Actually this is a pretty worthless read unless you've been at AdSense for say less than a month. Why do I say that? Well because there really is nothing publishers can do to control/increase their revenue. We can do a numerous things to stop from losing revenue perhaps, but the fact that not one person here chimed in on my post from the other day confirms what everyone pretty much already knows...and that's that none of us have any concrete idea on what makes one page more valuable than another or keyword strategies, etc. All of that stuff went into the toilet at least a year ago. What we get paid per click is so random now. AdSense does not follow the logic ofAdwords anymore - you're fooling yourself if you think it does. And here's another piece of info - the whole idea that Adwords is still an auction hasn't been true for years. So the reality is that no one knows anything about pricing anymore. I'm not even convinced the top person in AdSense knows how anything works. I don't mean to sound defeatist, but it's the truth. Not one single person knows how AdSense CPC or RPM are calculated anymore.



So I know that there is no definitive answer to this question, but would appreciate insights into what COULD be going on.

So one of my sites is consumer retail focused. I have a ton of "brand" pages for this consumer product industry which is very large and these brands are very high end. Typically, whenever I get a clicks where the CPC is 2-3X my average, then it's a rich media click (and they are infrequent). Today, I have several text clicks that are about 4x my average CPC. I've very rarely seen this happen with text - again almost always rich media. Why is that?

But what is interesting about today is that the "brand" these clicks happened on are not really even one the more expensive brands that I have pages for - hopefully that makes sense. I would think the more high end my brand - the more advertiser competition. However, I've really never seen that correlation. Typically each brand results in the same CPC which never made sense to me. And today, I am seeing high CPC's from 1 brand only and it's not really a high end consumer brand. So...thoughts on what may explain this?

Actually it is NOT a worthless read, and I for one don't appreciate your hijacking this post because nobody answered you on your own post. Talk about rude.

"and I for one don't appreciate your hijacking this post because nobody answered you on your own post. Talk about rude."

That is not what I was doing. I was adding context that no one knows how pricing works. Of course if you do, please enlighten us.

Here's an important point. We don't have to create custom channels for different sections or pages to obtain granular performance information. Custom channels are no longer necessary for obtaining that information.

That information tells us what pages make more money. That information can feed into deciding what topics to focus on or not to focus on, to determine buying trends, or whether that trend is geographic or seasonal. You can take action on that information to make more money. If it's geographically centered to a certain region you can focus your traffic generation there. OR it could mean you need to build traffic from other similar regions.

On the other end it can show you what topics or pages aren't making money. You can use that information to debug a page or section of a site to make it perform better or to give it up and pour resources in a different direction because the winds have changed, trends have moved on.

Agree with netmeg, there's some really good info in the article. The writer makes a great point that Analytics + AdSense helps show you which areas of your site to focus more time and resources on, which pages are highest-earning and which ones aren't.

I read it and it looks like we have two camps here and I'm in avalon37's.

Funnily, I had that enabled previously. Just really never bothered to look at it much.

By going to Behavior > AdSense > AdSense Pages I can see a list of the site content with the AdSense statistics broken down to the per page level. For example, instead of simply knowing the overall CTR for my site or a custom channel, I can now see the CTR of specific pages.

Well I would never have thought this page would get a click:

.../site-tree.htm

Très interesting.

Just really never bothered to look at it much.

I checked to see why not.

Yep I now remember, AdSense versus Analytics AdSense is still Apples versus Oranges.

I'll believe AdSense, they pay the money.

pretty worthless read unless you've been at AdSense for say less than a month.

I think I understand your underlying idea - that webmasters who take adsense seriously probably already know this. I agree that many smart webmasters who focus on Adsense already know this but let's remember that there are people at all different skill levels. I regularly meet people that have been making online money for over 10 years but still are doing rookie mistakes. It is good to go over basic information because some people might never have heard of it and it can help remind the masters of adsense to go back to basics which sometimes get overlooked. I have forgotten so many money making tips, that I appreciate to be reminded every now and then.

there really is nothing publishers can do to control/increase their revenue.

Speak for yourself. I regularly use my Adsense/Analytics link to discover what pages have the highest eCPM, then I find out what is driving traffic to my higher eCPM pages. When I know what types of pages are more profitable and how to get more traffic aka clicks to those pages I make more revenue. For example let's say I have many pages on my site about "repairing widgets" and other pages about "customizing widgets" the eCPM & traffic data helps me decide what section should be expanded first.

Plus looking at this data I can make good money from sorta doing arbitrage. Let's say I develop a cross promotion deal with another website. Using the adsense/analytics link I can find out how much adsense money each referring website is generating which helps determine if I should renew these cross promtional deals or even <gasp> renew a paid link. I don't care if my paid link is nofollowed on a password protected page if it is generating real traffic that is converting to real big adsense revenue for me.