Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I came up with a theory that smart pricing was not really all that smart and tried to figure out what the bot does to determine your "smart pricing"
I think that there is an algo that ties in your poor performing pages and uses them to weight your site for worthiness.
The more pages you track the lower your quality (to the bot).
On the 2nd I deleted all custom channels and saw a 400% jump in income. Went through the 4th of July weekend with better than average earnings. Daily income going up by 2 to 8 dollars a day.
Ctr and ecpm are doing better but slowly, with ecpm rocking down and up.
Payout per click went up from 3 to 9 cents and had 5 .19 cent clicks on search...unheard of in the past. (my average payout per click was 8 cents for my niche)
Noticed better ads began showing up that had not been there before and no crap ads that I could find.
Things slowed down and started rocking so I thought, "hummm, mr bot has found another way". So I started going though my site page by page and changing out the channel ads for regular ones and adding them to pages that did not have them...more page views...:), and have seen the ctr and epcm renew their upward creep.
This weekend was higher than the weekends I've been having for several months now.
For me it is working, I still have over 800 pages left to examine and check for adsense channel ads, (doing this in alphabetical order.)
I am not saying anyone else should do this, that is your choice. All I am saying is it is working for me and judging by the payout and the better ads I can tell the worth of my sites have gone up.
I'm not quite ready to merge the active channels into one "channel-less" category like Ann did, but perhaps if this initial test proves successful I will.
If I recall the channel availablity came about the time of Smart Pricing (April 2004?).
3. On those pages use just one ad
Does this mean that you removed 2nd or 3rd ad units from your pages as well as adding Adlinks units to those pages?
Adding Adlinks, removing 2nd/3rd ad units, and erasing channel data, doesn't sound like a theory to me. Sorry if I sound rude, but this just isn't good testing.
Again let me stress that IF you choose to do what I did those are the steps to follow, part of the formula may or may not work for you. Do them all if you are going to make this test. (from the 2nd to the 19th and It is still working for me). :)
Thought this thread had been deleted but lo and behold it is renamed and a featured front page thread....wow!
Guys and girls, I sincerely hope those who do this have a positive outcome and maybe some of us can breathe easier. :)
Ann
Thank you
I am willing to bet last month's earnings that many will see earnings rise, and the rest will see earnings fall ;-)
We are like passengers at opposite ends of a boat at sea.
I spent quite awhile thoroughly engrossed in another Featured Home Page Discussion yesterday and read every single post! So watch out Ann - this thing could take off! :-)
The other post (349 messages!) was from the AdWords side of things and quite an eye-opener! [webmasterworld.com ]
[edited by: Play_Bach at 4:25 am (utc) on July 20, 2006]
Thought this thread had been deleted but lo and behold it is renamed and a featured front page thread....wow!
wow indeed Ann... good on you.
Time and again, Google has said they do not want to be influenced by user corruptible data (like toolbar monitored click throughs etc) on the algorithmic search side.
To me, something as simple as channels is corruptible by publishers. I'd rather go with semantic qualities of a page and its conversion abilities (take a look at adlab.msn.com to determine if your site is a buy or a research site) to determine the payout. Yes, these are corruptible too... but that involves changing the page.
If channel selection is indeed a factor, I'd say give it till Monday to be dropped. A few people are going to work a long weekend.
are the steps to this change that:
the custom channel is deleted from inside the Adsense user interface
the Adsense code on the target webpage is changed to remove the channel idenitifier and the page is republished.
these are the only changes that are made.
Sorry if I've missed something and my questions seem a bit dim - I just want to make sure for myself exactly what we're discussing.
One cannot rely on what G says. They say many things but do as they deem fit. Secrecy is the key to their working. ..and I think they may have bulit in misinformation also as a strategic tool.
So good for you Ann.. if you have broken one of their 'codes'...
To me, something as simple as channels is corruptible by publishers.
Maybe, sorta. If all Ann is effectively doing is altering the input to the SmartPricing algorithm, then it could be a situation where some folks will get helped by the strategy and others will be hurt -- and people will be unable to predict in advance which result they will get.
If there is a real effect here, and if the effect has to do with SmartPricing, then look for there to be a window of effectiveness. If Google starts getting advertisers signed up for their payment system, the SmartPricing algorithm will have much improved data to work with, and I expect that data to swamp the current inputs to the algorithm.
Internet advertising is still incredibly cheap compared to print, radio and TV, but I am convinced that's due to change. When? I don't know, but for all of us publishers... the sooner the better. So, I have no sympathy for the poster on Adwords who is spending $300K per year. Why doesn't he reveal his net profit? (probably embarrassingly high, like in the multiple millions $$$)
Have fun. It's summertime.
I will tell you later if anything has changed.
And I hope Google won't back up all channels now in fear that webmasters will all delete their channels :)
We've had channels setup so long, we know what our pages will do even without the channels.
[edited by: Sweet_Cognac at 2:54 pm (utc) on July 20, 2006]
Google just resets for a week until price pricing kicks in for your entire site. You are much better off creating custom channels and geo targetting your traffic. Ie one channel gets US only visitors and other channels get the rest. And make sure pages in a channel have similar pageviews per user ratio.
What do you use to geotarget customers? That is, what service or database, or PHP code, etc.
Also, is there a list of countries with IP masks that are known to be helpful to one's AdSense stats, and a list of those that are harmful?
Thanks.
Has anyone tried 'Deactivating' the channels rather than deleting them? Do you think it would have the same effect?
AdSense Support, in the section on channels, says the following about deactivated channels:
"Data will no longer be collected for deactivated channels, but you can always pull up the historical data for a deactivated channel when generating reports."
And about removed channels:
"Please note, however, that creating a URL channel for the same URL as a previously removed channel will cause the previously collected data to apply."
That is to say, in both cases -deactivated and removed channels- the old data is not deleted. Removed channels are removed just from the user interface, to keep it clean.
I did a little test, after removing some custom channels (and reaching them with the back button until an old form with those removed channels), to see if what Google says about URL channels apply also to custom channels, and this seems to be the case. Even the removed channels were collecting stats from the unmodified pages, before updating them with the non-channel ad code some hours later.
Therefore, if the old data is in fact never deleted, probably there is no difference if you delete old unused channels.
And, if Ann's theory is correct, the effect she is observing might come from the new data that is no more collected. It's indeed a possibility, given that smart pricing seems affected mainly by recent data (for example last week or last month, according to other different theories, also not verified).
However, until now what Google says is usually correct, and they say for instance, answering a question on ad targeting (also in the channels section):
"URL and custom channels are used for reporting purposes only, and do not affect your ad targeting."
In this way, after maybe a week of testing, you can see if stopping to collect new custom channel data has any possible effect, for any now unknown reason. Of course I don't know the answer to this point.
[edited by: Juan_G at 8:26 pm (utc) on July 20, 2006]
Closed on a high note again and ctr+eCpm still slowly climbing.
Ann
This is my first post but i've been following this forum for over a year now...
Ann's idea is so intriguing, I just have to try it out...
I'm implementing it onto my site (however, I'm only disabling the channels, not deleting them totally).
So, let's watch how it goes in the next few weeks...
Cheers.
after one hour, one day, two days or do we have to wait for a week or weeks?
I want to repeat myself here, do it all, the way I laid it out or do nothing. I have tried all the bits and pieces of tweaks put forth in this forum and they were instant gratification but lasting, at the most, 3 days.
This is no flash in the pan, instant earnings, etc UNLESS your site and your earnings have fallen to a drastic low, as mine did, then you may have a jump immediately.
After my initial jump it has been incrementing upwards for about 20 days now. No, not everyday is higher income than the other but with a little comparison you can see the growth pattern begin to emerge...trending upward.
Some high days are due to a good visitor day and the others to an average visitor day. My visitors, in the space of a week will go up by about 2000 uniques then back down. I would guess that is the same with all of us. If I see a spike in visitors and clicks I go looking for the source, the same as all of you. My average traffic increases slowly as I do not advertise.
I personally know of a high earner, way past the fabled UPS club that implemented this test as soon as I told him about it and his increase has been absolutely wonderful would not put it strong enough. His Flagship site, the one that earns his living has been supporting him since before Google was even a thought. :)
I think Googles intentions was good in as much as the Algo that got a skewed was meant to level the sites to a level one and level 2. This would encourage advertisers to stick with the content network. Yes, EFV I read your thread :)
For a long time smart pricing was adamantly denied by Google. When publishers kept complaining and asking for better tools, more filters, crap ads, etc. They Probably thought they were dealing with greedy gus's hence the cold treatment, an deaf ear turned to us as they thought they had a good system in place to handle it, blaming low content or publishers website quality.
Personally, I hope they can fix it and have it work correctly. It would benefit all quality sites and just make others, MFA's to work a little harder for the visitors.
I could be all wet in this but I sincerely hope I am right. What I feel we are doing here is blinding the bot so it has to do things the old way, at least until they can come up with a better rating Algo.
Good luck all, give it at least a week, but two weekends will give you a better insight into what is happening.
Ann
I personally know of a high earner ... that implemented this test
Was your son given any choice?
For a long time smart pricing was adamantly denied by Google.
Smart pricing was introduced with a public announcement at the beginning of April, 2004, about nine months after the AdSense network was launched.
At the time, the effects were felt immediately by many or most content publishers. So it's hard to see how one can say accurately that "smart pricing was adamantly denied by Google" during the first nine months of the network's existence--especially since advertisers were paying full retail for the content network until then.
Just to confirm, I am going to tell you all that I have done.
I removed all the channels! URL & Custom (I am now COMPLETELY channel less!)
I removed all the adds from all my pages that were tracked by channels. I replaced all the adds with "non channeled" ads.
I have two 468x60 ad units on each of my pages that are not tacked by any channels.
Firstly, I do hope that I have done everything right. Now I just got to give it a week!
Secondly, I hope this works. Will tell you all about my results!
