Forum Moderators: martinibuster
From Googles Q2 Earnings Call [internet.seekingalpha.com]
In the quarter we made numerous changes to the way we serve ads that help us to show the best ad at the best time. For instance, one of our improvements involved showing fewer ads while users were looking for non-commercial information rather than seeking to purchase something, while showing more highly relevant ads when our users are searching for products and services.
It doesn't seem like much of a stretch for G to apply this to publishers sites. If in Smart Pricing a camera review site is likely to do better than a camera use tips site then serving fewer ads on the tips site might seem to be a natural fit.
Larry Page
..we have very, very strong monetization on search
I wouldn't hit the panic button yet, Google is naturally trying to be more appealing for advertisers, and they wouldn't kill their second best golden goose, specially when there are a couple of networks following close by with eyes on the golden eggs.
And I always say, it's a 2 way road.
I'm not sure this would be a bad deal for all publishers.
And already they sometimes serve fewer ads in a block on publisher sites when they think those ads will outperform a full block.
Be interesting to know more about this.
It doesn't seem like much of a stretch for G to apply this to publishers sites. If in Smart Pricing a camera review site is likely to do better than a camera use tips site then serving fewer ads on the tips site might seem to be a natural fit.
Maybe, but I think it would be more likely to happen on a page associated with a truly non-commercial term where the displayed ads would be barely relevant, irrelevant, or unlikely to be clicked.
I was reading an article from a leading magazine about politics on the Web the other day, and all of the "Ads by Google" were for supposed surveys. ("Cast your vote and you could win a TV.") Google and the publisher probably wouldn't lose much, if anything, by displaying only one or two ads in that situation, and both the publisher and the "Ads by Google" skyscraper would leave a better impression than the current stack of low-quality (if not outright shady) ads.
showing fewer ads while users were looking for non-commercial information rather than seeking to purchase something, while showing more highly relevant ads when our users are searching for products and services
Unfortunately the 2 things I highlighted aren't opposites, so one is left wondering whether Google are really showing fewer ads, or simply cranking up the coefficient of the relevance factor for some sites, or what.
Since we don't know the specifics of how the matching or the pricing is done anyways, I'm not sure this really provides us with any new information.
Even if it doesn't affect Adsense right now, it might well be something to watch for down the road.
I've been studying the ads on my site for about a month now, and I feel like this is already happening.
My site is a very diverse online magazine covering a wide range of topics. As a result, there were plenty of those "Cast your vote and you could win a TV", ads. Over the past few weeks though, the ads are almost perfectly targeted.
Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to rely on any tests since so much is going on over on the Adwords side (i.e. QS, minimum bid amounts, etc.)
Amazingly, even though the ads are better targeted - EPC has dropped a bit.
However, the pattern of late is that if you do a search on my keywords, the search pages are showing less and less adverts. So I'm wondering if the ad pool in my sector is drying up. That certainly seems to be the case - especially since the QS algo was introduced. Many of the advertisers that used to be active on Google have switched their campaigns to YPN.
