Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've been thinking (uh Oh), mainly about removing ads from low paying pages thus improving the payouts on the other pages.
Suppose you had a largish site and you started off with giving a lot of pages to google ads then gradually smartpricing moved in with her sister MFA driving your CPC down to the basement.
Let's say your original clicks were paying you 2 dollars each and went down to .05 and you decided to rid your site of bad performing pages.
You did this and wow! the payout is really going up! BUT is the income increasing? (bottom line)?
first: PVs= # clicks= PPC= earnings (bottom line) trending downward.
Second: PVs= # clicks= PPC= earnings " " Downward trend halted but clicks are less.
PPC back up, (now how to get clicks to increase since less PVs= less clicks).
PPC increased but bottom line did not rise. Smartpricing will be along shortly to damage even that plan.
Meanwhile, what is the difference if you get a few high paying clicks or a lot of low paying clicks? None.
I THINK that the only reason left to take away ads from certain pages is only to put something else on them that may earn more then those few removed ads to increase your bottom line.
Just musing on a long, wet Sunday afternoon. :)
What are your thoughts on this subject?
Ann
We're talking about a few pages that got a lot of impressions but very few clicks and low-value clicks at that.
By taking ads off those pages, I decreased impressions by more than 10%, lost a few clicks--and increased my earnings. In other words, the increase in EPC more than made up for the lost clicks.
WHY this would be was the subject of enormous debate. I thought initially that it pointed to AdSense taking CTR into account. Others argued otherwise, and quite persuasively. I'm now an agnostic as to the possible cause.
What I do think is this: if you can make changes to your site that will cause one of two things to occur, you might be able to reverse your smart-pricing decline. One is to increase the actual conversion rate on the clicks on your site(s). Since many advertisers don't use conversion tracking, Google must also have an alternative method of deciding if a site is converting or not. I picture it as a kind of "profiling." They have developed a list of characteristics of "converting sites" (or pages, if SP happens at the page level, as some claim), versus characteristics of "non-converting sites." I don't know what those characteristics are, but suspect that the nature of their incoming traffic, the closeness of match between their content and the ad keywords, their page setup, their site setup are all things that they might look at.
So, if you can improve your site's profile, you might benefit. Seems like that's kind of what david_uk is attempting to do, in another thread.
Good luck!
Wasn't really talking about me, just got the wheels turning in a think tank type of mode to see what others could add to it.
All input welcome. :)
Ann
I think you are right when you say to remove low paying ads only if you have something better to put in their place. That could be a higher paying ad or some good content to attract higher paying ads.
Certainly removing lower paying ads will inprove the average price per click, but as you say only at the expense of the bottom line.
Ann, right, I meant "you" in the general sense too, though of course it may apply to you specifically!
Yes the bottom line could rise but only until smartpricing sets in again.
Am always interested to read other peoples opinions and stash them away in my secret locker for later use-maybe. :)
Ann
