Hi there, 2 days ago I reported in a thread here at DP that a Polish site of mine was getting very low CPC. The same day I removed the images around the ads on that site and guess what ... my CPC is a lot better now (five times higher actually). And I thought it was because of "Smart Pricing"
This shows two things: You have to experiment to see what works best for your site Banner blindness is starting to happen for image-linked ads I'm not surprised.
I'm not trying to offend you, but just wanted to state out that I meant the CPC (Cost Per Click), not CTR (Click-Through Rate) After reading your post I thought that maybe I didn't state that out too clearly, since in my thinking banner blindness doesn't have anything to do with the price you get for a click...
I havee noticed many times seeing only three ads in a leaderboard that always carried four in the past. Wonderr rif thtis is to keep webmasters from attempting to place images over the ads. This site does not do it but I never saw three before people started using that image trick. Shannon
You're right, I misread CPC for CTR, but I still think my comments stand... the whole "put an image next to an ad" thing is not as lucrative as it used to be, not with so many people doing it now. That's what I mean by banner blindness, people getting used to seeing certain things and blocking it out. There could be other reasons for what you're seeing, too. It'll be interesting to see what happens over the long term.
whatever happened, smartpricing doesnt kick in this quick, things dont happen the same day, you've got to wait a few weeks to see the difference
Sorry, didn't make that clear before. Smart pricing didn't start on my site just a few days ago, but 1-2 weeks or so. Now everything seems to be normal again... Sure I'll keep you updated.
No, that was a separate thing that Google announce a while back, where they would serve less ads in an ad unit if their algorithms think the results would be better. Yes, it does mess with the image trick, and I've posted about that before in my blog. Basically the only way around it is to use the single-ad rectangle format and lay three of them side-by-side. If you care about the images lining up perfectly with the ads, of course.
3 single-ad units side by side doesnt work either, if you have more than one unit on your page, google quite often will only display 2 of them, leaving the 3rd one blank.
Yes that is exactly what I have said and meant. And sometimes only 1 Ad is showing!! But it is not sooo bad with the 3 single-ad units. And I have put "alternative ads" in it (thanks Eric).