Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Each ad group has ads that pay a little and ads that pay much more. All I ever got was low-paying ads. But now that my CTR is way up, so is my $ per click.
We have read that Google pays out from 40% to 80% to the Adsense publisher. Is there a direct relationship between the 2 stats, such as -
CTR Payout %
5% 40%
10% 60%
15% 80%?
Could this be possible (actual)?
If not, then what DOES determine which publishers get the high-paying ads?
Is it just volume (impressions)?
Or volume plus CTR?
Are publishers rewarded porportionally for their performance, or just their website size?
Can low-volume publishers get high-paying clicks? Or is the deck stacked against the little guy?
In short, what factors determine who gets the high-paying ads?
Recently, I have been successful in raising my CTR. Along with this, my $ per click has gone up as well.
Could just be a co-incidence. My clickthrough rates bounce up and down as do my earnings, my EPC's, EPM's, and every other calculation. One day I can get $**.00 for 150 clicks and then the following day get $***.00 for 100 clicks. My site isn't changing, I haven't moved anything, it just likes to mess around.
I've tested it with several campaignes.
Tons of adviews with the bigger change of a lower click-through rate is bad for the cpm and epc.
The best thing is to have adsense running on the pages which have a high click through rate and not place it on pages with tons of adviews and low click through rate, because the pages with tons of adviews and a low click through rate will bring down your total earnings .
For example:
I have adsense on the frontpage, page2, page3 and page 4.
the frontpage has ton's of adviews but low click through rate.
page2,3 and4 have lower amount of adviews but high click through rate.
With this situation I make less money than when I only have Adsense on page2, page3 and page4.
The tons of adviews of the frontpage brings down the cpm and that brings down the epc.
I've tested it with several campaignes.
That's a very limited sample, and--to make things even more complicated--your test results will be influenced by variables that you can't control or even account for.
Bottom line: Guesswork in the guise of science is still guesswork. :-)
Dave.
I WANT FACTS, not supposition!
Ha-ha-ha. Oh, well.
Gotta keep swinging the axe, fighting for hints.
What some would call "diligence", others call "banging your head against the wall".
Can I simplify the question? OK.
Does CTR influence EPM at all? SHOULD IT?
Please speculate.
I speculate that percent payout is indeed effected by number of clicks credited (regardless of ctr).
Furthermore I speculate if you are doing less than 100,000 clicks per month, that you payout is somewhere around 20 to 25% of the bidded amount. Where ever they draw the line, I don't know, but there must be an increase somewhere for bigger publishers.
Large publishers such as MSN could most likly arrange 60 to 75% payout.
All these numbers are based solely on what sounds practical to me and no real knowledge of what's actually policy.
"Does CTR influence EPM at all?"
Google Adwords uses CTR and Bid Price together in a complicated manner. It does so based on keywords. What you see in your reports are averages - not individual campaigns.
Finally, sounding like a broken record, there is nothing you can do about it. It is advertisers that set the price.
Spend your time on more meaningful ventures (eg optimise and build a quality your site) and you will be rewarded.
Have to disagree here...it is Google not advertisers that set the EPC to publishers. Don't know why people keep wanting to deflect it away from that issue.
Are you suggesting that Google arbitrarily sets EPC, and that advertisers' bids are irrelevant?
Just look at the stats after April for the proof of that. (after smart pricing) Advertisers may set the threshold but google sets the revenue sharing formula.
Smart pricing is simply a method of granting advertiser discounts. If an advertiser gets a 20% discount for a certain type of content page, each click will generate 20% less gross revenue. In the absence of proof to the contrary, we can assume that means less money for publisher and for Google.
As far as Smart Pricing we could also presume that Google is keeping a larger portion:)
Agree we do not know for sure but looking forward to the next published financial reports to see if income to costs ratio has changed.
My opinion on Smart Pricing has not changed since the original "smoke and mirrors" letter that us publishers recieved. Meant nothing at the time and still means nothing other than CPM dropped and seems to have been controlled since then. Find it interesting that prior to April CPM moved according to expected external factors. Since then it has not. So was smart pricing just a shift to CPM control? Our data suggests this.
"Have to disagree here...it is Google not advertisers that set the EPC to publishers. Don't know why people keep wanting to deflect it away from that issue."
It's very simple. There is no proof that Google is doing this. Nor is there any reason Google would do it. Plus, as I pointed out in other threads, if it is true then you should be not adding Adsense to new pages, but using another ad provider. Yet, nobodyy does this.
As an Adwords advertiser, I set the maximum price for a click on the content network. To suggest otherwise is simply ignorant.
'
No one is arguing this. What he is claiming is that google is paying less of the revenue share to affiliates. In the past they might have paid 50% of the bid amount, for all we know they could have lowered this amount to 10%.
Is it also beyond any rational explanation that google now as a public company wouldn't adjust payouts to meet market profit expectations? If people think they are not under pressure to achieve this, do not understand earnings reporting and the effect on share prices.
The approach of many in this forum to defend google bothers me. They are a company and like all others are driven by the bottom line. Whenever it is questined that perhaps they have adjusted an algo to pad their own bottom line, a number of excuses why this can't be true are forth coming. Just like others here I do not know, but will not fail to look at this being a possible reason.
Some previous posts and posts by myself about google having moved to a CPM model after april have not been addressed yet here. This would tend to explain those posts about higher clicks, increased CTR etc resulting in lower EPC's. IF this is the case and they have flattened out CPM by site would you still think publishers are setting EPC? This would result in higher profits as the cost of adwords increased but keep publishers happy. CAn I prove or disprove this...nope...and neither can anyone else at this time. This is what our data shows compiled over 12 million page views.
Take a look at the data in terms that google doesn't publish to the advertisers, namely earnings per visitor or the moving averages over a period of months but just not revenue. We want to maximize the revenue and are not satisfied with making changes to maintain a CPM. We want increases in CPM when changes improve the CTR as should be expected, but are not being realized.
In the past they might have paid 50% of the bid amount, for all we know they could have lowered this amount to 10%.
"For all we know" is like "Some people say": Depending on the source, it can mean anything from "This is idle speculation" to "I made this up."
As for specific figures, I doubt very much if Google's revenue-sharing formula is a simple percentage split, for two reasons:
1) A straight percentage split would be too easy for publishers--and competitors--to figure out.
2) A more complex formula has other benefits for Google (e.g., being able to motivate top performers or publishers in high-profit categories, or being able to use factors such as account overhead and profitability when calculating publisher compensation).
It's also worth noting that Google has no contractual obligation to pay you a specific share of the monies that it receives from advertisers. Google merely promises: "AdSense offers more ways for you to earn money while making your site more useful for visitors...When visitors click on these ads, Google pays you." If you want to obsess over percentages and commissions, stick with traditional banner networks and affiliate programs. Otherwise, learn to obsess over the CPM and revenue numbers in your AdSense reports instead. :-)
I am not defending Google. I am looking at the information at hand. You are simply speculating and looking for things that aren't there or don't make sense. Many publishers don't see any leveling effects.
How will Google grow its income? This is simple, it will try to get more advertisers and more publishers. Pretty standard stuff and it is exactly the way it has grown the business.
Please do some research on smart pricing. It is not smoke and mirrors. As an advertiser I have seen a decline in CPC I payout since it came into effect. Visi: read that last sentence again. I pay less, Web master gets less. But, what does it encourage me to do? Use the content network - which I used to turn off. Somewhere out there are Web masters who get income from me. Without Smart Pricing, I would not run the content network. Result: they would not get any of the my ad dollars. I am not the only Advertiser who takes this approach.
Once in a while income goes up for a week or two for no reason. But then Google detects that you are getting a free ride and shuts down that income. It's funny, they managed to give out the right amount of money that makes it worth keeping, but not enough to get too excited about it :)
With a ton of experimentation and reading other people's experience I've come to the conclusion that Google's policies and algorithms are totally random. It goes up and down at a whim and without rhyme or reason. Add pages? No effect. Increase pageviews. No effect. Choose ugly colors, no effect. Same colors as the site? No affect.
And that's bad? If they're trying to make AdSense harder to reverse engineer, more power to them. In the long run, that encourages publishers to focus on real content instead of "made for AdSense" pages that clutter up Google's SERPs.
The exact algorithms for both AdWords and AdSense haven't been fully disclosed to anyone except to a small group of Google's elites who are daily re-tuning, updating, changing, correcting, adding, etc. What did it reveals is a partial haft of these equations. So now you have a thousand of unknowns and variables. You can have any answer you want depending on what your assumptions you input. Thus, none can claim that he/she knows all about AdSense's algorithms. You may know today but not tomorrow.
As I said this, I still want to read all of your arguments in all sides. Why? I learn something. What you discussed in this forum have greatly affected the outcome of these algorithms. I have seen many changes which were directly or indirectly resulted from the discussion in these forums (AdWords & AdSense). Someone from this Google's elite group is reading my post right now.
If I was Google, I would give publishers with higher CTR better paying ads just because it would make me more money...
What's the difference to Google if an advertiser's daily budget is spent mostly on one high-CTR site or distributed across a number of lower-CTR sites? In theory, the cost of serving the ads might be less with the high-CTR site (since fewer ads would be served for each click), but the savings would be infinitesimal.
IMHO, lead quality is of far greater importance to the advertiser, and what matters to the advertiser matters to Google. That's obviously why Google offers conversion-tracking tools: not only to provide a useful service for advertisers, but also to create a body of data that can be used to extrapolate the value of a click from certain types of pages or even (where data is available) from specific pages or sites.
As for conversion tracking, it is another knob, another variable. I never said that it makes sense for AdSense (n o pun intended) to distribute highpaying ads based on CTR alone.
Uh, WE have, we started alternating ads with one of their competitors on the same page, and hopefully within the next week we'll have what appear to be some PRETTY interesting results to share.
We've been seeing the same exact thing being reported. Higher CTR, higher CPM. We literally doubled BOTH compared to the prior week simply by removing ads from the lowest CTR/CPM pages each day, yet overall earnings per click (that evasive statistic that G avoids in their reports) almost halved in the last 2 weeks. We're talking 20K-50K impressions/day here.
This thread has conjectured that higher CPM should mean better, but I was also told by a rep that the avg CPM is $2 and the avg CTR is something like 1-2% (I was pointing out to the rep that ours had previously been > $30 and 10% respectively with our privately placed ads.) It occurs to me that they might see anything significantly higher than "average" as "suspicious" and possibly not worth as much as their decidedly "average" producing sites. Ours just happens to have quite a few highly targeted pages viewed by people ready to click/buy.
A lot of the conjecture on this thread involves, not knowing the bid amounts. I am NOT an adword advertiser, do not have an account (we DO do overture and know the rates there), so someone tell me if I'm wrong here. But if you go to the adwords signup page, start to sign up and go through the signup process as a NEW advertiser, to just before where you have to enter Credit Card info, you get to enter and evaluate keywords. It then gives you the estimated cost per click for these keywords, avg rank, etc. Is this then, NOT the approximate cost a FIRST PLACE bidder is paying per clickthru? If so, then why does this show something like $1.50 for my keyword, while my avg earnings per click, ON A SPECIFIC CHANNEL, for the same very specific keyword subject, which has shown the same ad, all week, SERVING only ONE AD (not just one ad unit - ONE single AD - ONE single place to click) show only .12 per click! Why does it not show at least .75? This is SO easy to try yourselves folks and confirm it. CHECK THE BIDS, PUT ON ONE AD, TARGET ONE SPECIFIC DECENT KEYWORD, ONE DEDICATED CHANNEL, and divide your earnings by the clicks on that channel.
And YES we DID track the geo-positioning of the majority of the visitors on that page and studied the ads available under different geographical locations using the tool.
Can adwords bidders select one price for one location and another for network ads?
When our publication was wooed by G to replace our existing privately placed banner ads with GAdsense, the rep promised "we pay you the MAJORITY of the bid price"! To me that indicates 51% or higher. So what is this talk about 20%, 40% 50%?
I've also heard rumors that G takes into account feedback from adwords advertisers on the "effectiveness" of click thrus to evaluate the "value" of publishers. We had a few competitors show up on our early ad results which we had to manually find and filter. Could these competitors have taken that opportunity to "discredit" us based on those early clicks? I know... "no one knows for sure".
It sounds to me like there are a lot of disillusioned people out there, and what they are discribing: "constantly adding content and impressions, but losing ground in earnings and constantly chasing the wind to make up lost ground and meet prior earnings quotas" sounds a lot like nothing short of slavery to G to me. Most of us are in this business because we want to get AWAY from slaving away our lives for someone else. And I wholeheartedly agree with "if it isn't working, get rid of it..." So WE more than likely WILL be switching by the start of next month and going back to what we KNOW worked better before, or at least to a competing ad server.
Adwords advertizers frequently run dual campaigns. One higher priced for search only, and one with lower bids for search and content sites.
And many advertizers simply don't allow their ads on content sites.
So the numbers you see on the adwords ad set up system may not apply to content sites. That's one reason why you can see high bids there and see low earnings per click on adsense stats. Throw in Smart Pricing and it gets even more abstract.
