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Out smarting smart pricing

Discussion in 'AdSense' started by prowess, Jan 21, 2006.

  1. #1
    I have removed Adsense from over 90% of my site and have made very well targeted ads on the homepage and most used pages. Now my impressions are down, my clicks are down, and my revenue is up 30%. It was hard to do, removing most of the ads from the site, but now, I have a much better way to make money on those top pages...and through advertising partnerships, I hope to re-monetize the rest of the site again.
     
    prowess, Jan 21, 2006 IP
  2. dadasays

    dadasays Peon

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    #2
    That's the key. The fewer ads you have, the better your payout is for sure. On one site I went from 3 huge rectangle ad units to 1 tiny ad unit in a well placed area, and the income change was huge.
     
    dadasays, Jan 21, 2006 IP
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  3. fmgomes

    fmgomes Peon

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    #3
    That's interesting. Many people say "the more ad units you have the better". I have no opinion so far.
     
    fmgomes, Jan 21, 2006 IP
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  4. dadasays

    dadasays Peon

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    #4
    That's interesting. Many people say "the more ad units you have the better". I have no opinion so far.

    More ad units will give you more ad impressions for people to click on. The downside is that more ad units give you more ad impressions so you have no idea which ad will offer the best CPC.

    For example: On my best site, I have on 234x60 ad rectangle offering just ONE ad all the time. This ad, through smart pricing, will be the best paying ad my site can get at that exact moment in time. If the person is going to click an ad, I will get the best payout possible at that instance.

    On some sites, they have the maximum 3 ad units. The biggest ads might have up to 5 ad impressions, meaning they could have 15 different ads per page view. One of those 15 ads will be the maximum payout possible, with the other 14 being lower. I wouldn't doubt that sometimes 1 ad is worth $x with the other 14 being worth $x/30. Ouch!

    Also, too many ad impressions gives people reason not to return.
     
    dadasays, Jan 21, 2006 IP
  5. eiso

    eiso Peon

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    #5
    use an adsense tracker to give you an idea of which formats are getting the highest CTR.
     
    eiso, Jan 21, 2006 IP
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  6. pcunix

    pcunix Peon

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    #6
    Only one ad also means that's the only possible choice. If a visitor isn't interested in what that is pitching, then no click-through. If there were another, different ad, that *might* be something of interest.

    I vary my ads, and haven't found anything yet that convinces me to stick to a particular format - in fact, varying size and placement seems to give me better overall returns - but Adsense testing is very, very tricky: you have to run your experiments for long periods to see what they really mean, and if you've picked a time when you just aren't getting clicks for other reasons (phase of the moon, stock market, whatever), you can be fooled easily.

    It seems to me that every time I try a change, revenues drop :) - very annoying.

    One thing I do wish is that Google gave us better analysis tools. Channels are very limited and very annoying - there's no reason that they couldn't give us automatic breakdowns of where the revenue came from - pages, types of ads, etc. Most of us would happily PAY for that info, but you'd think they'd want us to have it so we could improve our placement. I've written to them and asked why they don't do that (the programming would be trivial) but they never have even answered at all..
     
    pcunix, Jan 21, 2006 IP
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  7. dadasays

    dadasays Peon

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    #7
    Google prefers you don't try to scope out the best payout every day, as they want their algorithms to do it for you.

    I find that on some posts I make, I'll get great CPC the first day, junked CPC for a week, and then that same static page over time grows in CPC over the long run. My tracking mechanism isn't as good as others though, so part of my tracking is a guestimate, but it is good enough to tell me to leave the site well enough alone, once I am happy with the results even once.
     
    dadasays, Jan 21, 2006 IP
  8. prowess

    prowess Guest

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    #8
    See Below...
     
    prowess, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  9. prowess

    prowess Guest

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    #9

    Their algorithms always screw me...so I will continue to scope things out the best I can for the best return. I just don't trust Goog to be looking out for little me.
     
    prowess, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  10. devin

    devin Guest

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    #10
    are you saying for a page or for the entire site?
     
    devin, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  11. Dio

    Dio Well-Known Member

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    #11
    Yeah - that happens to me, and even when it settles down its inconclusive. If you have lots of content on your pages, haveing lots of ads can benefit as it gives a lot of related choice across the page and makes the click a lot more likely.
     
    Dio, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  12. TheMags

    TheMags Peon

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    #12
    I'd like to ask that question as well, because I would suppose that fewer ads on each page but on more pages in total would be the way to go?
     
    TheMags, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  13. pcunix

    pcunix Peon

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    #13
    Not necessarily. You really have to experiment and see what works for your site. Longer articles can support more ads, but of course they have to be longer AND be read - if people aren't reading the whole page they will never even see that third ad below the fold - if they don't see it, they obviously can't click on it.

    I like to vary my ads - sometimes I'll run one ad, sometimes two or three. If the page is long and popular, I'll run more ads there than I will on a short page that is only getting a few pageviews a day.

    There are people here that say they changed to one ad and increased their income, but I saw just the opposite: I bumped it 33% by increasing the number of ads overall - though as I said, I vary them and I think that helps also: ad blindness is very real and the only way to combat it is to shake things up by doing something different. Sometimes I show Yahoo, sometimes Google, sometimes it's ad blocks, sometimes just a single ad, sometimes text, sometimes image ads - I think variety is a big part of the answer. Consider that the people who saw gains from whatever change they made might have seen some of those increases just because they were doing something different..

    But again: experimentation is the answer. What works for me might bomb for you. What works for me today might not work as well next week. I always pay attention to what other folks say, and I'm always willing to give an idea a spin, but I never think anything is the One True Absolute Way.
     
    pcunix, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  14. devin

    devin Guest

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    #14
    well said, pcunix, and i would agree that it takes lots of hard work to see which works best. :) how often do you vary their placing? once a week? twice?
     
    devin, Jan 23, 2006 IP
  15. pcunix

    pcunix Peon

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    #15
    With article pages, I vary "on the fly" by picking a random number. I do weight that heavily toward one layout that has worked well for me; the others are for variety and ad blindness.

    The major problem I have is analysis. I have thousands of pages, almost all of which get traffic daily, and I'd like to know what type of ads work best on specific pages. Channels are out because of the limits, so I have to get creative and group pages into types, assigning channels on the fly. The code gets pretty complicated, but basically I pick a certain set of pages and for a week those are "group A" and another set is "group B" etc. Then I can see in Adsense how "group A" did and keep on going another week.

    I've used Asrep ( http://aplawrence.com/Web/asrep-lessons.html ) and it used too much resources (cpu and disk) for my taste, though it would probably be great for a smaller site. It's frustrating because Google could easily provide us with much better reporting broken down by page and ad type automatically - heck, I'd pay for that if they offered it. But they don't, so I fumble around trying to get good stats.
     
    pcunix, Jan 24, 2006 IP