Why Your eMiniMalls CPM is Dropping - Besting Adwords (and Adsense)

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 17:30:56 GMT

Two days ago, I wrote "Chitika CPMs Dropping Again!" Which described how many publishers were seeing much lower CPMs with eMiniMalls starting on Dec 1st. I received an email from Venkat Kolluri, CEO of Chitika explaining what has happened.

Right off the bat, we noticed that clicks from countries that we do not support accounted for the lion's share of the difference between the raw clicks stats (that we summarize on a daily basis) and the final audited stats. So, starting December 1st, we started removing clicks from those countries from our daily reports, rather than waiting till the end of the month audit process to kick in. This is one of the main requests that we received in feedback from customers regarding the discrepancies between the daily raw stats and the monthly audited revenue figures: "Why report clicks from unsupported countries when you are anyway going to discount those clicks (and the resulting revenue numbers) during the audit process at the end of the month?"

So, in addition to giving users the option to use the alternate url feature, we are also dynamically removing clicks from unsupported countries in our daily reports.

So what does this mean? Are we now keeping the resulting click-revenue (from regions that we do not support) to ourselves? No. Even we don't get paid for the clicks from unsupported regions. Rather than waiting till the end of the month we are trying to speed up the reporting process and tackle the main factors on a daily basis so that publishers can get better revenue estimates. We still do need to rely on our monthly audits, but we are trying to address the easy ones on a daily basis as much as we can. Our goal is to speed up the reporting process as much as we can and decrease the differences between the daily and monthly (post audit) stats.

My reply to Venkat was simple.

My earnings dropped 15% from the unaudited to the audited numbers. This drop is over 50%. There must be something else. No?

He replied again.

Filtering clicks from unsupported countries (because of geo targeting) is the main factor. Also, late November and early December we started (slowly) integrating a variety of merchant feeds from other European countries... and as a result we are seeing a lot of fluctuations in the CPCs, CTRs, and hence eCPMs.

To give you a gist of what we are working on now to update the service: 1) optimize the units to find the right balance between varying CPCs across feeds from multiple regions and maximizing the overall eCPM that we can deliver and 2) speed up the logic in the audits process so that we can push to front (as much as possible) some of the easy filters to run on a daily basis and update the daily reports to give the best estimates for what clients can expect to see at the end of the month in the final audited revenue. A challenging problem but we are confident that we can work this out and make this program work for all parties.

This didn't answer my question. The October audit cut about 15% from my CPM. The current filtering of clicks (which is suppose to filter out the same clicks as the audit) is cutting more than 50% from my CPM. Because Venkat has been so nice to answer my questions, I'll hang in there, but if the CPM remains low, then I'll be reducing the number of impressions acccordingly.

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