May 23, 2007
Google AdSense continues to surprise and since my last post on this subject I happened to bump into yet another Ad sense thing that bothers me so much that I just can’t help sharing it with you.
If you are like me do most of your Pay Per Click monetization via Google AdSense you just have to be watching what it does very closely and attentively as good part of your income depends on it. And if you do, you might have noticed as I did some time ago that from time to time AdSense statistics spit out some funny figures. Almost every other day I see some funny irregularities like a channel that had no clicks but some impressions suddenly shows greater than zero eCPM. I am sure I am not the only one who had noticed this strange irregularity. For a long time I tended to write this off thinking that big numbers maths is something way beyond my understanding and all this would have been forgotten if there was not another more intriguing figure that tended to pop up less often but still often enough for me to take a note of. Occasionally in the column directly adjusted to the eCPM one and inconspicuously called Earnings I could see something like US$0.01. Nothing unusual, you say. Well, it would have been so if a corresponding value of a column titled Clicks was not displaying a big round zero. Needless to say that Page CTR cell also quite logically had zero percent in it.
Now, here is the question: how come I earned a cent from a Pay Per Click Network without having any clicks? Must be a miracle - IN GOD WE TRUST - indeed…
Can’t grasp the logic of all this. Setting aside the possibility if divine intervention as being highly unlikely in my case, let’s look for possible materialistic explanations. No big number theory can explain this phenomehae as from the course of elementary maths I remember that whatever you do with zero either you divide or multiply by zero you should always get zero. So, how was I given this one cent out of nothing as The Universal Laws of Science and The Law of Creation and Preservation of Matter and Energy in particular tell us that one cent coins don’t come from nothing under normal circumstances (and even less so do dollar bills). My most immediate thought was that Google rewards not only clicks but impressions as well (hence the title of this post). However strange it might seem if you think about it in fact it is only logical to reward sites performing well in terms of impressions but having users dumb enough not to click like crazy on those highly attractive and clickable AdSense blocks. Now, when temptation to look for AdSense alternative seems to be on the increase it does make sense to add a bit of per impression to the traditional per click concept to stimulate publishers thus saving your Ad network from collapsing. The only problem here is how you do it? The easiest way seems to introduce some bonus per view coefficient. But here another problem arises: where do you get funds to pay per view premiums if you are a per click network? Well, the answer is not so difficult to guess– of course from the part advertisers are paying into your ad network as per click rates (it would have been plain stupid to deduct it from your own profits, wouldn’t it?). But now you are facing another difficult task – how to calculate this whole thing as simple arithmetic i. e. 100% per click fee split between a publisher and a network at a known proportion will be of no help. For this the notion of heuristics widely popularized by GoogleGuy AKA Matt Cutts comes to the rescue.
Here is how Wikipedia defines Heuristics in Computer Science (I really like this one 
):
In computer science, a heuristic is a technique designed to solve a problem that ignores whether the solution can be proven to be correct, but which usually produces a good solution or solves a simpler problem that contains or intersects with the solution of the more complex problem.
Heuristics are intended to gain computational performance or conceptual simplicity, potentially at the cost of accuracy or precision.
Not only this method is something of a black box - we know what comes in and we see what comes out and how it does this we don’t really know and don’t care (see Black Box schematics diagram showing how BlackBox works for details). It also outputs results that are not quite accurate and not exactly precise. A method pretty much the same as Throw Shit At a Wall technique in SEO by Dax. Now, I think we’ve got an explanation!
I can not be sure that Google AdSense does heuristics for the purpose of rewarding per view sites (or should I say only for this purpose?) but I am pretty sure it placed a big black box full of heuristics between an advertiser and ourselves AdSense publishers and guys at Googleplex do not always know what kind of shit comes out of it and I assume they don’t care much as long as it suits their profits.
tags: adsense, googleplex, ad sense, black box, heuristics, money, pay, pay per impression, per click, profits, revenue
Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Google | Comments (1)
March 8, 2007
Watching my Adsense traffic from over two hundreds of sites I’ve noticed lately an unusual drop in performance. My average adsense income per site had dropped almost in half. The truth of the matter that I honestly considered this to be a natural phenomenae accuring as a result of lowering traffic and never bothered to look into my server logs. Not until I stumbled upon this article which thanks to it’s authos is published under very liberal licensing so I will draw upon it rather heavily since there is no need to rephrase something with wich I absolutely agree. Here is the punchline:
Data on several sites maintained by the operators of Texxors.com suggests that Google may be manipulating the profits webmasters receive from Google’s Adsense program. Our analysis shows statistical evidence that as a website becomes more popular, it receives less earnings per click (EPC) from Google Adsense. Since the EPC is determined by Google’s algorithms prior to the ad being served to a page, this suggests that Google may be intentionally or unintentionally manipulating EPC to increase their profit and/or Adsense participation. The method appears to be similar to the “throttling” practices that landed online movie retailer Netflix in legal hot water last year.
What follows is a quite interesting statictical analysis of stats which leads to this conclusion:
Clearly, whether you judge a site’s popularity by clickthroughs per day or page impressions, sites (and individual web pages within that site) that are more popular appear to be making less money per click from Adsense.
For all of us trying to make money with Adsence it’not good news at all. This prompted me immediately to look into my own server logs and compare the data with Adsense earnings. The sample is rather representative as it includes over 200 site for the period of the past 10 months. Foolyshly I thought that the decline in revenue stream was caused by the decreasing traffic flow; although at one moment Yahoo started sending less traffic to my sites but this was effectively compensated by the increasing flow from MSN Live, and the almighty Google itself started to send more traffic as well. So overall background gives not a decrease but a slow natural increase in SE traffic! It is rather unfortunate that the article in question does not provide any data comparison between daily page impressions and daily Adsense ones. In my case I’ve clearly noticed two things:
- decreasing EPC
- increasing discrepancy between Page Views and Adsense views
the latter being another and no less significant factor in the collapse of Ad revenue. In layman’s terms Google just refuses to display their ads on pages it deems too dull or for visitors from obscure countries (no offence intended) etc.
One way or another something had changed in Google Adsense from what it used to be. Unlike Bryan from texxors.com (the author of the original report) I don’t think it has a lot to do with the age of the resource. To mee it seems like Google is introducing a new Adsense algo since the beginning of this year. It looks like they inserted some sort of capping on Adsence Earnings and when you get too successful in your campaign either through too much of traffic or too high CTR you are being done by this filter. This conclusion doesn’t contradict Bryan’s observations at all: you start earning more -> your earnings capped.
I must admit this is only my gut instinct but isn’t it all we base our most important life decisions on?
So who is winning and who is loosing if it is indeed new rules of the game being at work here? I might also put forward another suggestion: Google is doing it in a bid to clamp down on MFA sites that are automatically generated in unbelievable numbers by SE spammers and BlackHat SEOs with their automatic content generators. If it is so the attempt is futile as it is nothing other than a half-measure. MFA sites in theory are violating Adsense T&C and again in theory should be banned from Adsense altogether. An attempt to impose a caping of a sort on unusually high-earning sites will certainly hit spammers but this will not spare some innocent bystanders like myself who just happen to be small-time high earners. Instead of lessening the amount of spam on the net this measure will only stimulate spammers to produce more attempting to regain lost profits. But what do I do being not in the position to generate googlions of pages as I don’t do autogenerated sites? How do I recap for my losses? In the event when it all begins to affect my pay per click profit in best traditions of free market economy I’ll start looking for adsense alternatives. Google seems to forget that their AdWords are not the Pay-Per-Click monopoly they used to be as a number of alternative ways of traffic monetization are now at hand.
So, for all of you trying to plan ahead your ROI for your Adsense-based projects here is a good adsense tip - whatever optimistic your initial EPC might look like be realistic and try to base your calculation on below 10-12c threshold or your business is in danger.
Another free adsense advise I am going to give and first of all to myself: Don’t be lazy, setup alternative ads page (I didn’t do it on my sites - and most certainly will do now!). Google hits you by not displaying their ads on your page - hit it back by displaying alternatives! Let’s not forget the main rule of advertizing - if it’s not your logo on that billboard be sure it’s your competitor’s one.
tags: cpm, epc, google, mfa, ppc, pay-per-click, se, seo, adsense, adwords, alternative, automatic, blackhat, business, competitor, content, generator, income, money, spam, traffic, truth
Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Blog | Comments (5)
December 2, 2006
It pays to keep your eyes open
As banner-blindness increases in all of us it seems it also affects the banner-targeting algorithms. Honestly, I was just doing my little keyword research on Technorati when I inadvertently found Jesus!
For those for whom the picture isn’t enough here is the full text:
Looking for Jesus? www.ebay.com - Looking for men’s clothing? From blazers to vests, new or used, you can find it on eBay.
At first it might seem shocking - why anyone looking for Jesus would nessesarily be interested in men’s clothing? After racking my brain for a while truing to think of a possible explaination for this rather bizzare advertising logic I came to the following conclusion:
Jesus was wearing a tunic - by far the most popular and the most wanted item of men’s dress today. Jesus as a role model as good as any other celebrity to promote men’s fashion. Besides in light of christian aparigraha it is only logical to look for this on eBay that is renown for its choise of affordable tunicas.
In brief:
- Jesus is a fashon guru
- eBay is a place full of cheap new or used tunicas
- Christians just love shopping for bargains
It seems this or somewhat similar logic was fueling the Technorati banner targeting engine here.
PS: to all who might find it offending - please, direct it not at me but rather ask guys at Technorati what they were thinkng.
tags: jesus, technorati, advertising, aparigraha, banner, banner blindness, banner targeting, celebrity, christian, clothing, ebay, fashion, keyword research, men’s clothing, men’s fashion, search, tags, tunica, vests
Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Blog | Comments (1)
