Make your CTR and CPM go up up up -- at a cost

I recently removed co-op ads from most of my sites, along with footer links which I was using to link between my nineteen various and largely unrelated web sites.

Traffic seems to have suffered a bit from the loss of these links. I've lost about 10% of traffic overall.

However, my AdSense ads are much more relevant now, my CTR is skyrocketing, my CPM is much better, and I am making about a third more revenue from AdSense than ever before. A 33% increase in revenue -- after a 10% decrease in traffic.

If contextual advertising is your main revenue source, you may want to take a hard look at the relevancy of your links.

 

What kind of website is this data from ? This might be an interesting data to look at.

 

It's from my loose network of about 19 mostly unrelated web sites.

Four of the links are in my signature...

 

Does this mean, you were getting ads based on the outgoing links on your site ?

I'm confused how coop will affect adsense context sensitivity ?

Please elaborate.
Regards,
Tuning

 

When Google AdSense MediaPartners bot visits your "farm tractors" page to see what it is all about... it looks at the page and says "Ahh... I see this page is about farm tractors. And shoes. And cheap long distance. And GSM security. And Corvettes."

Your visitors presumably got to your page while searching for "farm tractors". They are most likely to click on AdSense ads about farm tractors. My theory is that AdSense sometimes gets confused and shows them ads related to unrelated outbound links.

Make sense? Or has submitting to web directories turned my noggin to mush?

 

<<Make sense? Or has submitting to web directories turned my noggin to mush?>>


makes sense to me...... i get adsense for 'solicitors & mortgages'
count yourself lucky you don't get ads for will spencer

 

Thanks for the answer. I think the effect of coop will be less if you are running only 3-4 ads.

 

You'll also find Adsense is *very* sensitive to the proximity of links where:

They appear at the top of the page
They appear at the bottom of the page
They appear close to the adsense content.

I tried moving coop links to a side block (some time ago), and it improved things no end.

Cheers,

JL

 

Also remember that much of the anchor text used with the Coop is for very strong phrases. So if you have a page about green monkeys and AdSense is struggling to deliver ads, if they see something like "Mortgage" on the page, they will jump to display mortgage ads.

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I was getting a lot of ads about SAN's because of my footer links to EnterpriseStorageManagement.com and SANSecurity.com.

Those ads pay well, but the CTR was abysmal.

 

Traffic numbers keep falling; revenue numbers keep rising.

Mathematically speaking, this cannot continue forever.

 

Now just gotta figure out how to drive the traffic back up without losing CTR

 

hmmm, would it be allowed to hide co-op ad's from the adsense bot. I can't imagine that google would have a problem with that as you're trying to make sure that the adsense ads are more relevant to the content - which in turn would be good for adsense advertisers. Is this too sensible or will 'G' throw a wobbly because you're serving different content to surfers and bots.

 

Good idea, but I doubt Google would be able to differentiate this sort of thing with similar spammer activity, and therefore G would just not like it.

 

Maybe you could use a footer.php page that google is banned for seeing, but it is called with php includes...

but then again, G would still see it since it was delivered after the .htaccess and php include...right?

 

Google won't notice the difference in that case. PHP is performed server side so google doesn't notice from what file the contence was linked.
However having an iframe there with your links and code so it isn't indexed will work. I can't think of any reason why google would dislike this either. I've seen some websites which have there own iframe with things like contact email adres and a code to block out most bots from accassing it. Would solve the problems in this case I guess. And even if google can index it they won't associate it with the page contents.

Alternatively you can try to use:
<a href='url' rel='nofollow'>info</a>
Google mentioned in the blog that they ignore these links when spidering webpages. Might very well work now.

 

Of course, an IFRAME would also make the links useless for the COOP and for artificially increasing your own link relevance...