Hope Google, Adsense, Adwords, can flush them all away. Millions and millions of useless pages flooding the web, wasting users time. Webhosts could help stop this flood too!
Unfortunately its a trivial task to create huge interlinked, machine generated web sites, whose content has been stolen (scraped) from legitimate sites on the web. These sites degrade user/customer interest in the web as a whole. I've seen sites composed of 1000's of pages constructed entirely of random sentences on a given topic ripped from other sites. Actually sometimes a pretty good read! Monkey's on typewriters fully automated. For some sites I can see how difficult it must be for a search engine to sort out the scrapers.
Search engines are not scrapers they do not publish hard copies of their results pages to be crawled by other search engines. They also allow easy contact and opt-out.
These scraper sites are taking your money and not producing conversions, its that simple
Due to it, I have removed 90% of my adsense ads. If I don't get X per click, I remove the ads from that page. Supply and Demand.
Costs have risen but so have CTR's. We actually had to use the geo feature to eliminate marginal and non converting countries. This has really helped with results.
We have also added AdSense which now offsets our entire AdWords spend.
One thing I notice about ads that show up on our site is many do not specify where they are located and probably end up getting a lot of useless clicks.
If you are advertising in content make sure that the potential clicker understands where you are. Unlike search where the search types in "New York widget" in content you could show up on a content site aimed at Puerto Rico. If the clicker does not know you are in New york until he actually clicks on the ad then it will end up costing you and not converting.
How many products do you have and how many keywords?
What was your average position on a typical ad, and how did it change over the past year?
Do you try out new ad texts and run them alongside old ones?
I get the feeling I don't have quite enough infomation to work out whats wrong and that would be a good start.
Jim_w: Did google adsense just start smart pricing this year? Also, who did you put up in their place?
Tropical Island: Thanks for the info. We haven't done content ads since late 2003 since the conversion ratios were so low. I know they changed them and said they were going to be better, but I didn't belive it. I'll try it again. Thanks for the advice.
AlexMiles:
We have about 500 products on the site and we have a total of about 300 keywords, but there are only around 20 different categories that we target, so most of our keywords are just more specific versions of our root keywords. Here are some numbers from Jun to Sept for 04 and 05:
2004 vs. 2005
Clicks 102,502 vs. 63,231
Impressions 5,184,817 vs. 3,314,265
CTR 1.9% vs. 1.9%
Avg. CPC .16 vs. .18
Cost $16,702.29 vs. $11,808.20
Conv. Rate .83% vs. .56%
Cost/Conv. $19.53 vs. $32.71
Thanks for your help!
I may have a unique situation due to the fact that I do not block competitor’s ads. So for a while now, I believe using smart pricing, they have tried to only pay pennies to place their ads. When I see this, I remove the ads. Then they bid higher due to fewer ad view opportunities, so I put the ads back. Then once again they cut the price. This has gone on 2 or 3 times at least, and takes several months to play out this game of ‘footsie’ back and forth. It’s been going on for I would reckon a couple of quarters at least. I’m now thinking about putting only one ad on these pages like once every 10 page views. We of course have some pages that pay a MUCH higher value, consistently, and they stay the same.
So this is one view from an adsense side of the equation, which should be evaluated as a possible partial solution to your problem. Apparently, there IS money to be made on content ads, and it could give you more ad views at a lower price thus increasing your returns, depending on whom you are bidding against with your ads only showing on Google. If you dig in and find all the scraper sites, and block the ads from displaying there I would guess your return would be better.
I have several of was to make up the cost, which if I get less than .30 per click, isn’t REAL hard to make up for. Sometimes it just impulse buyers but we have about 4 other ways that I would rather not discuss.
But, what the heck do I know?
Have your competitors raised the bar? If others increase their conversions, yours will drop.
I spend a lot of time in my adwords account and I have thousands of keywords. It seems to me you don't have that many, and you CTR seems a little on the low side - although I've never sold guitars (if thats what you do).
There are lots and lots of techniques involved in getting your keywords in good positions for less money than your competitors pay. Its not just a case of paying as much as you can afford. I'm not really inclined to go over these techniques with half the planet's webmasters reading though - just be aware that there are methods.
Has your average position slipped this past year?
Thanks!
[edited by: eWhisper at 6:14 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2005]
[edit reason] Please don't drop email addresses. See TOS. [/edit]
...I'm wondering if they changed something in January that made it worse for everyone...
I recall posting here about 6 months back asking similar. Something certainly happened at the beginning of the year and I've never been able to figure out the "who, what, where, when and why" of it.
It was a bit like waking in the morning and finding your left-hand drive car had suddenly become a right--hand drive overnight. It still worked - but something was different :-)
All very vague I know and, at this stage in the year, quite meaningless. The thing is to adapt and move on. Question, learn, adapt. Repeat...
Syzygy
1. your CTR has not changed in a year - go back to school on this one, even with more competitors thats not a hi CTR, have you tested anything to improve it over the last year?
2. maybe you need to reaccess your landing pages, do your competicion do anything differently, things you think might work?
3. have you tried other ppc sources - some converft better than others, depending on product.
finally - best of luck.
