1 Introduction - 2 Ad Rank - 3 Quality Score - 4 Advert Price
5 eCPM - 6 eCPM explained - 7 Statistics - 8 Position Weight
9 PW Simulator - 10 Smartpricing - 11 SP Simulator - 12 Adsense Simulator
The Adsense Simulator allows you to test the impact of different ad placements using the Position Weight covered earlier in the course.
The Adsense Simulator itself is on the next page, this page describes how to use it. If you have a fast internet connection you can watch our video tutorial on how to use the Adsense Simulator.
The first thing you will need to do is 'tune' the simulator so that the numbers are of a similar scale to your current Adsense reports. This involves entering your typical EPC (which is Earnings / Clicks), CTR, page impressions and no of advertisers at the top of the simulator (an image of which is below).
EPC and CTR are used to set initial bidding levels by advertisers, etc., so once set you should leave the typical EPC and CTR values the same.
Page impressions can be changed at any time to any value
Unless you know that you have very few advertisers in your niche, leave the number of advertisers at the maximum of 30. Numbers greater than 30 have no impact on the simulator. However, you can change the number of advertisers to fewer than 30 to assess the impact of there being less competition, or perhaps less advertisers than the number of ad slots you are displaying.
To finish setting up the simulator, adjust the Position Weights to reflect your current page layout so that the total earnings in the simulator is roughly what you earn on average from the page.
There will be two Earnings reports produced by the Adsense Simulator. The first is without any impact of smartprice, the second is after smartprice has had its full impact (which is assumed to be one month).
You can experiment with different numbers of adverts, and ad positions/layouts/colours, by entering different numbers for the PW ("Position Weight" - a number that was covered earlier in this course).
After making a change, click in another input box or press "Update" to see the impact of your changes in the reports on the right of the page.
Adsense Simulator Default Settings
The page load default (which you can return to by pressing the "reset" button") is set up using the three ad formats that we looked at earlier in the course:
- The first ad block is a 160x600 tower in the left-centre of the page.
- The first three ad slots are above the fold, so they have PW scores of 1.50, 1.25 and 1.00: the difference in numbers is because the first ad has greatest prominence and is in the middle of the hotzone.
- The final two ad slots are below the fold, so they have PWs of 0.50 and 0.40.
- Further down the page there is a tower on the right hand side. This is to the side of the text, half way down the page, so the tower is out of the way of the reader's natural reading line. Therefore, the ad slots are all given a PW of 0.10.
- At the bottom of the page, immediately after the end of the text but before any further information, there is a banner across the full width of the page with four ad slots. Although these ads are at the bottom of the page, their prominent position makes them more noticeable than the tower half way down the page, so the PWs for each slot are 0.3.
- The final slot has a PW of zero. There are 15 slots in the Adsense simulator, but only 14 ads on the page. Put a "0" (zero) in unused slots, which should always be in the bottom slots of the simulator.
Finally, the Adsense Simulator runs on your PC and does not store or transmit any information. It is based on Google's published calculations, but does not include the impact of video/image/CPM ads, ad rotation and other complicating factors (whether published by Google and unpublished). Also, the smartpricing algorithm used is not Google's but rather our own assumption about smartpricing based on our testing/experience. If you want to ignore our smartpricing calculation, then there is a gross (unsmartpriced) earnings calculation that you can use.
Go to Adsense Simulator Spreadsheet