I get 1 cent clicks all the time. That's not what the advertiser is paying. It's what I'm getting after goog takes it's cut and, at least in my case, corrects for smartpricing.

OK , thanks....its just that I have had some clicks for 3 dollars, and to get clicks for 0.01 seems crazy, if the smart pricing is for non-relveant ads and other factors - what the heck is google doing serving them on the site in the first place?

You may not have been smartpriced Merlin. I was only saying that I know for a fact that I have been.

You're right though. It does seem strange.

Too bad that EFV is not around any longer here. He would have chimed in, saying that "Google needs to have real estate for all ads, not just for the expensive ones". There seems to be a market for $0.01 clicks (obviously, there must be high demand for these cheap clicks), and so Google is satisfying this demand. It's nothing personal, you know. ;-)

Oh, I am not suggesting its personal, Zett, wrong end of the stick there buddy...

What I am saying is that if the click is so low value - what the heck is it doing on the site - assuming that its smart pricing and deemed to be less relevant...

Lets face it, if someone physically clicks an ad, it MUST be worth more than 0.01 - by definition!

merlin23: only a self-serving definition I'm afraid.

For example, if my link is to information about a free museum or health service (for example) in your area, rather selling goods, there may be no obvious monetary value.

I pay rather more than 1c/click, but not an order of magnitude more, to get people to some of my pro-bono services. I don't make money from visitors (though I recoup a little of my costs for ads), so maybe I should pay -1c/click?

Rgds

Damon

[edited by: DamonHD at 4:14 pm (utc) on June 15, 2008]

Damon, I dont really understand your reply - are you suggesting that the page the ad is on is crap? Or are you suggesting the ad is crap?

Please clarify....

No, I'm just suggesting that your claim that a click has any particular implicit value is wishful thinking.

Rgds

Damon

it MUST be worth more than 0.01 - by definition

Let's look at it from an advertisers point of view.

The widget may cost $9.99 (e.g. an eBook on *cough* how to make money with Adwords, Adsense, and eBooks).

As the advertiser does not get a suitable rank in the organic SERPs, he realizes that he has to advertise. Otherwise he will sell no (zero) books.

He writes good ad copy and places it with Adwords. After a few trials he finds out that he can convince 1 of 1000 visitors (to his crappy web site) to buy his book - his conversion rate is 0.1%

He starts to hunt for one-penny clicks.

How does his business case look like?

Revenue
+ Sales from website = $9.99

Cost
- Marketing, 1000 visitors @ $0.01 = $10.00
- Payment transaction (3% of transaction value) = $0.30

Profit
= -$0.31

Yes, this guy creates a LOSS at a click price of just $0.01. Of course, he will want even lower click prices. His Adwords rep will tell him to try placement target ads; apparently these can be placed at eCPM rates below $0.01

No wonder there is demand for low paying ads.

merlin23,
If all you are receiving is 1 cent clicks, then the reason may be because your niche is not a desirable one for advertisers.

People in your situation typically have poor performing keyword phrases. It's not Google's fault. We did this exercise a few weeks ago with someone else. But we can do it again with you. It will help illustrate why this is happening.

Do this:
Step 1
Check your log files or traffic reports. Identify your top ten keyword phrases site visitors are using to visit your site. Make a list of those keyords.

Step 2
Enter each keyword phrase into Google Search, count the number of ads that show up, all ads total.

Step 3
Report here how many ads show up for each of your ten keywords. No need to tell us the keywords.

I'm going to be away from the computer. But this is how Step 4 usually plays out:

Step 4
You observe that there are very few ads for the keywords. Then we tell you that means there are not enough advertisers for your niche ad that a lack of competition will cause sites to earn pennies per click.

You now have the answer for why your site, as opposed to AdSense, is not performing well. Identifying reasons why something is not working is an important first step to improving your income. I hope this helps you understand the underlying reasons why your site is not performing.

Good luck.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:22 pm (utc) on June 15, 2008]

OK , thanks....its just that I have had some clicks for 3 dollars

Unless you have only 1 click per day there is really no way of finding the price per click. Google staggers the updating of its same-day stats -- different components update at different times -- making it very difficult to determine what a click is worth with any certainty.

Too bad that EFV is not around any longer here.

I believe he's off doing what he does best, out exploring and developing new content.

I think it would be helpful to know if we are taking about a small sample of clicks per day or a very large number of clicks. It might also be helpful to know what percentage of that is made up of $3.00 clicks

Thanks so much for the replies - really appreciated...

Just to say that some of the replies seemed to indicate that either the content of the site is not good or the keywordscontent are not generating enough ads...

The content of the site is good, and is on page 1 of google for most target words/phrases - and there is plenty of adwords campaigns targeting the keyword and site content... So I guess the low revenue must be something else...

If you're referring to me I make no judgements or assumptions about your site content/subject at all.

I merely point out that a click is only worth what the (Google-mediated) market will pay for it at any moment in time, and there is NO inherent irreducible minimum value in any (potential) click at all. Believing so would be tilting at windmills (would Don Q have used PPC I wonder?).

Rgds

Damon

LOL...no Damon, ..... but if the cap fits (only kidding)..lol

But seriuosly, I pointed those 2 things out (good content and plenty of adwords campaigns), so that thar road maybe closed, and maybe there are other reasons?

It's worth remembering that good content does not necessarily mean valuable content.

And also that the content that attracted that ad that generated the $3 click was likely different in some way from the content that attracted the ad that generated the 1 cent click. Or are ALL the pages on your site identical? No, of course not, what a stupid question.

So, given that there are different topics to be found on different pages on your site, you are going to get different ads. And even if the topics are only SLIGHTLY different, you can get some wide variation in ads and ad values.

I've had the same experience. I get nice fat clicks and mingy little clicks. I have SOME idea of what's generating the $$ clicks, but I'm not about to remove the other 2/3 of my site to increase the number of $$ clicks! For one thing, my site has a reputation and gets the visitors it does because of the totality of its content. For another, I'm more interested in my total earnings than in my average EPC. If I double my EPC but reduce the earnings, did I gain anything?

So relax. It's just the way the system works. And as a PS, since I figured out what content on my site seems to get the more pricey ads, I do tend to write more new content for that area than other areas. But I make sure it's worthwhile information that my visitors will want.

Purplecape, you cheapskate following the money! What happened to your spiritual purity? Did it escape to Canada or something? B^>

Rgds

Damon

Spiritual purity? Mes ami, we live in the real world, n'est ce pas? No MFA for me, but if it's MFU (made for user) AND MFA , pourquoi no, eh?

Sacre bleu...

chacun à son goût

Zut!

Don't also forget that if your site is used globally that some of your lower paying clicks may be coming from lower paying advertisers targeting their own regions.

For example my .cn and .in sites' average EPCs are considerably lower even though the ads I see in the UK have good EPCs, locally the ads are of much, much lower value.

You have to bite the bullet some times and say thank you:-)

Thanks again guys...

My site is kinda smallish compared to some of you guys, but the traffic I get should be relevant to the site, I don't pay for advertising at all, so 99% of my hits are through organic search...

The site is a good business in its own right (but only for 7 months a year).. My idea was to try adsense on it to get a little bit of income for the 5 months it produces little business... I am not ambitious with it, and was hoping to get a mere 10 dollars a day with adsense...over the year it would then be worth it for me (in relative terms)...

So I suppose the thread title could be misleading, because I have noticed that some clicks are only 0.01 and others are 3.00 (although as someone has said the way it works it cant be identified as such - but thats the way it appears in the stats...)

The site is currently only making at most 5 dollars a day - and for that to happen one of the clicks has to be a few dollars, coz most of them seem to be 0.01 or less than 0.10

If I cant get it to 10 dollars a day it just wont be worth it...and I will take it off...thats why I posted , to see if someone can help...

Sorry, we shouldn't have started joking around. As I said earlier, it can be possible to figure out where the good clicks are happening, using channels and intuition. But there's always an element of randomness in AdSense too.

I'm actually not making THAT much more than you. If I were you, I'd leave the ads up, try out different things from time to time. You may not be making that $10/day you want, but you're not losing money on them, right? See where you get. Good luck!

Thanks Purple -

Sure I am trying different things and it's just not happening - the thing is i'm frustrated with it because I already have the traffic - but my visitors are just not clicking...

Maybe its not suited to my site . it's travel related, but very specific travel and a specific destination - and the ads showing do look related to site content...

I'll give it another 2 monts max, and see what happens...

Well, possibly the sort of advertisers you need just are not using AdWords at the moment... Remember that lots of advertisers may be pulling in their horns at the moment, particularly for discretionary spending.

Maybe you need to hunt down some very specialist (affiliate?) ad sources to whom your site/traffic value is more evident.

Rgds

Damon

Can I bring this up again...?..lol

Still no improvement...tried different things...

I got thinking that maybe I have too much content - or I got too many adsense units on a page...

On the too much content side of it - anyone else considered this - or am I barking up the wrong tree...?

There's no such thing as "too much content", unless you're purely thinking "MFA".

On 15th June you wrote that you've just started with Adsense. Now it's two weeks later, and you see no improvement.

First, summertime is not the best time for some niches.
Second, it took three months to get me where I am today, eCPM-wise. (Well, in fact, I reached the eCPM peak after about a year, then it slowly fell back to where it is today.)

Patience, young Jedi, patience! From nowhere the success comes not. Time it takes the revenues to see grow. :-)

LOL..OK...

No, not MFA...the site has been a great success for 4 years without adsense...and still is...

I just thought I would try it, my initial impressions are though...

1) It doesn't suit my site
2)It actually makes the site look less appealing

But I am gonna stick with it a bit longer...

My comment about too much content is based on thinking that , if most of the answers people want are on the site, why click an ad to search for further information?

Its quite fair to hold a theory that people only click ads because they havent found what they are looking for on the site...

I have had some clicks that have paid 0 cents... or at least less than 1 cent and therefore showed up as 0 cents...

I emailed google about them and got no response.