- Joined
- Jul 29, 2011
- Messages
- 153
- Reaction score
- 20
OK, I'm normally a pretty level headed guy but this time I'm going on a little rant..... Click Through Rate (CTR) and Earnings Per Click (EPC) are the mainstays of domain traffic monetisation as they are often the indicators of revenue growth or decline. For the past few months I’ve been watching a behaviour in these two metrics that I haven’t seen for a number of years. It’s clear that Google is messing with them completely.
Here is an example of what I’ve been seeing in one account. As the EPC increases the CTR declines and vice versa. So let’s unpack what this is supposedly telling us. As better paying advertisers are displayed on a parked page then less people click. As soon as we have low paying advertisers then the CTR begins to increase. Give me a break…..this is complete nonsense! Until someone can show me the data on this then I'm just not going to swallow it.
I think that there is another explanation that is a lot simpler to understand. In business, I’ve found that when you follow the money trail it usually leads you to the right answer. In this particular case I believe that the domainer's Google tag is being managed to a particular revenue level rather than maximising the revenue for them. What this also means that the domain investor is no longer receiving the true value of their traffic but rather something that is made up by the finance department inside of Google.
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