I have a link unit on my site's home page that isn't doing very well (about half a thousand impressions/day, but very few clicks if any)... I'm going to try some other spots for it and believe I can improve it enough to nullify this question probably, though I still love to learn everything I can.... Anyhow, I'm not totally clear on how smart pricing works, so I was wondering if continuing to have the under-performing link unit could negatively affect my account as a whole (particularly if it were given site-wide impressions and still did poorly)? Most of my ad units do pretty well, though the link unit averages less than 0.5%. My first thought would be that the performance of link units wouldn't affect ad units, since the visitor isn't actually seeing the ads for all those link unit impressions, whereas they see all the ad unit impressions. I think my confusion is coming from the fact that the channels for tracking both ad and link units are mixed together (whereas other channels, i.e. search and referrals, are grouped separately). Well, just hoping someone can shed some light on this for me. I'm still learning Peace.
Smartpricing is confusing. Read more about it here. http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html
Hi absolutecross, Welcome to DP! I "do the web" all day and I'm still not sure how smart pricing works. I read a post from jensense yesterday where she said that page impressions have no impact on smart pricing. You can separate your link unit and ad units channels in adsense tracking though. Just assign a new channel.
Thanks you guys corinaw, if you happen to come across that page on jensense again, I'd love to read it In regard to channels for link units... what I meant to say was that when you make a custom channel for use with either an ad unit or link unit (for instance, I have a channel tracking just that home page link unit), that channel appears in the same list of channels meant for both link units and ad units (at AdSense Setup >> Channels >> Active Custom Channels). Also when viewing the "AdSense for content" channels on the Reports Overview, my ad unit and link unit channels all appear in that same list together.... whereas AdSense for search and Referrals have their own fully separate areas. Since they're grouped together like that, I'm not sure if the 0.5% from my Link Unit is factored into the calculations for my overall CTR and eCPM. My thinking is that an impression of a link unit and an impression of an ad unit ought to be considered differently (and perhaps they are). And perhaps, as you said, impressions don't mean anything anyhow and I'm just chasing my tail here. Well since I'm confusing myself just writing it, hopefully I described it well enough haha Thanks for your help