Go ahead and laugh. She who laughs last, laughs best. :)

Ann

One of the historic hallmarks of WW has been the civilty of comments about and between members and their opinions.

Mocking members or making fun/laughing at honest opinion and experience not only demeans the member being mocked/laughed at it also betrays that hallmark and and demishes the forum.

Hopefully the practice of that civility at WW is more than a historic footnote.

Of course, Ann - the real test would be... if you put the channels back, do your earnings go back down?
I know you'd just *love* to run that test! :(

I removed all my deactivated channels on Wednesday, July 19 late in the evening. The next day stats were normal but starting Friday 7/21 and continuing through today my CTR has dropped by 1.25 percentage points. EPC stayed the same.

Not sure why it happened, but the change is very apparent when reviewing my stats as they are generally pretty stable.

> To get rid of something or somebody you "86th" it/them

But why? What is the significance of the number 86? Guess I don't see the correlation like I do with "deep sixed." Anybody else besides Ann use that phrase?

[edited by: Play_Bach at 1:19 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]

>> Of course, Ann - the real test would be... if you put the channels back, do your earnings go back down?
I know you'd just *love* to run that test! :( <<

Leadergroot - You had me laughing sooooo hard. I know its painful for many, but that's the reverse side of this experiement for those that this "trick" did not work for. As for me, this was the joke of this thread.

Ok, I gotta give it to those adsense optimization enthusiast, or should I say Russian Roullette enthusiast. I still think smart pricing will make its way back around to each and everyone of us. I believe successful publishers think along the lines of big picture. I hear it in David_UK's comments. Forget the little things, channels, filters, etc. Just do it and focus on what you are really building.

Ann, you philosophize building a site that is not intended for Adsense (in another thread I believe), but yet I hear it in your tone that if it wasnt for Adsense, VC, or Fusion (or whatever ads) you probably would not be wasting your time. Just striking a debate, no pun intended.

I think we all get pulled into the minutia of ads and become fascinated with this type of revenue stream. Many webmasters get pulled into the undercurrent, can't figure out how to swim out of it, and for the life of them give up. I say stay in the boat man! You can see things better from up there.

[edited by: Yippee at 1:42 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]

Type the number "86" (not "86th") into Google and they'll actually offer you a link to a definition of the term.

Best definition:
"To refuse to serve (an unwelcome customer) at a bar or restaurant... [Perhaps after Chumley's bar and restaurant at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York City.]"

Worst definition:
"Being six more than eighty" (yes it really says this)

Yippie,

I wasn't philosophing. I only meant it is better to have a backup plan than none at all.

I have always been a risk taker (nothing ventured, nothing gained). Sure people like you describe get to sit back in a comfy seat and judge others but the one sitting back is not in the boat. In most cases they wind up MISSING the boat.

As I have said before, these sites are a labor of love and my hobby to fill empty hours. The biggest one done long before Google ever came along. I have also said that if I don't earn another dime I can still live quite well on my SS. So I am not a greedy person but I am and always have been a highly competitive one. Even in school I had to do my best or die trying. :)

If things go to pieces all around you and you just watch it happen is something I cannot even imagine.

BTW, Today has an excellent start. Looks like a Google money day hehe.

Ann

LOL, I'm not just sitting watching things happen... I put my work in other areas like business development, upgrading infrastructure, website interoperability, build up our ever growing member base, develop APIs and affiliate programs, and gosh so much more other than count Adsense pennies.

Perhaps I am missing the boat.

But why? What is the significance of the number 86? Guess I don't see the correlation like I do with "deep sixed." Anybody else besides Ann use that phrase?

Yea - it's MAXWELL SMART's number!

(geez, everyone in here must be younger than I am)

Jomaxx had it right. Here's what I found for the origin of the term "86":

"Chumley's, a famous and OLD New York speakeasy, was located at 86 Bedford St. During Prohibition, an entrance through an interior adjoining courtyard was used, as it provided privacy and discretion for customers.

As was (and is) a New York tradition, the cops were on the payroll of the bar and would give a ring to the bar that they were coming for a raid. The bartender would then give the command "86 everybody!", which meant that everyone should hightail it out the 86 Bedford entrance because the cops were coming in through the courtyard door."

Yippie,

I wasn't pointing at you, I believe you are a hard worker, what else would you be doing in here if you weren't?

Peace and all that :)

Ann

I always heard that 86 came from the armed forces as in 86ing the yard, latrines, etc

I remember 86 from my table waiting days (restuarants)... 86 lettuce, 86 wings, 86 Jack Delacruz cuz he just pee'd in the pickle bucket. 86 is pretty common in the food industry.

[edited by: Yippee at 12:37 am (utc) on July 28, 2006]

I believe we have bounced waaay off topic. :)

My income for today is doing very good and so far my ctr has tripled and eCPM doubled. Looks like it is still working...Keeping my fingers crossed and all that stuff :)

Ann

so far my ctr has tripled and eCPM doubled

While I'm happy that things have improved for you, Ann (hurray!) I don't understand how this works - why would your CTR have changed? Do you see different ads being displayed that are more attractive to visitors? If so, do you have any theories on why removing channels would give you different ads? I thought this change was all about killing smartpricing, so we get more of each click?

And, if the ctr triples and the ecpm only doubles (I always have trouble wrapping my head around these numbers!) doesn't that mean that your epc (that unreported number...) has actually gone down?
If so, I can only see your improvement as unrelated to the removal of channels. Hmmm...

Yeah I noticed that, too. If those two stats are correct, then the earnings per click are only 2/3 what they were before the experiment started.

Go figure.

My click payout has almost tripled. I don't know much about the why but I know what I did that started the ball going back up.

Smartpricing, as I understand it is how well you are converting for advertisers hence Google gathering information from the lower performing custom channels and applying it to the account as a whole, If it throws a skewed set of info that degrades your site as a whole then you get the lower paying crap ads.

By removing those channels and ad codes pointing to them I show a great improvement. I am hoping this keeps on having such a good impact on my earnings.

The fact that everything is going up is the most encouraging thing I have seen this year.

(the upcoming update tomorrow is making me a little tense)...LOL

Ann

So if your click payout has tripled and your CTR has nearly tripled, then your eCPM must be 8 or 9 times what it used to be.

Or are the numbers other people are citing not accurate?

Ann, could you give an overview of what has happened since you started your great experiment? If EPC (average over a week, say) when you started was x, and CTR was y, what were they over the next week, and the week after that, and so on (I think you've had this going for about 3 weeks)?

Also, how do the EPC and CTR when you started compare to what you've said several times was a better set of numbers several months or a year ago?

I'm trying to get an accurate picture of what has happened and I haven't been able to glean that from what I've read so far. Of course, if I 'm asking for too much, just tell me!

Hey Ann,
Have you made any changes since you did the test? I donno much but i guess google requires some time in each account to figure out things before it really start performing. So my stratergy is going to be to do NOTHING for the next few weaks. let google take its time. let the adsense algos gather data and solve its own problems?

you think it will work?

Hunderdown,

On June 24th my once extremely good income, which has been going down all year, hit the grand total of 12.68 per day, it is now up to 65.00 per day, still a long way from my high points but the growth is still happening. I would be violating G's tos to say eactly what the other numbers are but I will try to work around that.

I have been giving ball park figures on these from just glancing and resorting to memory so as not to violate terms..

eCPM up by 250%, CTR up by 200% done from the actual math, and that is as close to the terms as I care to go. I keep my eye mostly on the income and if it is growing that is great. You can see the income increase above, it seems to be growing more as a result of better paying ads. At the low point the ads were paying low paying and that has increased 3 times.

There you have it. As far as I know without the faulty custom channels my site seems to have been reevaluated by the bot to get better ads.

I feel the test panned out good for me and truly hope it did for others too.

I guess I was following Sherlock Holmes's lead: Whatever does not hold up is wrong and whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.

(I don't have the wording right but you get the picture)

Nothing more to report-Test Successful!

Ann

Ann,

I'm going to test this on a site with a $50-$60 epm.

The Short Our Stock algo presumably caused a lot of disruption to Adsense. Nevertheless, I will try it for a while, then I will put the channels back in for a while and see if a rolling average shows anything interesting.

OK - I'm in. I'll give it a whirl for a couple of weeks. I've removed all channels, removed all ads with channels in and replaced them with channel free banners.

Basically, I know what pages pay and what don't. I don't really expect to make any changes in the next couple of weeks or so, therefore I won't miss the data.

I'm going into this experiment wholeheartedly, and with an open mind because I know that (unlike removing the block list) the worst case is that I will lose a couple of weeks channels data, and as that doesn't usually hold any surprises I think I'll cope.

Having said that, I'm also going to be aware that some of the changes I see will be due to other causes such as normal variations and the effect of QS. What I'm looking to see is variations outside what I would consider normal for my site.

'Twill be interesting and I'll report back as and when there is anything to report.

My click payout has almost tripled. I don't know much about the why but I know what I did that started the ball going back up.

Have you accounted for time lags? Maybe you began trending upward due to some change you made a week or two (or more) earlier.

Ok, I'm in. Will report my findings. So far, removing only the unused channels has had no discernible effect.

Add me to the list. After the last 10 days or so of worse than normal earnings I figured it cannot hurt to give this a try.

to all who are trying it: Good luck.

I made no other changes than I told you all about. I already had my numbers rising rapidly when I removed the trashy banner ads about 2 or 3 days ago and this did not seem to have an effect on the test. I removed them because I was tired of spending so much time running down and killing offensive banners like the fart button and then buzzing mosquito which had at least 4 incarnations each. (4 diff advertising urls)

Bear in mind this test that I did was account wide, involving 3 sites so Alex Miles I would be interested to know how one site out of your account responds. Hopefully very well. :)

Ann

Remember, it is still a roller coaster of ups and downs but each up should be higher than the preceding down (except on weekends :))

I'd like to join the others in thanking Ann for this thread. Its sparked new ideas that branch off the original post, and for that I am grateful.

I began this test on the 20th, today is the 29th.

Average CTR in these ten days: the same as before
Average EPC in these ten days: the same as before
Average eCPM in these ten days: the same as before
Average earnings in these ten days: the same as before

The only difference is: I have no channels any more and I REALLY regret deleting them.

But good luck to everyone! I hope you you'll be more successful.

ann, thank you. That gives me a much better sense of what you've accomplished. That's a pretty impressive increase in daily earnings!

so Alex Miles I would be interested to know how one site out of your account responds. Hopefully very well. :)

Ann, I have interesting results. The domain I recently deleted channels for is suddenly profitable.

I've been at this one day. Unfortunately I forgot I was in an experiment and made a simultaneous change with a graphic or two, so at some point I shall have to switch those back to the old ones as well. But not yet! (All that can ever do is change CTR, not as far as I know EPC, if you control for position.)

When I said my site had a $50-$60 epm, that was what it used to have, before the SOS Adwords algo caused a domain change.

The new domain was in the toilet as far as EPM was concerned - about $30. I thought this was because traffic levels were minimal. The reason traffic levels were minimal was because of the Adwords disaster. As soon as I'd solved the Adwords issue I took the opportunity to rearrange urls and ad campaigns ready to transfer them to MSN. This meant that at any one time 80% of my ads were in the review process and not displaying.

I thought that was the reason for the crappy EPM. The wrong kind of traffic.

Well I did everything you recommended except one thing. You have only one adblock on your pages, I always have two - so I kept two.

Now bear in mind I have three sites in my Adsense account. The old domain Adwords doesn't love anymore still getting a trickle of traffic because I haven't chased down and transferred quite all its content. It used to be extensively chanelled.

The new domain which had the header and footer ads tracked as seperate units, but no pages or directories tracked. Thats the one where I made changes to graphics yesterday, and deleted the header and footer channels.

A third very low EPM site only ever domain tracked.

All three are now only domain tracked.

From breaking even this past week, every day this week actually, the new domain showed a 320% return!

Some is no doubt due to an increased CTR after I changed the graphics back to the old ones - but get this - the EPC is up by a third! Right back to where it is supposed to be for the old domain.

My EPC had been stable on the old domain for months until a recent slide I thought was due to losing 80% of its traffic. Always within 2c of 36c sliding to a recent 2c of 29c.

After the enforced domain change the new domain was always within 4c of 22c.

Now the new domain is back up to 34c - within range of the old domain, and my EPM is right back up over $50!
After I deleted the channels on the old domain it showed an EPC of 37c yesterday - back to where it used to be.

So, its certainly a possibility that channels are associated with an epc penalty in some way. If anyone is wondering why, with all the data Google has it feels the need to do this, the answer is that humans are still far better at arranging data conceptually than machines are. Plus Adsense is where they pay out. They'll do things on the cheap there.

What I don't understand is why, if the old domain was so extensively channelled, I ever got an EPC of 36c in the first place? Perhaps I just did even with an EPC penalty, and the lack of historical data for the new domain meant Adsense now has to rely on previous account data? With the very low EPC domain (that gets few clicks) dragging my EPC down around another 2c?

So thanks Ann! I'm in profit for the first time in a week. Although my traffic is only 20% of what it should be, its been that way for some time and the crappy EPC had been stable, so its enough to be statistically significant.

[edited by: Alex_Miles at 6:23 am (utc) on July 30, 2006]