I have two keyword phrases. One was set at around 33%, the other at 67%, and they have been that way for quite a while. According to the stats, the one that is set the lowest constantly shows more views. (almost double). Any thoughts on why?
The weighting system assigns them to sites, but after that, each ad has an equal chance of being displayed within the site (from the site's cache). One thing that comes to mind would be if an ad with a higher weight was assigned to 3 low traffic sites vs. an ad with a lower weight assigned to a single high traffic site, it could be something like that.
Something doesn't seem right to me with stats either. We used to have about 18K weight, and were doing fine. Then the file changes were implemented, we added 4 ads for a total of 5, weight went to about 29K, and stats started plummeting. We moved the co-op to the root of our site, went to 63K weight, and stats are *still* falling. Either some huge sites have pulled out of the network, nobody is visiting network sites, or something is wrong. It has caused our google rankings to plummet as well. We were at #1 and #3 for our most sought after keyphrases, now we're at #4 and #6, and the google changes seem to coincide with the lower number of impressions from the co-op.
I suppose your right, we're not plummeting in google, but in the stats. We're leaking and slowly sinking on google. Impression-wise, we peaked on April 16th-ish at about 6000 impressions for the keyphrase with the most weight, but dropped to about 2000 by April 24th, even with the weight increases we realized by first adding 4 ads and then moving the co-op to the root of our site. We lost 2/3's impressions, but increased the weight on this particular keyphrase from about 9K originally, to about 15K with 5 ads, and finally to about 25K now that the co-op is on our entire site. It's almost inversely proportionate, increase weight nearly threefold and drop to 1/3 of the impressions. I'm not really complaining though, just posting my observations. It sure seems odd that stats would slide drastically as you're increasing weight dedicated to it, and with the google rank falling somewhat in tandem, it's concerning. I'd like to be able to make sense of it. I'm seeing impressions start to tick back upward since the 24th, hopefully we'll get back up to where we were. But, how does one explain falling impressions when weight is increasing?
my guess would be that your ads were showing on a high traffic site, but then they expired from that site and are now showing on a lesser site..
It may be coincidental but I've noticed something similar for several coop sites where there is a slow degradation in SERP positions for G/Y/M that correspond to a decline in impressions for particular keyword. The coop is just one component of my advertising/backlink strategy but now that Shawn is showing us the ad stats we've got one more piece of empirical data to use in analyzing the search engines. -jay
I've only been using the co-op for a very short period of time (about 3 weeks). What I've noticed is similar to the initial post in this thread (ie the ad with the least weight is getting far more impressions than the other ad). Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not complaining. My SERPs for the site that I'm targetting with the Ads is increasing far beyond what I expected (considering I'm sharing 7500 weight between 2 ads). How much of these increases are due just to the co-op is hard to tell, but I'm convinced that at least some of the increase can be put at the door of the co-op. Over time, it'll be more and more obvious if the SERPs positions go up and down with the ad impressions. I'm also seeing traffic from the ad's - well at least referrers from sites I don't recognise.