really can't get a fix on how and why CPC values are so volatile unless you make a concerted effort to really understand how AdWords works. I don't mean just whip out a $100 free voucher and try a campaign, you have to really get into it. Like, go through the AdWords Learning Center, and read up on all the bidding options, and ad serving options, interest based advertising, and remarketing - everything from the ground up. If you are really and truly serious about making good money off of AdSense, this is what you need to do. Because these two programs are very tightly intertwined, and you'll never ever get a handle on one if you don't have a good understanding of both.

[DanAbbamont]

Well it's been a while since I did a content network campaign, but smart pricing never seemed to be remotely decent. I always used a script I wrote to query conversion ratios based on individual domains running ads and there were massive differences from site to site. All financial stuff though, so you had all the respectable sites with good converting traffic, then you had the jokers trying to create any site that will show insurance ads. Hopefully smart pricing is a little better now.