Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'd like to see if I can get a general concensus on the things that are good, and bad in ragards to CTR and Smart Pricing.
Currently, I still have ads on my forum - however the vast majority of my revenue still comes from the rest of the site. The forum has several hundred thousand more pageviews monthly than that of the rest of the site, and performs extemely poorly in the area of CTR.
That said, the CTR of my forums brings down the CTR of the site substantially.
Would I see an increase in EPC site wide if I ditched the ads from the forum, or is this just myth/coincodence for some people.
Also, is there a point at which your CTR being too high can cause the EPC to fall... that you've noticed of course.
This is all speculation to me at this point, but I am very interested in hearing your experiences at any rate.
Although, unfortunately, this happened around the same time Google announced recent changes to Smart Pricing, so I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Since I've reinstated posting abilities, CTR went back down, but earnings have not gone back down to their dismal levels (although they did drop a bit)...
I compared test results over a 6 week period and A¦B tested it. Several times.
I had alternating CTRs of ~0.3% and ~2%. I would alternat them for a week at a time. The traffic source remained the same for the tests.
The results showed an initial increase in CPC on the first increase in CTR with a decline to normal CPC rates there after. There after for every change in CTR there was no change in CPC.
It should also be noted that the Number of Clicks was relatively the same during high CTR and low CTR periods.
From this I concluded that in my case for a single source of traffic in the entertainment sector a change in CTR does not relate to a change in CPC.
Maybe you were out of the tail end of the bell curve when you got the 5 percent. If the rate of increase is S shaped.
From what I understand, CTR has a direct impact on Smart Pricing. While this isn't published as 100% true, I believe that it is quite possible.
It's certainly possible, if CTR grows at the expense of conversions for advertisers.
Let's say that you disguise ads as editorial content or as navigation links, and a significant number of users click on the ads because they're confused. Your CTR will go up, but advertisers' conversion rates will go down. In theory, at least, this should result in higher "smart pricing" discounts for advertisers and lower earnings per click for you.
I'd like to know in particular how the conversions are tracked for sites like the following:
User visits an AdSense ad on my site that takes them to a "made for adsense" site.
The conversion for that person is when they follow one of their AdSense ads... is that tracked as a conversion, or are all of my visitors that are lost to these type of sites not showing conversions of any kind?
I see a lot of these type of sites, and while I filter them when I notice a scraper or something similar, I don't watch the ads all day long. Something like this could really hurt me in the long run in terms of Smart Pricing. Perhaps I have it all wrong... I think I need to run a few hundred through AdWords for nothing more than a learning experience.
I haven't run a serious adwords campaign so I am not sure how they measure conversion.
[adwords.google.com...]
Note especially the definition of a "conversion," which can be a sale or other "business action":
[adwords.google.com...]
If having a low CTR does cause the clicks you get to be discounted in terms of EPC, then I need to re-think some of my advertising strategies.
For example, there are places that I advertise that generate lots of traffic, but in some cases the folks are webmasters themselves. While they are genuinely interested in the content (or they wouldn't have read the article) they know about AdSense and will not visit the ads.
I would obviously stop allowing my articles to be viewed on sites like this if it is going to hurt my EPC. I would also immediately drop my very poorly performing forums. They do provide a fair amount of income, but not nearly enough to warrant bringing down the CTR and possibly the EPC of the rest of the sites clicks (95%+)
