I realize that AS is able to know--by the IP address--where a click has come from geographically, and I also know that the cost for a click is influenced by the part of the world the click has come from. But does AS know how the visitor got to that click? In other words, does AS track the path to the click? And if AS tracks the path to a click, does this affect the click's value? Anyone have any insight? AmCy
Hehe...OK...In other words, if a visitor makes an AS click on one of my sites, does AS track whether that visitor came from e.g. a Yahoo search or from a link from another website? And is the value of that click affected by this? AmCy
i doubt they use click path in calculating the value of the click. they might collect this data for statistical purposes but other than that i don't think so... also, if you were them, what role would click path play in your payout algo? p.s. and i highly doubt that they value clicks differently depending on what geo location the clicker belongs to. can you prove otherwise?
My understanding is that G wants to offer the best possible value for their AdWords customers. I think that click path may play a role in their determination of a click's value to an AdWords customer. Let's consider 2 click paths for web surfer "X": a) X --> login to Internet --> CNN.com --> Yahoo.com Search --> Mysite --> AS click b) X --> login to Internet --> G Search --> Adult Site --> Online Dating Site --> Mysite --> AS click My feeling is that G may determine that path "a" is more valuable to their AdWords base than path "b", and may assign click values accordingly. Of course, the exception would be if path "b" lead to a click on my site, and my site just happens to be an online dating site (related theme.) Am I making sense here, or should I grab a donut and brew some more coffee? AmCy
That's always a good idea -- First you talked about geographics, then click paths. About the first you could say that a adsense keyword like 'hotel' is picked by a (let's say) Polish advertiser for Polish visitors of your site for $0.10 and by a US advertiser for US visitors for $1.00. So if you have one day only visitors from Poland, your CPC would by 1/10th of a day with only US visitors. I don't think the click path is that important to determin what ads to show. Google derives some keywords from your page and show ads based on them and based on the IP address of the visitor. That should be enough to get the highest click rate (and highest revenues for google, and therefore for you as 'publisher').
As an advertiser through Adwords, you can target your ads geographically. Therefore, Adsense has some back-end technology to determine your location and choose which geographical ads are shown to you. Try it yourself. If you live in Canada, Google "credit report". Up comes many ads for canadian credit reports. Geographical targeting.
They probably know what the referring url is. Whether that info has any bearing on the ad displayed and amount paid out.... I have no clue.
Im pretty sure the referring url comes into play on AdSense ads. Cause ive had some pages that wont load any ads or just 1 ad when reloaded but if I come at those pages from certain other pages all 5 ads are full.
Interesting observation. Thanks for sharing that. Well, if it's true that the referring URL does play a role, I think I'm going to have to rethink my entire linking strategy. Oh boy. <daydreaming>ahhhh, If only I could be a fly on the wall in that G AS programming room for a day.</daydreaming> AmCy
I've wondered about the click path affecting things too. Specifically I wonder if things change if a vistor arrived at you site via an adwords click.
Yes, another good question: what about AW referrals? Is there a bias in assigning AS click values when a surfer arrives @ a site via AW? Hmmm... AmCy
Some people swear that they see improvments/increaseas when they run adwords themselves for their own website. Guess you would need to give it a try.
To me it makes sense that the CTR would be better for people who come to your site via AW. You know they are the type of people who click on ads. I've started doing a bit of experimentation with AW, but have gotten mixed results.
Sorry to disagree but I don't think that G has any information other then about the page the ad was clicked on. I've been reading through this forum and I gather that while many members are excellent marketers not many are web developers. I assume this because most web developers would know that you can can't get access to that kind of information from the client. Let me explain and then anyone is free to correct me. (I have been known to be wrong befor adSense is client side code. That means the code runs in the clients browser on the clients machine. It cannot access any information about the client's history, either one page back or many. On the client side there is a collection known as 'history' but client side code can only refer to items in the history by index number and can never read the contents. e.g. history.go(-1) for a back button. If this wasn't the case I could write code to dynamically say "Naughty boy you've visited the following porn sites. ....." Violation of privacy or what! There are many ways to get the referer in your own server side code. There is document.referer for javascript and the servervariables collection. But those only tell you the referer of the current page not back any further. This was the reason for those ad networks that sprang up to track people across multiple sites. (I think double click was the first wern't they?) They worked because each member could set and read a shared cookie on teh clients machine. If enough sites were a member of the network their combined information would provide the kind of click paths in your example. Dave
Dave excellent post but if google wanted to track click path of *pages that contain adsense*, it would be able to. user visits page A on example.com, google logs the visit. user clicks off to page B and possibly clicks on an ad on page B on example.com, google logs it again. hence, google now has a click path (page A->page B). primitive but possible to do when pages visited contain ad sense code on them again, i don't think they do any of this as there is very little purpose behind it
Ya right after I posted I realized that G has got one of the best adNetwork info systems around. As long as the user continually hit sits with adSense G would have their whole surfing history. However I still doubt that they mine that in realtime to adjust the payouts. Payouts are a result of adWord bidding right? So if bidders were able to say "I'll bid 50 cents if the person had PBS in their history and 10 cents if they had visted foxNews" then maybe. Hmm cept that should be the other way around right, the people surfing from foxNews are clearly suckers, so I'd pay more for their clicks
My thinking is that the referring URL may affect how much of a cut G will give you for a particular click. Maybe that's one of the reasons why they are very secretive about the percentage they pay to their AS publishers. Just my guess, of course. I have no idea what the story is. AmCy
Hey AmCy, sometimes you start the thread about what I am thinking about too, coincidence... My observation: Google surely checks out the Geo location. If I am advertiser of my law practice in US, why should I pay for the clicks from other Geo locations like Europe or China. What I may ask google is, I wuld pay $2 for clicks from US and $0.20 for clicks from other parts of world... this makes sense for me to get potential customers and not only useless clicks for my ads. This logic proves, that google must be taking care of this for adword advertisers and provide different CPC as per advertiser's choice for Geo locations. I do have the evidence of this, from my adsense R&D.