Hi, I understand that the commissions that google pays for an adsense click are secret. But I've heard people say that the amount of the commissions depends on a few things. I heard that it depends on PR, bidprice and overall google placement. So would that mean that if a bidprice is relatively low. One could raise the amount of commission that google pays out by trying to get a better SE placement ? Also, does anyone know what the max. percentage of the bidprice the commisions can reach ? Gdev
A very good questions. Just when I think I understand it my numbers swing up and down so much that I really don't have a clue. From my knowledge I would remove PR and google placement from your list of factors.
When someone clicks an ad, Google rolls some dice and that determines your payout percentage. Seriously.
What are you saying Eric, that it doesn't matter if you the bidprices are low or hight and that it's all a gamble ? Are you actually making a joke here ? Gdev
Half-joke, half-serious, actually. Google doesn't disclose the percentage it pays out, plus there are so many factors that can influence the amount that advertisers pay (see the posting I just made about keyword values) that it might as well be a roll of the dice sometimes. Especially if smart pricing kicks in.
I am very aware of the fact that google does not comment on actual revenue percentages. My question was wich factors are taken into account while actually coming up with this 'secret' percentage. If you'd care to comment ? gdev
Probably smart pricing, which gets calculated weekly and applies across all your sites. If you have poorly-converting sites, they may be dragging down your earnings overall.
I strikes me that if Google won't comment on actual revenue percentages -- though it does publish the cost of acquisition of its ad revenue in its written filings with the SEC and the investment community -- it is not going to comment on what factors determine the revenue split with individual websites on individual ads. We can speculate on what factors influence payments. Some of that is bound to be correct, but no one, maybe not even Google insiders, know the actual degree of influence. Your click rate may come from an algorithm which considers numerous things, including: cookie- and IP-based factors about the person clicking on the ad, to the conversion rates for individual sites per class of ad per advertiser, the time of day in the region where the click came from, to the geographic relationship between the clickor and the clickee. If conversion rates are considered, that is a very important factor for websites which are not working hard enough to create content which brings the right type of user and advertisier together on a page. If lots of clicks equal few sales, then Google should be lowering your percentage of the take. I have seem threads at DP which discuss the idea that Google puts a track back cookie on the computers of people who click on individual ads. If no sale results in 'x' days it is theorized that Google decreases the weight of the site where the click took place. It would be great if we had a Google deep throat who could help webmasters understand these concepts. If you knew that poor conversions, for instance, could kill your ad revenue split, you would be more likely to focus on your site quality than quantity of vistors -- an undetermined percentage of whom escape your site through ads.
I can assure you that PR and Google placement have nothing to do with the amount paid per click. Google won't even touch some of my sites (PR0, not indexed in Google) - the traffic comes from MSN, Ask and Yahoo, and there have been very high value clicks from them.
I wouldnt be 100% positive on that one, as I saw a CPC spike after the PR updates, and super drop after one site got removed from google's index. Maybe a coincidence, but who knows..
I see the spikes and drops all the time. Yesterday my main site spiked with 3 times the average CPC. Today it is well below average.