http://www.icarusindie.com/wiki/index.php/Making_Sense_of_Google_AdSense This is a snippet of the larger article --------------- An impression is an ad view by a visitor. This number is updated on a somewhat regular basis throughout the day. There are no real time statistics with AdSense. Back in the infancy of the internet when money flowed like water, an impression would result in revenue. This is not actually the case anymore and yet for some reason that doesn’t stop people from getting myopic about the number of impressions. You see web-sites with ads all over the place. The goal? To raise ad impressions. To me this makes no sense. Why in the world would you jack up a statistic that has little effect on ad revenue and can actually be detrimental to your revenue? The logic behind this is that a user must see an ad in order to have a chance of clicking on an ad. The logic then extends to “if a user sees one ad, they have x% chance of clicking on it. So if I show then 5 ads then they have a 5 times x% chance of clicking on one.†This, however, is not actually true. In the real world of marketing, the more ads you show a user the LESS likely they are to click on one. In fact, as soon as you annoy a user with an advertisement, they will blank out any additional advertisements on the page. Radio advertising is considered the most effective advertising because the audience is “captive.†With TV it’s easy enough to change the channel or TIVO past the ads. With radio, the listener is most likely in the car and not in a position to change the channel. However, a listener does have a breaking point. If the listener can expect the ads to be over in a reasonable amount of time they’ll leave the radio alone. However, if the listener wants to listen to music and gets the impression that the current station is going to be playing ads for too long, the listener will change the channel. The first few ads for each music break are going to be the most effective. It’s the same with your web-site. You need to get right to the effective ads and only for a small duration. Imagine for a second that a visitor comes to your site and you have a pop-up or pop-under. You’ve now distracted your visitor and have forced them to deal with a negative stimulus. Meanwhile, elsewhere on your page you have an advertisement for something they are interested in. Had you not forced that negative stimulus on them, the visitor would have been far more likely to click on the ad they were interested in. But, since you did, they will either, simply ignore any additional ads, leave your web-site, or be too annoyed to reward you with a click if they do see the ad they like. Visitors aren’t stupid. They know ads bring you money. Think of the ad revenue as a tip from your visitors. If you give them quality service, they are very likely to tip you by clicking on an ad they find interesting. If you give them bad service, they won’t tip you. It was also discovered long ago that visitors consciously block out advertisements. This brought about the advent of flashing, animated advertisements. Visitors quickly became annoyed by these ads and what little spike advertisers had in response was quickly gone. Visitors view these ads as negative stimulus and as a result they ignore them and any other ads on the site. ---------------
Most people do not click on ads unless the viewer is directed to interact with the ad by use of the words 'click here'. Most of us are burdened with ads on our pages that don't invite the viewer to click. That's why I filter my ads. I personally don't think publishers should be penalized if viewers don't click ads. If the ad is well written the viewer will click. Google is a rip off because the vast majority of viewers at least read the ads. Newspapers get paid a lot of money for ads that are not interactive. We should be paid the same.
Large sites get paid per view. Small sites get paid per click. AdSense is a good way to get paid while you build up your site but eventually the goal is to deal with advertisers directly and set your own terms. SomethingAwful.com charges a small amount to advertise on their site for 30 days. Any site can do that. You just need to be able to convince advertisers it's worth your fee. It's a trade off to use AdSense.
The point of this section of the article is "don't annoy your visitors" by over displaying ads. Just because your click thru rate is 4% now doesn't mean that if you double your ad impressions you'll maintain that 4% and get more money. Click thru tends to stay consistant with unique visitors. Not with ad impressions. I've seen sites that have multiple ad boxes plus pop ups. That really jacks up ad impressions but most likely lowers the click thru rate. You're now displaying 4 ads per unique and they can only click 1 so you max is now 25% click thru. 1 to 1 is 100% max CTR. Plus you've annoyed them so they're much less likely to click anything on your site. You have to consider not only are the visitors seeing your ads but whether or not they're having a positive reaction to them.
I agree, popups suck and are ineffective. With all the other advertising options that are available, I don't understand why anyone would resort to popups.
What if a page is not crowded? I mean , imagine if ur site's pages are big with much spacing. Will it still annoy ur visitors to see lots of ads , or it got to do with impression of disharmony ? Suppose for example , putting ads at bottom of page after several break lines? Oh and another question: won't decreasing number of ads decrease ur liabilty to get CPM ads which are much favoured , though less frequent?
I guess so. I just think the cost of annoying visitors isn't worth the extra money. To each his own though
If your site has too much whitespace it has too little content. When I go to a site and all I see is ads I think "spam" and go elsewhere.
Not too much white space, I mean just a block of space before the ads at bottom of page ( plus ads to the right side of the content). And there will be lot of content, the page will be a bit deep down
Plain wrong. I get plenty of CPM ads on my blog. So you do get paid for impressions, no matter how small your site.