[theforum] Re: Welcome to Google AdSense!

David Kaufman david at gigawatt.com
Wed May 12 18:10:06 CDT 2004


Martin Burns <martin at easyweb.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 12 May 2004, at 12:41, William Anderson wrote:
>
> [google ad words have] been added to http://browsers.evolt.org/ with a
> piece of explanatory text at http://evolt.org/help_support_evolt/#textads
>
> Well, that's $number_of_forum_members -
> $number_of_fms_adblocking_google_with_firefox views already :-)

Actually, as of Wednesday, May 12, 2004 6:32pm EST:

    Page impressions    3,662
    Clicks                 14
    Clickthrough rate    0.4%
    Your earnings       $3.31
                        !!!!! woo hoo!

wow.  seems wrong, somehow, doesn't it?  three bucks for 14 clicks?  $0.23
paid per click? ...there's no friggin way, right?  that's a healhy pile of
impressions for one day (that isn't even over)...but still.  CTR appears to
be computed as clicks *per*thousand* impressions, but looks damned
respectable to me...

i'm scouring the FAQ (https://google.com/adsense/faq#payments), and all it
has to say on the subject is that google "doesn't disclose the exact revenue
share".  and the "Terms and Conditions" agreement
(https://google.com/adsense/localized-terms) that i signed -- er: clicked,
merely promises that "You shall receive a payment RELATED TO the number of
valid clicks" (CAPS emphasis mine).

and the blocked ads aren't counted in the impressions.  google says in the
FAQ (https://google.com/adsense/faq#account2) "We count a page impression
when our AdSense JavaScript is actually executed by a user's browser and ads
are displayed", so that calculation policy benefits us, actually.  the
resulting "ad impressions" figure is going to be lower than the number of
pages actually served by the webserver, including just the people whose
browsers served an ad to them.   so for a given number of clicks, the lower
# of impressions counted yields a higher clickthrough rate, and apparently
the better our clickthrough rate is (plus i'm sure other factors), the
higher the rate "per click" google pays.  or maybe it has to do with which
ads were "content targeted" to our site, and what each advertiser pays
google per click.... i dunno

odd ducks those googligans, eh?

-dave



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