SEOly Blog » CPC

Adsense: Text vs. Image Ads

Stephen Quallich — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:33:49 +0000

Adsense text ads tend to blend into your website more, which results in a lower CTR; whereas, image ads stick out more against the content of your website, which results in a higher CTR. This does not necessarily mean that image ads are better than text ads. Generally, Adsense image ads are CPM ads; this means it might be a good idea to use these ads on webpages which are unlikely to get clicks. Depending on your website it may be beneficial for you to use Adsense text or image ads. In my experience with another blog of mine, I decided to switch from Adsense text ads to Adsense image ads; the results were surprising. I received ~25% more clicks while using the image ads, but the image ads paid ~50% less than the text ads did. Maybe this is because there is not as much competition for image ads in the niche, which would explain the lower amount paid per ad. The choice to use Adsense text or image ads really depends on your website. You should also consider individual ad positioning to see if certain placements are beneficial to image ads, while others are better for text ads and vice versa. You will not know whether text or image ads will actually perform better until you do a comparison between them.

Chance Of Smart Pricing On Your Blog

Stephen Quallich — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:50:11 +0000

With our recent post about what smart pricing is, who it affects, and how to avoid it, we figured we mention that blogs appear to be high in likelihood to get smart priced. Generally blogs get the majority of their traffic from return readers or social bookmarking. Both of these groups are quite unlikely to click ads; this will generally result in a click through rate below 1% in most blogs. What really matters when it comes to smart pricing though, is the actual conversion rate of these visitors that click on the ads. Even though one of your websites or blogs may have a conversion rate of 0.25%, it may not be smart priced. The reason for this is that the traffic that is directed to these advertiser is highly likely to convert. Even though we said that websites with a click through rate of below 1% are likely to get smart priced, this is not completely true. This was a generalization for most websites, but blogs do not fit into this trend. I suggest that you do not worry about getting smart priced on any of your websites, especially your blogs. If you are smart priced, you will know it, and then you can make the appropriate changes to your websites.

What Is Adsense Smart Pricing?

Stephen Quallich — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:30:25 +0000

When your Adsense account start to generate CTR (click through rates) of lower than 1%, you are in danger of being smart priced. If your Adsense account has been smart priced, you will experience a extreme drop in earning. A click that used to generate $0.50 on average will now only generate $0.05; this means that you will only be received 10% of what clicks used to be worth, if you were smart priced. Additionally, if you have been smart priced, your entire Adsense account will be affected, not just the low CTR websites. To avoid smart pricing, you can remove low CTR websites from your Adsense accounts and display other ads on those websites. Also, you may choose to only show Adsense text or image ads to visitors that are directed to your site from search engines. These visitors will be more targeted than visitors from other sources. If you only show Adsense ads to visitors from search engines, you will increase your CTR and be able to avoid smart pricing due to previous low CTR websites. Once you implement these changes to an account that has been smart priced, you should see your earning return to their previous values in about a week or less.

Why (or why not) use CPA?

Stephen Quallich — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:09:18 +0000

CPA (Cost Per Action) is when the publisher of the ad is only paid when the user clicks on the ad and preforms the desired action by the advertiser, which can be anything from purchasing a products to filling out a sign up to a newsletter. CPA ensures that the advertiser get the visitor to their final destination, whereas CPC only ensures that the visitor clicks on the ad. This means that CPA conversion rates will be much less than CPC conversion rates. In this manner CPA advertising is quite beneficial to advertisers because they are guaranteed that a visitor will end at their goal, otherwise no money is paid to the publisher.

With CPA advertising using Google’s Adsense (it is referred to as Referrals), you can actually choose which ads you want to be shown on your website. This means that you are able to select ads that are relevant to your visitors and pick the ones with the highest CPA values. CPA rates range from $0.01 to $153.85. CPA looks like it could be a much better choice than CPC because the higher revenue value and the ability to select what ads you show on your site; however, how much money will you really make with it?

Let’s say that your CTR (Click Through Rate) is ~5% for targeted ad on your website and that your CPC rate is ~$3.00. This means that you will be making ~$150.00 per 1,000 visitors. Now let’s say that you decide to use CPA advertising and that your CTR remains the same. Out of these visitors that click on the ad, how many of them will proceed to do the required action? Let’s assume that 10% of these visitors that click on the ad actually do the specified action. This means that you would need a CPA rate of ~$30.00 to make the same that you do with CPC advertising. In reality the rates of CPA ads are ranges or a low fixed value; for instance, Free File Hosting: $0.23 – 1.19, HDMI Cables: $2.31, or Pay per Click Management: $3.00 – 153.85. This means that unless the majority of your user’s are ending up on the high side of these rates, that CPC advertising will be the better choice for your website. Also, it may be beneficial to use CPAlead instead of Google’s Referrals depending on your websites structure. You really need to experience and look at the logistics before jumping to a conclusion about what advertsing method to useas they all can be used to generate more revenue in certain situations.

CPM vs CPC: Which to use?

Stephen Quallich — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:48:51 +0000

Deciding whether to use CPM (Cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) ad campaigns ultimately depends on your website users. An important factor is: does your ad service target your users with relevant ads? If your answer to that question is no, then you might as well use CPM ads because you will be unlikely to generate any (significant) revenue with untargeted ads. For instance, if your website is centered about a specific online game, then ads related to this online game will generate you revenue. If instead of seeing ads relevant to this online game, you see ads for get rich quick pyramid schemes or online dating services, then you will not receive many (if any) clicks on these ads. The likelihood that a viewer is interested in this topic is quite low, and the chance of them actually clicking on the ad is even lower. This is the reason that targeted ads produce more money than untargeted ads for both the publisher and advertiser.

Now if your ad service does target your users with relevant ads, CPC is a viable option. The next question to consider is: Will my users click on these ads? Remember that you do not need to receive a large amount of clicks per day to make money. A single click can earn you anywhere from $0.01 to $75 depending on the topic / keywords of the ad. With a small amount of testing you can easily determine if your users will click on your ads, but where do you fall when it comes down to CPC? Are you earning a measly $0.05 or will you be getting $12 per click?

Even if you only do earn $0.05 per click, this may still earn you more money than running CPM ad campaigns. CPM payouts can range from $0.01 to $1.20 depending on the advertiser. When trying to calculate whether CPM or CPC will make you the most money, consider all of these factors. Do not be rash in your decisions when deciding to use CPM or CPC, instead test each of them thoroughly (possibly a few days to a week), so that you can guarantee that you will in fact be getting the most money from your ad campaigns within your website.