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A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

gwern.net

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Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#71

Post by human »

pault wrote: post #62
kzrdude wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see more ads that instead target the content of the page. When I'm reading about machine learning, it should be books close to that topic, and other related things. I can't believe little that happens.

It has the added benefit of having a high probability that you'll be interested in the product, since you wouldn't be on the page if you didn't find the topic interesting. Instead we get tracking networks showing you ads for TVs because you bought a TV last week.

I think the problem with that is that most browsing is done on pages that do not target a valuable topic: news, weather, memes, etc.

For that reason, it's better to remind you about that Amazon product still in your cart while you're browsing for random stuff.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#72

Post by bertil »

smsm42 wrote: post #52

> ~60% of visitors have adblock This is much higher than I'd expect. Of course, it is a special kind of site, but still. Can we say a model is in serious trouble yet?

I think the right metric for AdBlock (like every service) is retention. If most people who try it like it enough to remember how to install it on their following browser that model has a sigmoid-shaped problem.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#73

Post by dfabulich »

The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue.

> My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quantify the value of a page-view, so I can instead ask myself hypothetically, would I trade ~1 week of traffic for $360 (~$0.02/view, or to put it the other way, $18720/year)? Probably; that’s about the right number - with my current parlous income, I cannot casually throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars for some additional traffic and so I feel comfortable valuing page-views at ~$0.02 or a bit less.

If your income is as parlous as you say, then it seems bizarre to value any amount of unmonetized traffic over cash flow.

People call page views a "vanity metric" with good reason. You can't put food on your plate with page views. By valuing a single page view at $0.02, you're literally doing work for free, "for exposure."

We all make fun of businesses who ask professionals to work for $0 for exposure. It's no better when you're making yourself work for unfair terms!

To put this another way, I think the author can probably arrange to buy relevant traffic via Google AdWords at or less than $0.02 per page view. If traffic ("exposure") is that valuable, then, yes, stop running ads on your site, and instead buy ads of your own.

But if that sounds outrageous to you, if you would never reach into your pocket to pay Google $360 for a week's worth of website traffic, then you should rethink whether unmonetized page views are really as valuable as you think they are.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#74

Post by pault »

Mz wrote: post #68
pault wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I have worked out a couple of models that work You should write these up in detail and post it to HN. I would read it!

I have written about them and posted stuff to HN. It usually doesn't get much attention. Nutshell version: 1. Flexible online means to earn money. 2. Genuinely affordable market based housing, such as SROs. I have several blogs where I talk about such things, like Mic Digs, Project: SRO and Write Pay. They don't get much attention. Edit: just to prove my point, here is a recent piece on working for pay while homeless…

Maybe you could do something like indie hackers [1] and highlight the stories of people that are trying to get off the streets by doing online gig work. That would be inspiring for people looking for help and interesting to everyone else.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#75

Post by gwern »

dfabulich wrote: post #73

The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue. > My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quan…

One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable...

> it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow.

Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do know for certain that it is not exactly $0! Errors made on the assumption it is a cent or two are surely less than errors made on the assumption it is literally worthless.

(As it happens, the introspection was pointless because the effect came nowhere near the threshold, and if it had, I would've had to reintrospect anyway since my Patreon has been working better and I have more money since I began the A/B test in January. There's no reason to not revisit thresholds if circumstances have changed, after all.)

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#76

Post by Mz »

dfabulich wrote: post #73

The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue. > My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quan…

He has Patreon. Ads are not the only way to turn traffic into money.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#77

Post by burntwater »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #45
magicmikexxl wrote: post #9

There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.

I scanned the article to see if it was interesting enough to dive into the details, but when I saw the Disqus plugin I closed the tab. What's the point of dropping Adsense if you keep the Disqus plugin?

Simple, they value the discussion capabilities provided by Disqus. Disqus was worth keeping, Adsense was not.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#78

Post by dfabulich »

gwern wrote: post #75
dfabulich wrote: post #73

The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue. > My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quan…

One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable... > it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow. Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do know for certain that it is not exactly $0 ! Errors made on the as…

> One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable...

If you have very little money, then every cent counts, including AdSense cents. Page views count only to the extent that they convert into something: Patreon patrons, consulting gigs, or what have you.

And I'm not saying your page views convert at $0 to those things, but I think it's plausible that you're off by an order of magnitude, e.g. that an ad-free page view is worth only a tenth of a cent.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#79

Post by pakitan »

mattmanser wrote: post #24
soared wrote: post #16

I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar w…

In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice. We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.

I have a similar experience - after a redesign and significant improvement of page load time, the bounce rate and few other metrics improved but conversion rate stayed almost exactly the same. Kissmetrics are probably measuring this across thousands of sites and averaging the results as opposed to taking a slow site and tracking conversion rate after it gets speedier. So, it could be a correlation kind of thing - better sites, with more resources, simply invest more into every aspect of the business, including site speed.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#80

Post by shostack »

ar0 wrote: post #53
Feniks wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you have to invest in personal relations with advertisers. New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.

In fact, that’s how Google started out with AdSense as well: It was called “content targeting advertising”, because Google scanned your webpage and then served ads that related to the content of your webpage. I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.

What happened is the ad landscape shifted from targeting placements and content to targeting audiences and where they are in their journey to purchase. It simply performs better for advertisers and it's often more scalable. In turn, this makes the platform more money because sites that may have low value inventory can suddenly be sold for higher CPMs if an advertiser for example wants to bid on their retargeting data in the auction. It let's them price based on people.
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