Arbitrage CTR: Other factors besides layout

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Setec

Setec

Will work for cheese
Nov 1, 2006
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www.buymystupidebook.com
So far I've tried 4 layouts, ranging from ultra-simple to fancy fake-authority sites, and my CTR is still down between 10% and 25%. (That's my calculated CTR, clicks I get on Yahoo / clicks I buy... Yahoo over-reports my impressions and gives an even lower number.) I picked my niches well so I'm still turning a nice profit, but I'd really like to get into the usually quoted 30-60%. I'm beginning to think layout's not the problem.

Somebody here already mentioned that the niche influences CTR, which makes sense. I'd like to see what the people with high CTRs think about the influence of these factors:
  • Ad copy - Do you try to write attention-grabbing, funny ads designed to catch anybody who sees them? Or do you write them to attract people looking to buy the products being advertised on your page, who are presumably more likely to click?
  • Traffic Source - I'm using 50/50 7Search/Searchfeed. I had hoped to track which one performs best with Google Analytics, but there are several problems with that and it's not effective. I may try sending each one to a different URL for an identical page.
  • Terms You Bid On - Do you bid for everything sufficiently cheap and remotely related to your page? Or do you selectively bid on terms likely buyers might type?
  • Term Specificity - Do you bid on terms for people looking for specific products in your niche? There are a lot of opportunities for cheap clicks like this, but if somebody's looking for a radioactive sewer rat and all the ads on your sewer rat page are for regular sewer rats, did you just waste $0.06?
  • Other Arbitrage Sites - If a niche is packed with arbitrage sites, it seems likely somebody visiting yours has already been to a few of the others and would be more likely to recognize yours as arbi and hit the back button right away.
  • "Buy" vs "Info" - Is your page and ad campaign designed to imitate an information source, or a place to buy products?
  • Ad Network - Yahoo vs Google. I'm using Yahoo, which as a reputation for lower CTRs, but my arbitrage page ads seem as well-targeted as most Google ads, so I don't know if that's the problem.
  • Ad Blocking - How often do you block irrelevant or local ads? If Yahoo's serving ads for Las Vegas sewer rats on my sewer rats page, do I really want it taking up space on one in a million chance that my visitor looking for a tasty rat is actually near Vegas?
I know somebody's going to jump up and flame me for this and say "stop analyzing and build!" Yeah, yeah, yeah. :ak: This took me 10 minutes to type. Now I'm going to sit down and spend the next 10 hours building pages. Just so we've got that out of the way.
 


i have found so far that sites w/ more pictures don't do as well- except in one area- teen/kids sites. I have a pokemon arb site- which is almost worthless due to the low payout for pokemon ads - which has a CTR rate of 90% avg. I have animated .gifs on it and all that flashy stuff. Kids must love it.

I have a plasma tv site that is doing worse now that I added more pics (like the i-geek layout) than when I had only one pic. I think the pics are too distracting. Going to go back to a more basic site.

I am also trying out using only one text ad underneath a large pic for more 'serious' sites like health care, etc. My theory is that people w/ a real problem will take the time to read your page and see your link.
 
Remember that the more ads on your page, the more likely the people are to click on a lower payout ad- it is ideal to get them to click only on the top ad on the page...which has the highest payout.

More ads= higher CTR(?) but lower payout.
 
Remember that the more ads on your page, the more likely the people are to click on a lower payout ad
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that applies to YPN. It seems to show the same ads in every unit in the same order, even with three units on a page.
 
Ad copy
Personally, I don't think my ad copies are too great, therefore I don't think this plays a big role. Then again I only get around 10 clicks max per site(if I'm lucky). I get good clickthroughs so I don't give a damn.

Traffic Source
This is what I have gathered from the forums so far.
7search: more clickthrough, but MUCH less volume of traffic.
searchfeed: less clickthrough, MUCH MORE traffic.
I guess you pick the one you like and go with it.

Terms You Bid On
I bid on things I think most people will type in.

Term Specificity
I do this, but if you have images that don't resemble the keyword then you will prob not get a clickthrough.

Other Arbitrage Sites
You need to seperate yourself from other designs. My design is pretty bad ass compared to the one's I've seen. Think web 2.0 style.

"Buy" vs "Info"
Mine are more geared toward info.

Ad Network
I don't have YPN so I wouldn't know. If I did, I wouldn't arbi with them cause YPN is too strict imo.

Ad Blocking
I only block irrelevant MFA sites. I don't look for specifics, but block the major MFA players out there. goto john chow's blog... he talks about em.
 
Ad Blocking
I just tossed up another niche arbi site and saw that one of the ads were from "ads.trafficleader.com". I'm guessing its another traffic company buying ads through YPN (which i am using for my ads). I figure they payout couldnt be as high as it should be so i went ahead and blocked them.

Just make sure you keep an eye on your ads and what is showing up
 
I did an experiment yesterday raising my bids on Searchfeed to $0.07, which brought me over 500 visitors across my 25 niches. My increase in ad revenue was pathetic, like 30% more revenue for 400% more money spent. I barely broke even for the day.

I still imagine Searchfeed is worth having, but at really low bid values. I'm sending my 7Search/Searchfeed traffic to different URLs now for the same pages, to see how well each one actually converts and come up with profitable bids for both. I'm guessing Searchfeed is going to end up being profitable at around $0.02/click for most niches.
 
setec, how are you doing with your google arbitrage? yahoo is hard to deal with because traffic has to be US only and then the ads don't target as well. My guess is if you removed the yahoo ads and put up google you would be in the 30% + club. Yahoo is good for finance and high end items but beyond that I tend to have very few yahoo arbitrage pages.
 
I'm not doing Google... don't want to put my account at any risk because I'm really just dabbling in this stuff and my white hat quality content sites are much more important. I know getting banned for arbi is a really tiny risk but I'm paranoid.

YPN seems to be ok. I've been picking niches with several related keywords that have several high bids on the Overture tool, then cramming those keywords into my arbi page title and text several times over. It has targeted really well for most pages, but I have to stay away from anything that has geographic targeting (like hotels, which I tried, but the ads were all for specific spots in random locations across the country). I'm averaging around $1.00/click over all niches.

I made a spreadsheet to sort out my stats and found that some niches are in the 30-40% CTR range and others are crap. The ones with the most 7Search traffic as opposed to Searchfeed have much higher CTRs, so I think that's had a lot to do with it.
 
the thing is traffic from 7search can get you banned from yahoo unless you are using an ad script incase traffic is coming from someplace yahoo does not like so if you think yahoo will never be worthwhile then go for it but you are taking a much bigger risk of getting ko'd from them than using google. Hell if it was a problem getting banned there would be some big money in trouble
 
Does anybody know what percentage of traffic Yahoo needs to see from the USA? Google Analytics is showing me at 63% US, 5% UK, 5% Canada, 27% other overall.

It would be possible that most of the US traffic is Searchfeed, and most of the clicks are foreign clicks from 7Search. But today I've been sending 7Search traffic to different URLs, so I can check the cross-segment performance from 7Search (god I love Analytics) with geography, and it looks like if anything an even higher % of 7Search traffic is US. Hopefully that puts me in the safe zone for Yahoo.

If I get banned I can always try AdSense. It seems like Yahoo would be easier to get back into later.
 
I am sure the traffic has to be higher than 70% from the US. I don't know if you have done anything else with yahoo but they are asshats!
 
Does anyone know if adwords for content (not search) can be restricted to USA sites? If one was to bid low for content adwords (USA) and then send traffic to a Yahoo ads arbi site then hopefully most traffic would be USA. At one time I tried Yahoo ads on an arbi site that would only serve the ads to USA surfers and adsense to non-USA using paid MIVA traffic. It worked well for a while then wasn't profitable...I think it was the poor MIVA traffic that hurt the profit.
 
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