I have read a few times now that the less ads you show on a page, the higher the value the ads will have that actually ARE displayed. Has anyone done any solid research on this, or heard anything official? LMK, thanks.
Well, from my understanding, the ad unit that appears first on a page (in html) will display the highest value keywords. Im pretty sure I read that on here or Digg, but I cant cite the source - sorry.
Its not that higher value ads will be displayed as Google will serve the highest value ads first. If you have less ads then there is less chance someone will click on the lower paid ad. It all depends on your site theme for example: I have one site that has only one banner that gives me good payout. If I place more than one banner I start to see more clicks but more lower valued ones. Another site that I have has three banners and the payout is good but if I remove one or two of the banners its more or less the same value as with three but with less clicks.
A couple of months ago I went to using only one adsense block and removed all link units on my sites and my CPC almost doubled. The cool thing is that my CTR only decreased by a little bit with these changes.
Yep, having one big rectangle ad is better than having ads spreaded all over. Your ad that gets the most clicks could be getting served with the advertisers that are paying the least.
If the second or third adblock shows up empty often, the ads that do show up there (sometimes) are likely to be cheap. It's really about how many ads are in the ad-inventory for your keywords. If there are many ads, there are likely enough reasonably paying ones to fill three ad-units (not on my sites, but well). If there are few, you are better off just showing one ad-unit, so that the ads that do show are ones that had to outbid the ones that did not show up. It's a matter of supply and demand. Make sure you have places for ads to show, but not more than there are ads for. If you have more than there are ads for, advertisers won't have to bid highly to have their ads shown. By the way - I use one ad-unit plus one link-unit on many pages. Seems to work well. This sort of defies my theory though: link-units have a lot of spots for ads to show up in.
Google does not always show the highest paying ads first. I've done research with the ads shown on my site vs. the ads shown on googles results for my main keywords and the ad that is shown on my site shows on page 3,4,5 or even 6 of googles search results. I have done this numerous times to be sure and my theory stands corrected
Well, google does give advertisers the option to place their ads lower. But I'm sure that if there are four spots on your page only the highest bidders that fit the keywords on your page are going to show (on whatever spot). and if you make 8 spots, by having 2 ad-units, the extra spots are going to go to lower paying ads.
It's based on the placement of the ads in the source. If most of your clicks are coming to the 3rd placement of your ads... then of course removing the first two blocks will probably increase your total revenue.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/first-impressions-count.html It doesnt matter if you have 1,2 or 3 banners, you will always be served the highest paying ad as the quote says, the first ad unit on the page. And ads on their Search Results is very different than what you see in on webpages. Lots of people disable their ads from being displayed on sites and only opt for the option of having them shown on the search results, thats why you are seeing a difference in positions.
i think yes when i put 468*60 ads in my system average cpm can be .4$ but when i put 728*90 cpm lowered about .15$.
That is odd... I've gotten PSA's many times on my first ad unit, while the second and third had ads. It must just be the general trend.
I've found that it depends on the layout of your site. If your site is a jumbled mess with a ton of content spread everywhere, sometimes more ads will help, because you increase the chance of someone stumbling across it while searching your site and clicking. But if your site is very streamline, then one ad will be better, because anything more will make it seem like your site is nothing but one big ad site, and surfers hate that, and will not only NOT click, but probably not come back.