Forum Moderators: martinibuster
but not all other publishers.
EPC on my site fluctuates so much it's impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions from it. Who knows why. Advertizers may adjust their bids, or drop out of content ads temporarily or entirely, Smart Pricing might kick in, the high season for a topic might be over, etc., etc.
Meanwhile my eCPM is slowly but steadily on an upward trend and so are total earnings.
It seems to me that eCPM is much more important a number than CTR or EPC. Looking at eCPM makes it easier to compare historical numbers with current numbers.
but I can't see how if I have doubled clicks that the revenue is only slightly up
It's all supply and demand.
You supply impressions, advertisers demand ROI :)
If ROI is down with more lookers and less conversaions advertisers won't be willing to spend as much for all those clicks as their ad budgets go upside down in a hurry. The more page impressions you have I'd suspect rates to go down, not up as advertisers need to cover more clicks on more pages to capture the sale.
As an AdSense publisher, my income there took a dive in March, and is now just starting to recover. It's a small part of my total revenue, though, so I don't sweat it much and check stats only once or twice a day.
It's all SUPPLY and DEMAND. The number of publishers are higher, and the number of ad units we run on average are even greater per publisher, what with multiple ad blocks being allowed whereas in the past we only ran 1 adblock per page. Now we can have 4 units total, 3 ad unit blocks and 1 google link unit which could have at least 20 ads in total on 1 web-page.
In addition, something many are forgetting is Gmail. Take a look at 1 simple email. The gmail I looked at had 5 ads plus links to 2 sets of related ads with 18 ads on each page. That would be 41 ads originating from one email. That is a lot of supply multiplied by millions of gmails per day!
So just 1 average webpage and 1 small email could easily market 61 ads in total, or more. That is a lot of supply, whereas I am sure the number of adwords customers has not increased anywhere near as much. 1-1/2 yrs ago when we were limited to 1 ad unit and no Gmail there were about 5 ads vs 61 or more now!
Plus you have to take into consideration G allows some publishers (of all sizes, small and large from what I hear) to run Google Hints where they can target selected good keywords in their code. It is said G also permits large publishers to use URL Referral Line of Code to actually identify and use the same relevant ads running on 3rd party websites. All that targeting of keywords would also seem to impact the supply, especially popular and well paying keywords.
IMO, it's surprising the average publisher has not declined even more that what many report. G has done a good job maintaining publisher revenue in light of the amazingly worse supply and demand situation.
it's surprising the average publisher has not declined even more that what many report. G has done a good job maintaining publisher revenue in light of the amazingly worse supply and demand situation.
Amazingly worse supply and demand? i.e. a lot more supply of ad spaces than demand exists for them?
What's your source?
AFAIK, Google is actively campaigning for more publishers. They see publishers as the key and even more important than advertisers (contrary to what intuition dictates). They cold call webmasters to sign up to Adsense. All the indicators are that they don't have enough publishers... not the other way round. Search is only a small part of how people get to sites. Google appreciates that and is trying desperately to reach the page views they don't now have control over.
If it is the case that the demand and supply position favours the publihser then other things remaining unchanged EPC should go up.
there are many more publishers this year over last year,
Given a positive ROI there's virtually no limit to the number of clicks advertisers will take.
I too am disappointed with the steady drop in EPC on some channels. I've got tracking going back to 2003 (including before Google had "channels") and looking at moving averages and monthly averages there is no doubt that on some topics EPC keeps declining steadily for no explicable reason. I'd call a Google conspiracy except that on other channels/accounts I do have steady or increased EPC.
If it is the case that the demand and supply position favours the publihser then other things remaining unchanged EPC should go up
What individual publishers make vs the 50% take Google gets for all publishers is two different things.
I would hazard a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess) the only reason Overture bidding still seems to be higher than AdWords is from the simple fact of how Overture works and how restrictive and picky they are about their their publishers and advertisers. If you want good visibility on Overture you have to pay for it meaning a few advertisers pay a lot more than the rest of the advertisers.
The genius of Google AdWords/AdSense on the other hand tries to get as many publishers as possible to create as many ad spaces as possible so ALL of the advertisers are paying as much as possible all over the place. The only problem with this approach is although you have all the advertisers paying many of them only have to pay $0.05 to get ads shown on the content network (trust me, that's all I'm paying to get 1,000s of clicks per day on a keyword) but have to pay higher to jostle for position on Google itself.
We have no idea where the top dollar advertisers show up, whether it's on Google search only so they can keep 100% of the ad money, if it's only on publishers that generate the best ROI for the keyword, or if it's round robin random distribution and whoever gets it first wins. No clue whatsoever.
This morning I get up and earnings for the clicks so far today are up 68% over yesterday!
End of month ad budgets being spent to catch last minute sales?
Google just decided to send more business my way?
Go figure.
This morning I get up and earnings for the clicks so far today are up 68% over yesterday!
I didn't check the exact percentage, but I saw a similar scenario this morning as well. I've already earned better than 75% of yesterday's entire earnings. Perhaps a click dump? It's only just after 10am here.
Anyway I was writing because I've noticed our ads getting "better" and CTR going up but CPM and PPC going steadily down. By "better" what I mean is they tend to match the top most ads displayed by G when searching for a particular matching keyword. I contend these ARE the highest paying (ON THE AVERAGE - Not every ad available to G-search is placed on G-Ads, plus there could be many, many exceptions) for the following reasons:
1. They tend to match very closely the order of the highest bidders on Overture which anyone can view.
2. When I filter ads which are "lower" ranked in the search my PPC goes up.
3. Why would G place the lowest paying ads at the top of their own search? Do they REALLY want to cater to the low-paying advertisers?
Would anyone ever bid higher if they knew they could get to the top without even bidding higher than the minimum. OF COURSE the top ads on Gsearch are the highest paying. Just compare the top rankers and their suspected ad budgets (based upon company size and sales size).
The biggest impact I suspect lately is GAdsense getting creative with keywords and not displaying ads based upon the highest paying term on the page. For instance if term "A" pays 1.00, term "B" pays 2.00 and phrase "A B" is going for .50 they are displaying ads bidding for phrase "A B". Perhaps they feel (and perhaps justifiably so) that phrase "A B" is more "appropriate" a term to match since both words happen to appear together on our page whereas they don't appear together as often on others. I've done a lot of investigating of late into the terms which are being matched, by studying the URLs in the preview utility. About 1/3 of the advertisers now are inserting some sort of coding in their links to track the matched keywords. I've been noticing more lately that while the advertisers are often "top of the line" for the industry (ones who consistently bid high), but often times the matched term/phrase is NOT one which they pay highly for! Some times the second term (B) doesn't even appear on the page!
Again whether this is intentional on anyone's part (say an advertiser bidding on the cheap for a very specific term that noone else has noticed, that appears only on our pages in order to target them, or some deep dark alterior algorithm motive by G) or not, I believe it is by and large a major reason for the declining CPM/PPC's.
Here's a question for those of you in Adwords (and honest enough to provide a straight answer): If you searched the web and decided you wanted to be on a particular publisher's specific page (say an Adsense publishers page which comes up #1 on G under your favorite term and which gets 10,000 impressions/day) would it be a difficult task to target your ad to it by picking some VERY unique and specific terms appearing ONLY on that page (say for instance: "santa fried widgets with albatross drippings" for a page which is the #1 topmost authority on widgets) and then bidding close to the absolute minimum since it IS such an obscure and specific phrase that noone else thought of it? From what I have scrounged from the forums, since G appears to optimize ads based upon term matching and appears to optimize performance mostly from CPM (not PPC), as long as your ad was well written to attract and pay for lots of clicks (which you could afford to do since it's paying only .05 for a $2.00 term) your ad would get better (and more frequent) placement than the higher bidders, thus lowering my overall PPC drastically from 1.00 to .03.
I haven't determined anything you can really do about it short of constantly changing the text on your page so they aren't so well targeted to minor phrases (if you can determine what they are). "Competitor Filtering" them eliminates them from coming up on other GOOD pages where they MAY in fact be bidding 1.00 for a high interest term.
At those low prices you could then afford to turn around and place nothing but adsense ads on your landing page targeted only to "Widgets" and make .97 per click thru... (Don't try it with US, we search for and filter those kinds of obvious traffic sucking ads :)
...Amazingly worse supply and demand? i.e. a lot more supply of ad spaces than demand exists for them? What's your source? AFAIK, Google is actively campaigning for more publishers. They see publishers as the key and even more important than advertisers (contrary to what intuition dictates). They cold call webmasters to sign up to Adsense. All the indicators are that they don't have enough publishers... not the other way round...
Really, are you sure about that? BTW, it would be great if you are right and I am wrong, nothing would please me more!
Do you believe the number of adwords clients (Adwords Demand) has increased at the same or better ratio of possible ads (Adsense Supply)? Which supply has multiplied from 5 or so in 2003 to anywhere from 25 to as much as 61 potential ads today (increases of Supply of from 500% to 1200%), using my examples of 4 adsense units allowed on 1 webpage plus a number of ads in a Gmail email. Whereas in the past we could only run 1 ad unit and gmail was not around.
Really, are you sure about that?
Personally, I'm 100% convinced about that. There are a lot of posts and references I could put together to make a case for this but it would take too long. However, logically, it's very simple. Search accounts for only a small percentage of how people get to pages. Google realises that and has to reach people on pages other than SERPs.
AFAIK, Google is actively campaigning for more publishers. They see publishers as the key and even more important than advertisers (contrary to what intuition dictates). They cold call webmasters to sign up to Adsense. All the indicators are that they don't have enough publishers... not the other way round...
More than the lack of publishers, I think Google's aggressive recruitment of publishers is more to solidify their first mover position - before competition (Y) comes in and grabs the publisher market. They want to be first in the hearts and minds of the publishers. Give the publishers a taste of the income they can get from Adsense (which partly explains the reason why G may have relaxed the restriction on publishers revealing their income numbers) - thus creating higher barriers to entry for the competition.
Now the competition must really work hard and come up with a superior product relative to Adsense to lure those publishers that have been using Adsense, particularly those who have been earning really good money from Adsense.
