I've been meaning to update this experiment, but forgot!
Anyway, usual disclaimers:-
Mileage may vary, get permission from whoever pays the bill before you use the phone, mobile networks may charge differently from landlines and so on.
In a nutshell, looking at the period of this month to date, with the last 9 complete days being cpm free, impressions are up 1%, clicks up 7% ands ctr up 2% over the previous part of the month with cpm ads.
Nothing stellar there, but the other metrics are quite interesting.
EPC up 35%
eCPM up 33%
Earnings up 34%
These figures are site wide, as the removal is sitewide. I would say that the improvement in some of the smaller channels has been better than the higher traffic pages, but no real pattern to it. I've seen the usual daily ups and downs, but in general I prefer to look at longer term trends. I will keep monitoring of course.
I've known you can remove cpm ads for a while but never bothered. Reason being that the stats show miniscule numbers of them being shown. So the obvious question is what other changes have happened.
Well, I've done NO work on the site the last week or so. I wanted to make no changes whatsoever so as to rule out the effect of changes I've made. There haven't been any "Upgrades" during the period of the test, and I've not seen an improvement in ad targeting. So it's difficult to see what has caused this particular rise in fortunes. However, the fact that dumping site targeted ads coincides with an immediate eCPM rise of 33% can't be dismissed as a coincidence either.
