Now Adsense has competition with YPN, Chitika and others. I am testing both YPN and Chitika on my sites and will soon make a decision about which sites I keep Adsense on. Common sense tells me that unless the dollars are significatntly better with Adsense I’m better off working with an ad system that allows me more control and information.

I had the same exact performance happen to me as well. My index.php performed well. I then added AdSense code to my phpBB forum pages and watched my CTR drop like a rock. I removed the ads from my forums and watched the numbers return to normal.

To me, this was disturbing. My forums generate the most dynamic contact reaching a far range of topics and to have to eliminate AdSense from these pages was upsetting.

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 quali…

Since its introduction in the Adsense program, Google has not been forthcoming with any details on how Smart Pricing actually works (to the chagrin of many publishers!). Jenstar however reports on some details that one publisher got from Googles suppor…

With my traffic increase this month, I should have made pretty well, but when the actual price you’re being paid per click is almost negative ::grin:: it would take 8X the visitors I am getting now to make a decent living at it.

Ugh!

This month I took adsense off the forums and left the front page ad in the same place. Not only did the front page ad perform better, but it outperformed what the forums were doing before by almost double.

I’m not sure the exact significance of this, but it does seem to corroborate some of what you found out.

It’s been very frustrating to me, especially since the eMiniMalls allow me to specify keywords via code and those ads are perfectly targeted and making two to three times what the AdSense ads are making for me, even though due to limitations in blogger, I can’t place them down amongst my content where they would really shine.

I dunno why Google can’t do that. And I am annoyed at them for giving so little control to the publishers. And on top of that, I too am frustrated with the lack of understanding about how they work. Some days, I see my earnings at one level, and then see them lower later in the day for some reason. One would think that additional clicks would cause your earnings to go up, rather than down. But alas, that is not always the case. Something fishy.

My comment: I just fear you won’t get interesting results in non-usa contries – since the ads will be less geographically targeted.

My comment: I just fear you won’t get interesting results in non-usa contries – since the ads will be less geographically targeted.

1. AdSense “support team member”
2. The publisher he was talking to
3. JenSense

On top of that, the AdSense rep in #1 was making a call trying to convince someone to switch back from YPN to AdSense. I know Google’s non-evil credo should prohibit it, but It’s a rare salesman who won’t make up a few “facts” in order to keep a conversation going with a lead.

Personally, I’m inclined to doubt it because it doesn’t make any sense to Google. Accounts are meaningless, any valid optimization should focus on sites. Advertisers’ costs shouldn’t change just because I sell a site to you and you put your AdSense code on it.

It’s sure a shame that third-hand rumors like this are the closest thing we get to facts about AdSense, though…