How Much Money Are We Earning CPC or CPM

Well, the forums have been buzzing lately with news that we can now see whether our Web pages have been site targeted, how much money we're earning for CPC ads and how much for CPM ads.

For those of you who missed it, all you have to do to see whether you've been site-targeted and how much benefit it brought you is visit your Advanced Reports page. Choose AdSense for content as the product, then ask to see data by 'Individual Ad Unit' from the drop-down menu. You'll be able to tick a checkbox marked "Show data by targeting type - contextual or site."

And what can you expect to see there?

Two things. First, whether or not an advertiser has chosen that page for site targeting. (Even small sites and small pages get picked so you could well be surprised -- and flattered.) And second, the eCPM for those pages.

What many people have seen though is that the eCPM for those pages is much lower than the eCPM for the pages with contextual ads. So many people have been seeing this, in fact, that Google added a new entry to their blog explaining that "site targeted ads are most likely appearing on lower performing pages within your account - in other words, pages requiring a lower eCPM to win the AdWords ad auction."

I think that's really the most important information I need to know about pages that have been site targeted. What Google is telling me is that if an advertiser site-targets a page on my website and succeeds in putting his ad there, it's because that page wasn't making me much money in the first place.

Sure, I'm pleased that a site-targeted campaign is increasing that page's earnings a little. But what I really want to know is why that page was making so little money that a site-targeted bid was able to be successful.

So am I going to be checking to see whether any of my pages are showing site-targeted ads?

Sure. And then I'm going to be comparing the layout and content of that page with my higher earning pages to see what I've been doing wrong. The question I'm going to be asking then is whether those site-targeted ads will go away once I start doing things right...

Find out which layouts and content make the most AdSense money now at:

My 2 Cents