Adsense rumoured smart pricing |
This smart pricing stuff is interesting if it is true. It’s not official information, it’s coming third hand, so keep this in mind. The basic gist is that pay per click values from Adsense have an adjustment factor controlled by the quality of the site where the ads are being displayed. A review site, for example, might be more valuable over a tips site because one is promoting a product, indirectly or directly, while the other is promoting how to use a product/service for those who might already own it.
This raises the question about whether publishers should be removing AdSense from sites they suspect are converting poorly, in order to increase their smart pricing percentage. The loss of revenue could be more than made up with higher smart pricing across the rest of the account. But publishers do not have access to any of the data that would be used to determine which sites (if any) are converting better than others.
Darren Rowse, the six figure blogger guy, is complaining about losing Adsense revenue lately and labels this “Adsense dumb pricing“:
All I know is my Adsense performance continues to be significantly lower than it was a few months back, that ad relevancy is very poor and that pricing fluctuates from day to day by up to 20-30% with no changes being made at my end.
That last sentence is a little deceptive. I understand what Darren is saying but he’s missing a key dynamic ingredient. Every day there is new content there are changes being made on the publisher’s end. The content changes, the ads being displayed change, the amount of money per click changes. Everything changes every day without moving a single ad to a new position.
In our case, about 45 days ago we replaced one of our sites that was running Adsense with YPN and have seen an increase this month of nearly 30% in Adsense revenue across the account overall. Some of this increase I’d like to attribute to changes in content, but the reality is that over the last 45 days the content changes have been subtle, at best. The site we replaced the advertising on, however, was a dog and didn’t convert with Adsense and doesn’t convert all that well with YPN either. We clearly should not run Adsense there until we can improve the content. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
Again, if this smart pricing is the real deal and not just fiction, I like the idea of this smart pricing from both a publisher and advertiser perspective because it puts more responsibility on publishers about where they use Adsense. This will clearly hurt splog networks and publishers with lower quality content who try to expand too large and generate lower quality sites. There should be a penalty, IMO, for putting Adsense on a crappy website because it brings down the quality of the Adsense service overall.
At the same time quality content websites also need to be mindful that they don’t overdose on ads. Just because they have good quality content isn’t a license to assault readers with advertising.
Sites like the one displayed in this post: “Caution advised in over advertising” seem to have forgotten what the vast majority of readers are actually interested in: content, not ads.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Unfortunately, I think this actually SUPPORTS, not harms splog networks. The reason being… when one lands on a splog page where there’s no real content, I’d say the clearest “exit” is an AdSense ad which quite possibly IS relevant. Indeed, over on threadwatch, one of the sploggers was chuckling how CTR and revenues on AdSense on his splog sites are triple what he gets on his non-splog sites.
On the flip side, if you have a wonderfully engaging site with lots of great content, useful navigation… people may be LESS apt to click on ads and more apt to either subscribe to your site (in RSS, where ads perform VERY poorly it seems) or spend time clicking on nav links, not ads.
So, while I don’t have strong feelings about whether I like or dislike “Smart Pricing” for AdSense, I hardly think it’s a splog-killer
Comment by Adam — October 27, 2005 @ 5:34 am PST
Well if the click value is dramatically less because of quality, it will be a form of deterrent over time. You do make a good point though, Adam, about how some of these sites make it so the only exit — or the primary exit — is through adsense.
That’s a violation of the Adsense TOS which specifically states that there must be content on any page where the ads are shown. Not that sploggers really care about additional violation of Adsense, but Google should be able to filter that stuff out and disable ad display on those type pages. Checking a page for text and stripping out HTML is a trivial programming exercise. They are already scanning the page to develop what ads to show so policing it this way makes good sense.
Of course for sites that are picture/video/audio only using adsense, something would have to be done.
Comment by TDavid — October 27, 2005 @ 8:09 am PST