Hi all, new to the forum and somewhat new to Adsense. (6 months) My question is about how Google "sees" a website, whether it's evaluates all the content on the site to choose the ads that are displayed, or on by each individual page within the site. The specific reason I ask is because I have a website about buying/selling gold, which was getting me pretty solid CPC. The site is well established, but I just recently added adsense. A few weeks ago I added a rather large section about gold prospecting, and my average CPC dropped significantly, immediately and has stayed down for a several weeks. That new content that I added had not had a significant amount of views, but it seems as though Google decided that my website had more to do with prospecting for gold than buying/selling gold, and therefore displayed the lower paying ads. (ads about buying/selling gold are significantly higher $$$ than mining/prospecting ads). Does that make sense? I had assumed that those specific pages would have lower CPC, and the other pages would still maintain higher CPC, but it doesn't seem that way. Of course there could be other factors that I have no control over, but a better understanding would help me out. Thanks for any insight...
Hi, unfortunately adsense algorithm is exactly like gogole search algorithm, there is no official explanation of its working, and only people on forum who make up stuff. So the only correct answer is "I don't know". Once adsense will produce a clear explanation then we can learn it and answer something else.
I appreciate that James. "Nobody really knows" is definitely a better answer than just a guess based on here-say. I pulled that new content off my site and will be interested to see what happens. It was quality content, but if it causes google to lower the CPC value it's not that important. It will be interesting to see if it bounces back.
Personnally what I would have done is keep that content and keep on adding more. Plus I would have continue to try to increase the CTR. Because the CPC fluctuates, it doesn't matter. With a good ctr you can get high RPM even with low CPC, and whenever the CPC increases back because a new advertizer bids high, your whole optimised system will generate lot of money. So I would focus on increasing traffic by having quality and numerous content on CTR optimised pages. That's all I would be concerned about.
I have found lately a curious Google's behavior. No matter what the content of your site is, but the AdSense units that you may have in a page might be showing advertising that is irrelevant to your content, but has to do with you web surfing and previously search terms. Let's suppose your site is about Payday Loans, the obvious relevant advertising would be finance-related. However if someone has been searching for a hosting provider, and visiting some of them before landing on your page, your AdSense will display hosting related advertising. So I have no idea how Google evaluated the content to display advertising and determines the CPC if what I can see often has nothing to do with the content available on a given site.
It is not lately, it is quite old now. Yes, if you go to irobot to look at roomba, or if you go to agoda to look at hotels in X city, then you'll see ads about those things following you on unrelated sites with adsense enabled. I think you can opt out of this tracking by clicking on ad choices and then find the option, but who cares really