Adwords and it's effect on CPC and CPM

Coincidence?

[Powdork]

Ever notice the ill effect it has on Adsense when you turn off an adwords campaign to the page with Adsense. I do. Almost monthly I turn off my Adwords campaign when I get close to my budget. Additionally I will turn it off for other reasons at other times. EVERY time there is a huge drop in eCPM. Usually it is a combination of CTR and EPC along with a shift to marginally targetted ads. But the main thing I worry about is that there has always been a drop in the Earnings per Click. Without fail. That leads one to wonder if the EPC is somehow tied to the referrer field, an IP that came from Google, or something tied to the account in general.
At least it makes me wonder.

[stuartmcdonald]

Interesting - I was thinking about making a post speculating the opposite! We suspended all our adwords campaigns a few weeks ago. The result has been a consistent (14 days now) and substantial increase (circa 30%) in EPC.

The increase in EPC has been substantial enough that even taking into consideration the drop in traffic and resulting lower total clicks, I'm not far off what I was earning when I was spending dough on Adsense. Revenue is about 10% off last month, but as I'm not spending anything on Adwords, I'm ahead.

At this stage I'm disinclined to restart the Adwords campaign and instead see the overall site traffic grow at a slower rate.

[bumpski]

Do you block your own URL's, so your ads don't show on your own site? Or do you avoid the content network completely? I've always wondered why Adsense and Adwords don't discuss this topic somewhere.
(I'm not sure I fully understand these posts so please forgive possibly stupid questions)

[ionchannels]

This is an interesting thread. We have found that adwords traffic has a negative impact upon adsense earnings. I think the traffic from adwords is much more "low-brow" compared with targeted traffic from sources such as professional conference promotions etc... I think it has something to do with smart pricing and the fact that adwords traffic is generally joe-surfer types who may click at a higher rate, but convert far less - my niche is medical information, so I would much rather have clinicians and scientists than the typical surfer. I guess it depends on the niche, but I have found I made more once I turned off adwords - my CTR dropped, and CPM and EPC rose substantially, enough to offset the loss of "dumb traffic"... interesting...

[thegreatpretender]

I've just investigated the stat of one my sites today and was surprised to find out that my adword traffic are mostly coming from trash websites like parked domains. But despite of this, I'm getting higher ctr and epc for two weeks now.

[bumpski]

Powdork & stuartmcdonald

This post may give you some clues:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Adwords and Adsense can interact (in bad ways) if you're using tracking /referrer URL's, unless Google has fixed this. I checked a couple of weeks ago (Sept. 05) and still saw the bad side effect of infrequently used referrer strings.

[Atomic]

I have also noticed that eCPM improves when either:

a) I reduce the keyword bid price
b) pause the campaign

Pausing the campaign has other effects such as a reduction in traffic and that impacts my afiliate sales and overall earnings. I was thinking about posting in regards to this issue and I'm glad to see that someone else has noticed it. I can see why Google might discount clicks that are the result of AdWords traffic a little. It makes sense to discount the advertiser a little bit.

This is not the result of referrer strings at the end of a URL. It is true that the ads are not as targeted but I think there is more at work here. Smart pricing is probably one of the things discounting clicks. So you have to decide what works best for you. After Bourbon I had no traffic and decided to try AdWords and have made a bundle even with this discounting/poor targeting for AdWords traffic. But you really have to make sure your AdSense clicks are worth it.

[Powdork]

Bumpski, I have never had a problem with my own ads showing up on my own side. I usually do run content ads but as a separate ad group.