Matched Content helping, but not really

[JS_Harris]

I'm giving Adsense's "matched content" a fair trial near the bottom of my pages. These are my results after a few days.

- My server logs indicate 15% of visitors are clicking through, roughly the same as with other similar links I've used
- My pageviews, as reported by adsense, are nearly 40% higher but my server logs say it's less than half that
- My CTR, as reported by adsense, has fallen by nearly 40%, but again my server logs say it's less than half that
- Overall I am serving more pages for slightly less in total earnings

More importantly:
Am I making my visitors happier with this? That depends, are they finding what they want on the page matched content is sending them to?

Am I making search engines happier with this? That depends, are visitors finding what they want on the page matched content is sending them to?

I am watching which pages are being considered "matched" closely and so far it's OK. I plan on using this as a tool too to find candidate pages to merge and consolidate if they aren't significantly different enough for my liking and/or continually take a visitor off my best page onto a lesser page with a more tempting title.

[AmpedSense Plugin]

I got approved into this a couple months ago, but haven't tried it since I didn't really see any benefits. My goal is to increase my adsense earnings, and I can see how this indirectly does this, but if all it's doing is adding links to related content, then I am a better judge of what's related more than Google is (my assumption).

Plus the examples I saw looked like they were ads. Who wants to put more ad-looking content on their site that isn't going to result in direct ad clicks?

Thanks for sharing your stats here - has anyone else noticed the same?

[tangor]

As a variation on a theme matched content is not "bad", but do agree that I am better suited to determine a "matched content" link than G, so... just one more way to keep folks "glued" to the g "machine" and not sure there's any real value there.

[Rasputin]

When I tried them a few months ago they looked ok and found reasonably sensible pages to link to but added a lot of extra load time to the page to the extent I thought they were having a negative impact on visitors, so I took them off.

[Swanny007]

I've been running them on my second-largest website for a long time, since pretty much they announced it. I do sometimes see ads in the list and I nearly took it off but instead I sent feedback back to Google that I did not agree to them placing ads in there. Long story short is I rarely see ads in there anymore.

I put it at the very footer of my site where you would normally have an ad (I moved the ad to the bottom of the content text). I can't say it has any huge impact, it's hard to measure after all. However it actually looks and fits well there and serves a purpose, which is to help people click to other parts of my site. So I don't even look at the stats anymore, it's just there.