I am wondering about the placement of ads when using more than 1 ad unit and the price we get paid per click. I have heard here that ad units that are placed on top will be of more value than those placed lower. But I have noticed on my own site that I often get paid more from clicks on a leaderboard on the very bottom of my site than clicks on a skyscraper and rectangle placed on the top of the page. So does this mean that the value of an ad is not calculated by placement then? Or is there something I have missed here?
Straight from the adsense blog: "Make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page." "Currently, the first ad unit on a page always shows the top ads that win the ad auction. Also, if there aren't enough ads in our ad inventory to fill all of the ad units on a page, the first ad unit on the page will display ads first." http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/first-impressions-count.html
Ok thanks. Guess there is some other reason to why I often get more for each click on that bottom ad. Heck if I know what though
If you are referring to the site in your signature, that is a "link unit" in the footer and not an "ad" unit. Somebody could click through you link unit and then click the 1st adsense ad on the ads page, theoretically resulting in the highest click. I can't find specifically where adsense mentions this but I did find this that hints at the difference: "link units display a list of topics that are relevant to your page. Each topic, when clicked, brings the user to a page of related advertisements." https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=15817 So when they click your bottom link unit (or topic links) they aren't clicking any add at all, let alone the lowest "ad" in your code, rather just a link to the page of ads. If I understand link units correctly.
Yeah, thanks for the information, however its not the site in my signature that is the one in question. The site I'm having in mind got a leaderboard at the bottom, in other words a normal ad unit. It usually gets 15-30 cent a click, while other units on my site lately had only 2-10 cents a click :s
This came up recently and somebody pointed out that this doesn't mean the ads with the highest CPC, it means the ads with the highest overall earnings - CPM. So the first ads might well pay less per click, but should have a higher CTR to more than compensate. Also remember it is the ads that appear first in the HTML that earn the most, which may not necessarily be those that appear first on your page - depends how you've set up your site or used CSS, PHP includes etc
The thing is that my leaderboard is in bottom of both source code and the displayed web page. So its weird it usually has the highest payment.
Ok as I still keep getting higher paying clicks on the leaderboard on bottom of every page, and very low paying clicks on the other ads, I decided to pull it off completely from all my pages to see if that will increase the pay per click for the other ads. Kinda annoying when the ad unit that has lowest CTR of them all gets the highest payin clicks, while the ones that has really good ctr gets shitty pay per click. Got no idea why its like this, but I hope removing the bottom ad will help
How exactly are you tracking this? Sitewide channels could easily be wrong. For instance visitors click the top ads on low paying pages and bottom ads on high paying pages. Not saying that's what is happening, that's just one example of how sitewide channels could be wrong. So, How exactly are you tracking this?
i have individual channels for the ads in question on different pages, so i can easily see what pages the clicks are from as they have unique names for each page.
So you have ads on the bottom of a page that pay more than the ones at the top, and they aren't link units, and you are tracking page level. Odd, and for sure opposite of what the google blog says. http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/first-impressions-count.html However, maybe the ads with a higher quality score/ctr are showing up first on your pages. e.g, the better paying ads don't show up first, but the ads that win the bid do http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/02/ad-rank-explained.html Just a thought.
I had another thought- could it be that ads are usually first showing ads related to things like title of page, name of html file, h1 tags etc but if the keywords for these do not have a wide amount of ads to display about it looks at other parts of the page instead, such as the text or meta tags or something and thus maybe showing other types of ads related to those other keywords? And maybe those keywords are higher paying but placed so low on the web page that only the lower ad units will be affected because the upper part of the page and ad units have allready loaded?
Ok just read that google page about ad rank you posted. Seems its possible that higher paying ads are actually getting lower rank than lower paying ads because of the "Quality Score". Guess that might be it actually.
I think you will find that quality score has a lot more to do with AdWord publishers landing pages than it does the AdSense ads that are displayed on your site. This is a distinct possibility - when Google reads your pages it trys to places ads that are relevant to the entire page as well as the content directly around the ad. Can I ask which ads are more relevant though. See from what I understand Google doesn't just factor the highest paying ad and place it first, it places the highest "earning" ads first. What do I mean by that. Well say you have a site about surfing and obviously the vast majority of people coming to your site are interested in surfing and say your surfing ads shown in your top ad unit are paying $0.30 a click and they are getting quite a few clicks because it is relevant to your content. Now because there are only a couple of advertisers that want to target surfing Google might try to fill any ad inventory that can't be filled with surfing ads with say water skiing ads. The thing is the water skiing ads pay $0.45 a click, but the thing is the CTR on that ad isn't all that crash hot because most people at your site aren't there to get more info on water skiing, and well if you put the same ad in the same position as a surfing ad it might not even get half of the clicks that your surfing ads gets. So Google doesn't just factor earning per click for position, it also factors the CTR of an ad, and ads that get better CTR on your site obviously should be put into highest positions because they will earn more when you factor the amount they pay AND how often they are clicked. I hope that sorta makes sense. So that is how you can sometimes ads that aren't the highest paying up the top. The other conclusion that I'll just quickly throw out there - is your leader board at the bottom actually appear first in your source code? I know it sounds ridiculous be it can be done and often inadvertently.