Statistics Students Use AdMoolah Data in Projects
Students in an Iowa State University statistics class recently used data from AdMoolah in a group project. Hadley Wickham, who teaches Statistics 480, had the students collect data and then attempt to answer questions based on the data. Two of these papers have been published on the page outline the requirements for the project.
Some of the students had some interesting questions and conclusions.
One paper attempted to answer the question: “Is there a difference in earnings between categories, sub-categories, language and page view/page rank?” The conclusion reached was:
The analysis of the Google AdSense data resulted in more questions than answers. The main dependent variable used in the majority of the sectional analysis was average earnings. Earnings were found to be dependent upon seasonal effects (through quarter of year)and upon assigned PageRank score of the website. Increased earnings could also be captured if a website was published in either English or Danish languages.
A second paper also had some interesting analysis. My favorite part of this one was an analysis of how more page views per visitor effects results. They found “a negative relationship between the number of times the page is viewed and the amount of earnings”. That is, having more page views makes your average eCPM go down.
I think this project was a great idea. These are the kinds of questions I had in mind when I started AdMoolah, and these student did a good job of providing some rigorous analysis of the data. I’d like to thank Hadley Wickham and all his students for the work they put into this.
Suhaimi Said,
March 2, 2007 @ 8:19 pm
Good post. One that makes me think is about the earning of Danish language adsense sites.
That sounds interesting. Now I need to translate my site to that language.
Toivo Lainevool Said,
March 3, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
I don’t think Danish would be my first choice. I have a feeling that was just a quirk in the data. Translating your content could make sense, I would try and start with what you think would be the largest target audience for your site.