OK, I have a scenario I will do my best to describe. I am looking for thoughful feedback. I have a niche site that does okay. It's one-of-a-kind, but so specific that traffic is not unlimited in potential. So, I had the site using YPN in the beginning and saw such a poor target that I switched it to AS, except for the very front page which inexplicibly would only display PSAs using AS, despite the content being just as specific as the inner pages. I have about a 4% CTR using AS on the inner pages. But, I was noticing that the ads on the one page displaying YPN were for the SAME businesses and paying 2-3x more per click. So, I switched my entire site to YPN. Targeting has much improved since way back when I began the site and YPN is now displaying pretty much identical ads as AS. But, suddenly, my CTR is WAY down. Let me choose arbitrary numbers. Say I had 50 clicks a day using AS. Now I am seeing maybe 3 a day. Same traffic. Same ads, as far as I can tell. I cannot believe all my visitors are all of the sudden seeing the Yahoo tag instead of the Adsense tage at the bottom and not clicking due to that. Is YPN just flat out not recording the clicks? Any ideas??
Ok, now that is something to think about. But, for what it is worth, my logs consistently show stats pretty much like today's: 98.67% USA 1.33% Canada Your comment would make sense, though, if I did have international traffic coming in more often.
try GeoTargeting the ads to show only to the US traffic for 48 hours, and nothign to the canadians. Then try same thign showing only adsense to US traffic and nothing to canadians. This way you have same control group. If the ads are for same business types, and you are seeing 50 with adsense adn 3 with YPN, such a huge difference, this may be a big problem, very big problem. If YPN are counting less clicks and paying us more per click, then this is flat out fraud. Not jumping to any conclusions here, perhaps some of the clicks are blocked by Yahoo because of international traffic, or because they are of IP's that have been blacklisted. Not accusing you here, but have you clicked your own ads?
Slava, good questions, all. The only one I can answer with any certainty is that I have never clicked my own ads. I'm far too paranoid for that! I'm just a hard-working single-mom wanting to bring in some additional income and would never want to risk losing what little this does bring in. Your thoughts on fraud... well, you tool the thoughts out of my mind. I hate even uttering it, but it IS what I have been wondering. I have never done geo-targeting. I am a graphic designer and although my sites LOOK freakin' fantastic, I am a little slow in the more technical areas. So, I will read up on all that tonight.
Hah. Thats exactly my story. I just wrote about it the other day: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=158922 So I decided to run a little experiment. First off, according to AWStats I have at least 90% US traffic. Anyways, I just started the experiment so its kind of premature (need to run it a couple of days): I installed phpadsnew (what a pain) and started to use geotargetting. I am using the free simple database for GeoIP. Anyways, I told it to show Google ads if the Country doesnt match US (or Islands). And guess what, even though AWStats shows 90% US traffic, a lot more Google Ads are being shown. YPN earnings are same as ever, but on top of it I am getting Adsense. I guess before I did this, I left a lot of money on the table. I have read that YPN counts all links innitially and subtracts invalid clicks during review. Not sure if that is still true. Anyways, I find it rather curious that more google ads are shown. Geotargetting can be done with this app: http://phpadsnew.com/two/ Its overly complex for that task alone, but I am already starting to love the additional features of it.
i believe the free database is only 72% accurate and not updated as frequently. if you really want to do a test and report back to us. send your international traffic to a seperately tracked ypn page and see if any of the clicks count.
You know the funny thing? In review, I have never been paid LESS than the amount calculated daily in a given month. I have, though, been paid MORE. YPN boggles my mind. Seriously. I'm going to learn teh who geotargeting game.
72% does not account for the numbers I am seing. I am getting at least 5 times more impressions on the Google ads. I think I will keep it the way it is and in a week from now report back if it did increase my earnings or not. I don't want to send any non-US traffic to YPN ads, since some people got ditched for "low quality traffic" (I don't even know how traffic can be low quality). I wouldn't have to send them to another page, just show a different category for that traffic
you wont get banned for doing it for a day or two, they will ban you if you do it consistently for over a month.
Here's a small update. I switched the site in question 100% back to AS, *including* the front page, which had always used YPN (since AS had always shown PSAs on that page). The PSAs are gone now and MAN, I was missing out on TONS of clicks by using YPN on my front page. My earnings have more than doubled just by placing this page back on AS, along with the rest of the site. I'm seriously leaning toward the belief that even though YPN pays more per click, they are only actually recording and paying for about 10% of my actual clicks. And, yes, my traffic is still 98-99% US.
I have adsense account too but never tried as YPN pays me best even with 1% CTR. if i get 2% CTR with even, i might be making in thousands atleast will try to move with google later if revenue goes real down, not now..
My CTR for the internal pages of the site in question, on average, was about 3-4%. Now that I have the front page of the site on AS with the rest of the pages, my overall site CTR is around 7%. I like YPN, God bless 'em. They have a nice price per click, but I cannot deal anymore now that I know it is NOT just low CTR. It is obviously uncounted clicks.
Here is my Update: Turns out after a while YPN and Adsense get about the same impressions with Geotargetting turned on. Thats still odd (since I get mostly US traffic) but better. Google earnings have gone to hell (I guess smartpricing is the issue here). On average I am making more with Yahoo than I make with Google (CTR < 1% on both but about 1/3 on Yahoo vs. Google). Overall my Earnings have gone up since I employed Geotargetting. Even though YPN now gets a lot less impessions I get more out of it. The overflow goes to Google which quite frankly has been really sh***y recently (EPC). I think I will try this out on other websites as well (maybe even pull all Google ads for a while to reset smartpricing).