I was having a discussion with someone on MSN who believes that the highest and lowest paying ads are just randomly mixed up on a page. I guess he meant - each ad unit goes from highest to lowest - and then it starts again on the next ad code. I told him NO - highest paying to lowest paying is how they run! So if you have 3 ad units on a page 1 - highest 2 - middle 3 - lowest Is how they will be distributed (if that is how they are placed in the code) Can anyone else confirm this?
Have a read of this: http://www.seopedia.org/contextual-...se-your-first-ad-unit-is-the-most-profitable/ Should confirm.
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and say that I don't believe this. Why? Because we are also told that Google always shows the highest possible ads first. Let's forget the order for a second, let's assume that you have only one ad block. I repeat, we are told that the highest paying ads are used to fill that ad block. We know this is not true. Again, why? Because you can be polluted with MFAs paying $0.02 and $0.01 per click...If what we believe is true, then those are the highest paying ads. Well, now I filter those ads out and all of a sudden I'm getting $0.20 and $0.30 per click...hmmmm, those are higher than $0.01 and $0.02 aren't they? So, we know that the statement "Google always shows the highest paying ads" is false. By extension, I don't know if the statement that the highest paying ads are always in the first ad box can be said to always be true, either.
True but remember... 'Highest paying ad' doesn't mean the ad with the highest CPC, it means the highest eCPM. So lower paying ads can be shown first if the have a higher CTR and better overall earnings.
It's not quite the same thing. If an advert will pay 25c and the ad has a CTR of 1% but another ad has a CPC of 20c but the ad has a CTR of 2%, the second ad will be shown first. It will earn more overall for your site, but doesn't have the highest price per click. I guess this is why the MFA 2c a click ads get shown - they don't pay much but they get clicked on a lot, so should actually earn more for your site than the other ads available. That's how it is supposed to work (as I understand it) but I wouldn't like to say how well it works in reality. Not perfectly I think, which is why people sometimes report increased income after blocking MFA low-paying sites.
rasputin, who determines the CTR? Google determines the CTR on my ad block or the CTR of that ad campaign across the sites? I still dont get ur point
Google will know the CTR for each individual ad - not each ad block. So this is not the same figure as your adsense CTR. Say your CTR is 5%, the CTR for each individual ad will be much lower - perhaps 0.5% I guess they measure the CTR by looking at that ad across all sites it is shown on, but it's possible they look on a site by site basis, I don't know the answer. The point I'm trying to make is that just because an ad has a higher earning per click doesn't mean it will ear the most or be shown first, because other ads may get clicked more often. You would rather have 3 clicks at 10c than 2 clicks at 11c. So the eCPM is used to compare different ads, because that is a real measure of how expensive / high earning an ad really is, because it takes into account both CTR and CPC. Then the ad with the highest eCPM should be shown first on the page. To complicate things further this assumes the ads in your HTML are in the same order as they appear on your page - not necessarily true with CSS etc!