I will attempt to explain my analysis of the last 40 days of my sites and my conclusion, which now seems obvious and logical to me. And why I think Google's "Invalid Traffic" message might actually mean "Invalid Traffic for High CPM Ads." This message could be long.
Let's try to understand what it really means to switch from a CPC (Cost Per Click) system to a CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) system. We need to think about how Google must operate to sell this.
If we put ourselves in the shoes of an advertiser, the difference between CPC and CPM is that CPC involves paying per interaction, while CPM means paying for attention received. With CPC, we sell interactions with the ads. With CPM, we sell attention time devoted to the ads or the brand.
To address this, AdSense must place high CPM ads on spots that receive a lot of attention time. It's not about traffic, but about time, to correctly bill CPM and ensure advertisers are not shortchanged.
From AdSense's perspective, it's crucial to find spots where attention time is significant, meaning pages where people stay for a long time. These are the pages where AdSense can afford to place animated ads and videos, as well as very costly ads for advertisers. It may take time to analyze the sites that show a high average attention time, on which it can then confidently publish the ads of top advertisers.
A site with many visits but where visitors quickly move from one page to another or scroll very fast, is not ideal for display because it could quickly deplete my client's budget while the visitor hasn't even seen the ad for two seconds.
I reflect on this as a developer with 30 years of experience in my field and 10 years of experience with AdSense. I wondered how, if I had to offer this service directly to clients and create my own system based on CPM billing, I could publish different types of ads in the right places, all while ensuring maximum visibility for my clients. I would start by analyzing the sites where I have placements to see how long users stay on a page and how fast they navigate to optimize the placement of ads that have a large budget.
From the site owner's perspective, it's important to have spots where the visitor stays for a long time, to optimize their attention time.
From this, I arrive at the following conclusions for my sites. I have different types of sites, and those that bring in the least are the purely informational sites. I have one that has been on the first page of its domain for years, with 50 to 60 thousand monthly visits from Google, and yet it's the least performing, barely bringing in four times the cost of hosting and domain name. But it's also the one where visitors consult several pages (low bounce rate) but change pages very quickly. I have other information sites that monetize better than the first due to their theme, and that with fewer visits. But the yield is barely acceptable.
My revenue generation leaders are my favorites. And what's their special feature? It's that my visitors, whom I prefer to call users in this case, spend 20 to 30 times more time on each page than on the first site mentioned.
The difference lies in the fact that I have pure content pages and content pages where the user has functionalities to interact with or use the content.
For these sites, the RPM (Revenue Per Mille) is $20 to $30 on weekdays, and drops to $15 on weekends.
Two of these sites have only 5 pages in total, but can generate up to $80 on the best days for 2000 page views.
All these sites target the same regions, and the niches are different. The only correlation between the high-performing sites and the less profitable ones is the time spent per page, that is, the attention time I offer to AdSense advertisers. Moreover, I have observed a 200% increase (simplifying) in video ads, which clearly require the most attention time.
So, let's forget the traffic obsession; I am convinced that the real issue is the attention time per visitor, and not just the bounce rate or the total time spent on the site, but the time devoted to each page.
This remains my own analysis, but it's the only explanation that makes sense when I look at AdSense's behavior on my sites. The difference lies in this parameter.
Next step? Check your data and think about what kinds of functionalities you can offer to your users with your content.
