Who else feels like sharing their adsense stats ? | Hacker News Reader

Who else feels like sharing their adsense stats ?

42 pointsjacquesm20 comments

This thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790800 prompted me to go and do something that may be a technical violation of the adsense tos.

So, here it is (the month of July):

    impressions clicks  ctr     ecpm    total pay
    6,798,064 	13,694 	0.20% 	€0.13 	€882.30

This is a minor drop in the bucket on our sites income, we are not exactly advertising driven but since it is 0 work we figured we might as well take it.

The sites these ads run on are mostly music oriented.

Without knowing more about these sites I'm sure that you'll have a hard time using those numbers directly, but it may help somebody that is considering an advertising supported startup to determine the bandwidth of income that could be generated using google advertising.

Anybody else feels like sharing ?

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This is totally not what you're asking, of course, but I still wanted to represent this opinion:

I've never made a penny on Adsense, and probably never will. I think the ads usually look like warts on a site, and if you need to have them on your site then you have other, more serious problems. Unless maybe you're an open-source developer site or something. I think the argument that they are 'zero work' and 'free money' is ludicrous. I'm not against advertisements, in general, but I think Adsense often makes sites look like crappy, low-rent. low-content, spammy, rip-off sites. (And, yes, I'm aware of all the major media companies that use Adsense on their sites.) Another major reason I hate this type of near random text ad is that you rarely have 100% control over what is being presented to your audience...and I'm very picky about who I want to be associated with - even at the subconscious level.

Most importantly, every single time we have tested having Adsense or their ilk on one of our sites, it has lowered our overall conversions. Paying customers are worth more than the pittance you usually make from blind text ads, so we try not to make our customers feel like they should take a shower after visiting our sites.

Adsense really makes sense only if you don't have any other option to monetize a web site. You are just selling your traffic for a very cheap price.

"Adsense often makes sites look like crappy, low-rent. low-content, spammy, rip-off sites"

True. Thus I use Yahoo ads. They are much more customizable and you can make them blend better with the rest of the site in order not to have spammy Google branded blocks.

Many websites are better off with CPM ads (sites with high visitors numbers) or affiliate ads (authority sites based on personalities or other trusted sites).

I probably have the best Adsense performance I have seen anywhere:

  Page impressions  Clicks   Page CTR   Page eCPM         Earnings
  1,235             62       5.02%      €14.78 / $21.24   €18.24 / $26.21

Those are July, all time stats for a couple of years are very similar:

  Page impressions  Clicks   Page CTR   Page eCPM         Earnings
  67,877            3,471    5.11%      €12.57 / $18.06   €853.27 / $1,226.35

Obviously low traffic (~30 uniques/day) but very good return per visitor.

The site is a directory type service for a business niche. People who come to the site are specifically looking for that business type so they respond very well to ads for those businesses.

It is page ranked second for the business category as search term - I believe it would double the numbers if it was ranked first. Of course it would still be low traffic, so small change, but it pays for the server. Repeat for a few more niches => profit!

I'll make you a prediction:

It won't scale. I have similar sites in my 'breakdown', but as soon as any of them get significant traffic it drops right back down to < $0.25 CPM.

I think the reason is simple, as soon as you get in to a very targeted niche there are very few advertisers that match that niche. By the time you've exposed all of them a couple of times the click rate & ECPM drop right back to average.

I probably have the worst.

    Page impressions 	Clicks 	Page CTR 	Page eCPM [?]	Earnings
    44,031,234		8,098	0.02%		€0.01		€548.35

ouch... any idea about the causes ?

Probably because I don't stick them in my users faces every chance I get; they are just a couple ads in a side bar.

I currently work for a big internet company (to remain nameless) that makes most of its money from online ads. I can't share specific numbers, but I can give some feedback on yours.

I'd have to know more about the sites to say for sure, but that eCPM looks too low to even bother with ads. I personally don't have a site with a eCPM under $5, and the company I work for is WAY over that (in the rare occasion they use AdSense, and not direct ad sales).

Your CTR is also low, which is evidence that your ads are definitely not targeted enough. Many of the same factors that improve SEO improve AdSense targeting, so look into those.

Also, if the ads are on a forum or blog, you should turn off most if not all ads for logged-in users, because they never click on ads, so they hurt your CTR. You can even experiment with plugins that increase the number or frequency of ads for people who get to your site by clicking search ads (based on referral string), because they are proven ad-clickers.

Good points, thank you very much!

I've been an adsense user for the past 4 years. Total income: $168.34

After last payment (of my first 100 dollars):

    impressions clicks  ctr     ecpm    total pay
    75,604 	311 	0.41% 	$0.85 	$64.57

BTW this is the data for the past 6 months or so. Pretty bad. huh? :)

I think there is something terribly wrong with the way AdSense calculates impressions. And if that number is wrong, it's also entirely possible that the clicks number is wrong, too. I recently posed my question to their help forum, but got no response. Anyway.

According to my webhost & logs; 2009 Page Views: 843,398

http://www.zentu.net/snaps/2009stats.png

According to Google Adsense:

http://www.zentu.net/snaps/googlebaloney.png

Yeah. That's what google has recorded for "all time", while the first link shows just this year alone. It is baloney.

I wondered about this too...the impressions are the number of times each ad is seen, so if you have 3 image banners on a page, and the page gets 1000 impressions, you would get 3000 adsense impressions.

But what if instead of 3 image banners, they serve up three 4 text ad units. Does each ad in the unit get an impression, or does each ad unit get an impression. That would be the difference between 12000 impressions and 3000 impressions.

I have you beat (in badness):

Impressions Clicks CTR ECPM Total Pay

116,068 227 0.20% $0.46 $53.76

Not AdSense, but socialmedia.com.

Facebook App - Is My Name Sexy?

July Impressions 5,433 Clicks 191 CTR 3.52% CPM $2.16 Earnings $11.73

MySpace App - Nicknames

July Impressions 76,240 Clicks 1,296 CTR 1.70% CPM $0.77 Earnings $58.36

I don't use adsense so I can't share but I'm curious to know your uniques for that month, if you feel like sharing.

Sure, let me dig that up, just one moment

edit: approx 750K uniques undoubled for the sites the ads ran on during July.

I successfully clicked myself on my google ads through proxies and various cleaned-up browsers on a low-visited personal site ages ago. One per day and always tried to hit high paying ones. Filled up the 100$ requirement for payment twice then decided that a) it was not worth the trouble (thanks to the weak dollar or strong euro) and b) I rather have no ads at all if they do even not bring hosting coverage by themselves (without cheating).

That's a pretty nasty thing to do imo.

As someone who runs AdWords, thanks for wasting my money.

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