LZZR

Is Google AdSense actually a Pay Per Impression Network?

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

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Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Google |