The Google, "can't do work/click on your own site" is unreasonable and too great burden for a webmaster.

Coogle doesn't say you can't "do work" on your own site.

And how is clicking on one's own ads "too great a burden for a webmaster"?

The Google, "can't do work/click on your own site" is unreasonable and too great burden for a webmaster.

Brett; Do you honestly think the average webmaster is so incompetant that they can't handle a simple "Don't click the Adsense ads on your own site" part of the contract?

What's the "burden" here?

And where does Google say we "can't do work" on our sites?

although this thread has been hijacked by brett (;P) i want to give you an update:

3 (!) days after unchecking the onsite advertiser sign-up option until google finally deleted the "advertise on this site" link. a bit impudent if you ask me..

If you think that time frame to change a feature of your account is impudent of Google, you've obviously never tried to manage a multi-terrabyte database and mirror it to numerous server farms.

The people getting the most "free ride" is Google when you use the "Advertize here" link through your Adsense control panel.

To be honest, any advertiser wanting to advertise specifically on your site would probably be keener to talk to you direct than to sign up for cpm ads that might show on your site (if they select the right keywords).

I think they should go back to the drawing board with this one. Signing up people on the basis there isn't any guarantee that their ads will show on the selected sites (and not explaining that point) is a bit didgy IMHO. I also think they are missing out on a golden opportunity to marry-up advertisers and content providors that want to be together and are more than likely willing to pay for the privelege.

What they fail to realise is that advertisers willing to target a specific site will only want to do so in the belief or knowledge that a particular site will work for them better than showing the ad on countless MFA's. Therefore if the advertiser has the faith in the site, Google should also have some faith and offer the advertising on the normal CPC basis, and pay us in the normal manner. No CPM ads. Why offer cheapo cpm campaigns that might appear on the site, when they have an advertiser willing to pay the going rate? Maybe even a premium :)

To be honest, any advertiser wanting to advertise specifically on your site would probably be keener to talk to you direct than to sign up for cpm ads that might show on your site (if they select the right keywords).

Not necessarily. A large advertiser (e.g., an airline) probably isn't just buying site-targeted CPM ads on one site--it's more likely to be buying many, many impressions from multiple sites. That's where Google's ability to "aggregate" impressions comes in.

Therefore if the advertiser has the faith in the site, Google should also have some faith and offer the advertising on the normal CPC basis, and pay us in the normal manner. No CPM ads. Why offer cheapo cpm campaigns that might appear on the site, when they have an advertiser willing to pay the going rate? Maybe even a premium :)

1) CPM campaigns aren't always "cheapo." Sometimes advertisers are willing to pay a premium to override even the better-paying CPC ads on a site.

2) Site-targeted CPM ads and page-targeted (contextual) CPC ads serve different purposes. Let's say you've got a site about cookie baking with a page about cookies that are decorated with candied violet petals. A maker of cookie sheets might be interested in a site-targeted CPM campaign because all of your readers are likely to be prospects for cookie sheets. However, a manufacturer of candied violet petals is more likely to be interested in having ads run only on your page about cookies that are decorated with candied violet petals, because few bakers are likely to buy candied violet petals unless they're using a recipe that calls for them.

There may well be a market for site-targeted CPC ads--in fact, I think some advertisers would happily pay a premium for control over placement of contextual ads--but that doesn't mean site-targeted CPM ads don't have their place (or that site-targeted CPM ads can't pay well).

To be honest, if any advertiser wants to advertise on your site specifically, you may do better by selling the space yourself.

I've actually had a fair number of inquiries on this; the only thing holding me back is that I haven't a clue on how to price it.

Selling ads direct isn't as simple as it may appear. For example, big mainstream advertisers and their agencies or media-buying services may want:

- Lots of impressions without excessive frequency
- Geotargeting
- Dealing with professional rep firms (i.e., reps who do sales presentations, take them to lunch, are known within the advertising industry, etc.)

For example, if you own a travel site, you probably aren't going to have much luck selling ads to airlines, international hotel chains, cruise lines, national tourist offices, etc. on your own.

I used to have banner ads on my site, and the ongoing hassle of encouraging people to sign up, and then renew, and send me the money, really made it feel like work. It became a real pain for me. I got burned several times by advertisers who said they were going to pay me for ads I had up for them but never did.

Just having Google collect the payment for my site's ads and automatically deposit it into my account without my having to ask for anything is worth a lot to me.

Hi Car_Guy,

I think that what you have described is the MAIN benefit of AS to me. All the money-schmoozing-PR-lawsuit-invoice-chasing-yada-yada-etc related admin is what I gladly pay G its percentage for.

I guess that many (unhappy) AS users who've never had to raise or chase an invoice think that G is taking their money for nothing...

Then of course OTHER major AdSense benefits include the contextual matching, deep advertiser pool, simple HTML integration, ability to deal with me in my language and timezone, etc...

So, unless someone I could trust came to me with an offer to advertise directly, I'd say "please go via one of the networks I use where you can target me directly" such as AdWords or AdBrite. Indeed, I've already done it...

So, again, I don't mind the "Advertise on this site" at all. Indeed, I signed up to AdBrite just to get their "Your Ad Here" link before AS had its equivalent, and if G had been quicker off the mark I may not have bothered with AdBrite at all...

Rgds

Damon

The only direct advertisers that really worked out for me were all fairly large companies with deep pockets who paid for a year in advance.

There may well be a market for site-targeted CPC ads--in fact, I think some advertisers would happily pay a premium for control over placement of contextual ads--but that doesn't mean site-targeted CPM ads don't have their place (or that site-targeted CPM ads can't pay well).

Clearly there are exceptions, but most people who have tried it here seem to report back that it isn't worth participating in.

Yes, there are pro's and cons to selling ads yourself and it's not always worth doing I have to say. I'd prefer to simply leave it to an ad selling organisation to do for me, but if advertisers want to talk to me, I'm happy to listen. As I type, my site is number 3 on Google search for my keywords. It's usually somewhere between 3-5. I figure that if someone wants to advertise on my site because of the search engine position, then I'd be underselling to allow them on for the peanuts that Google pay. Therefore it never worked for me. I get a better return selling a separate banner direct, but yes, it's hassle sometimes. If people really want to have theior ads on my site via Google, then they can go the cpc route or talk to me direct.

But my situation is different from others. It may be that cpm ads pay similar rates to cpc ads. To be honest, I would take cpm ads on some of my pages that get good traffic but poor clicks. But they don't offer that option.

There's something that goes beyond any insanity.

See, yesterday:
Keyword X,
Impressions 3
Clicks 3
CTR 100%!

Google deactivated the keyword today asking to increase from $0.06 to $0.10!

I took the advertise on my site off one of my main sites and somehow people still target it for site wide ads. I have to check for them all of the time and block them.

They just don't work for me on a site with a broad range of topics because they ads may be relevant for only 2% of the pages but then they end up showing on 50% of the pages. For example, if you have a site on car repairs and someone that sell Ford parts buys site wide ads, then you get Ford replacement part ads on the BMW pages, which makes no sense (and no cents).

fischermx:
"There's something that goes beyond any insanity.
See, yesterday:
Keyword X,
Impressions 3
Clicks 3
CTR 100%!

Google deactivated the keyword today asking to increase from $0.06 to $0.10!"

This appears to be a comment more appropraite to the AdWords Forum. nevertheless...

What if
Keyword X,
Impressions 3
Clicks 3
CTR 100%
Surfer Dissatified with what they find 100%

IMO The QS algorithm is to do with the value added by your site - not the effectiveness of your Adcopy.

jane, the rumour is that you can tell adsense support to stop serving up site-targeted ads on your website... removing the text from the ad block won't stop advertisers from site-targeting your properties.

i'd feel better about site-targeted ads if google gave me control over what pages they show up on... but that'll probably never happen.

i'd feel better about site-targeted ads if google gave me control over what pages they show up on....

You already have some degree of control over where site-targeted ads appear: You can simply remove the AdSense code from pages that perform poorly with CPC ads and which therefore attract lower-paying CPM ads.

Maybe what you really mean is, "I'd feel better about site-targeted ads if I could confine them to pages that have performed poorly for advertisers." That might be appealing from a publisher's point of view, but it wouldn't make sense for advertisers, who'd pay even less for ads limited to pages that a publisher had identified as being nearly worthless for advertising.

I don't think this is a correct analysis of what was said.

We all know that adlinks and adsense blocks will perform differently on various pages within our sites. It may be that one page does really well with adlinks, but badly with adsense. Conversely, another page may do really well with a standard block, but tank when it has adlinks on it.

It may well be that a page does really well for advertisers with cpm ads on it. To say that pages that might work better with cpm ads means that they are "nearly worthless for advertising" is not giving the suggestion any serious thought.

>>>You can simply remove the AdSense code from pages that perform poorly with CPC ads and which therefore attract lower-paying CPM ads.<<<

not relevant... i said control over what pages site-targeted cpm ads show up on, NOT cpc ads.

>>>To say that pages that might work better with cpm ads means that they are "nearly worthless for advertising" is not giving the suggestion any serious thought.<<<

exactly... for instance, putting only adsense cpm on forum pages could be attractive to both publishers and advertisers.

and yes, efv, as we told you before, that means putting adsense in the cpm-only business... it's a new direction, just like they are now into the rich media and video advertising cpm business.

>>>You can simply remove the AdSense code from pages that perform poorly with CPC ads and which therefore attract lower-paying CPM ads.<<<

not relevant... i said control over what pages site-targeted cpm ads show up on, NOT cpc ads.

Sure, it's relevant, because publishers who are skeptical of CPM ads will use them only on "throwaway" pages that are of limited interest to advertisers.

putting only adsense cpm on forum pages could be attractive to both publishers and advertisers.

But the net effect would be lower CPMs on those pages than advertisers are paying for sitewide CPM ads, because Google would have to drop the CPM minimum to make such ads attractive to advertisers.

and yes, efv, as we told you before, that means putting adsense in the cpm-only business... it's a new direction, just like they are now into the rich media and video advertising cpm business.

Fact check: I've been predicting greater use of CPM ads on the AdSense network for a couple of years. That doesn't mean AdSense is moving toward a "cpm-only business," though. For now, CPC ads are used for contextual targeting, CPM ads are used for site targeting, and there's no reason to believe that the core pricing model will change in the foreseeable future.

Still, as I've suggested before, CPM pricing could be used for contextual ads. I suspect that one of the big sticking points would be the fact that impression fraud is likely to be harder to detect than fraudulent (or otherwise invalid) clicks are. Still, large mainstream advertisers are accustomed to the CPM pricing model, and Google might not want to write off advertisers who are leery of--or simply uninterested in--CPC. So maybe we'll see Google offer CPM pricing of contextual ads on sites that meet certain criteria, as outlined in this forum's thread about Smart Select [webmasterworld.com] (or what Martinibuster called "Contextual Optimization"). That thread was about contextual CPC ads, but the Smart Select concept would work equally well with CPM.

>>>Sure, it's relevant, because publishers who are skeptical of CPM ads will use them only on "throwaway" pages that are of limited interest to advertisers.<<<

no, as david just told you, publishers will use whatever ad model pays the best for that particular page, there is nothing "skeptical" about it.

efv, your inferences that forum pages "are of limited interest to advertisers" is obviously not valid, and i suspect that it's the result of you never having used adwords before.

>>>But the net effect would be lower CPMs on those pages than advertisers are paying for sitewide CPM ads, because Google would have to drop the CPM minimum to make such ads attractive to advertisers.<<<

nope... i think it was ken_b who posted the adwords help link detailing how adwords cpm advertisers can section-target some individual page areas already... adwords cpm is not limited to site-wide only.

so it would be a situation of cpm-only bidding against cpm-only, on the selected pages that adwords already allows, possibly with a minimum bid amount set by the publisher, not google.

and since you didn't bother to read it in my previous post, i'll point out once again that google is already in the cpm-only business with their video advertising... all that's needed under the current system is for google to allow publishers to tell advertisers where cpm-only ads can be placed.

OK, somebody let me know when:

1) Google lets publishers choose the pages where site-targeted CPM ads appear on their sites, and...

2) Advertisers bid as much for publisher-picked CPM pages as for run-of-site or advertiser-targeted CPM pages.

The combination sounds pretty unlikely to me, but who knows--maybe you can stir up a groundswell of interest among advertisers in the AdWords forum. Why not give it a try?

sites that sell their own cpm often give advertisers pricing options based on where the ad will appear.

i think that some advertisers would jump at the opportunity to not compete with mfa'ers, and not have to worry about click fraud.

sites that sell their own cpm often give advertisers pricing options based on where the ad will appear.

Sure, but the process of buying site-targeted CPM ads on the AdSense network is a lot different from the process of buying ads directly from a known site or from that site's rep firm.

The economics are likely to be different, too, unless you're talking about a premium publisher that can deliver enough impressions to justify the advertiser's time in reviewing not only potential site-targeted CPM publishers, but also specific pages or sections within those publishers' sites.

I haven't seen publisher-picked CPM ad pages mentioned in the "features we'd like to see" threads on the AdWords forum. Still, if you can whip up interest among advertisers, more power to you.

I'm not sure I was aware we could turn off the "advertise on this site" message before reading this thread. I guess I never visit our account page. The explanations there from Google indicate that you can only benefit from site targetting if you display CPM ads, which we don't It's easy enough to confirm it doesn't help us in the Advanced Reports menu, by selecting the "Show Data By Individual Ad" and then "Show data by targeting type - contextual or site."

Since 100% of our targetting is contextual, I may as well turn it off. Thanks to netmeg for pointing out that it's possible.

I turned off the "Advertise on this site". My earnings went down.

>>>I turned off the "Advertise on this site". My earnings went down.<<<

that is possible, if low-rent site-targeted cpm ads make up a big part of your earnings... but you wouldn't know that, unless you follow the instructions that content_ed just posted.

and remember that turning off the "advertise here" message won't stop the site-targeted cpm ads from showing up on your site... you have to email adsense support directly for that.

>>>The economics are likely to be different, too, unless you're talking about a premium publisher that can deliver enough impressions to justify the advertiser's time in reviewing not only potential site-targeted CPM publishers, but also specific pages or sections within those publishers' sites.<<<

wrong, because adwords already has site-targeting and section-targeting capability that a number of advertisers have been using for quite awhile now.

efv, you are attempting to bash something that's already been proven to work.

adwords already has site-targeting and section-targeting capability that a number of advertisers have been using for quite awhile now.

So what exactly are you asking for that isn't already available?

selections within the site-targeted and section-targeted adwords areas that let the advertiser know when there are cpm-only pages available, as defined by the publisher.

sorry if i'm not making it clear... i don't expect it to happen, because of the computing overhead, and the possible impact that it could have on adwords cpc advertising.

I guess it does not matter to my website. Whether it is Contextual or Site, each click is cheap.