How can you increase eCPM?

Traffic recovering, but eCPM still tanking

[elguapo]

My main site was one of those hit hard by Jagger, losing about 70% of traffic beginning Sept. 22. I was making an average of $350-500 or better pre-Jagger with a very nice eCPM (anywhere between $30-$50). Then Jagger came and my traffic went down the drain bringing down my income anywhere from $75 to $175 per day. It's one big ouch on my pockets.

Coinciding with the decrease in traffic is about 50% decrease in both my eCPM and CTR. It feels like a double whammy.

But with Jagger 3, my traffic is slowly recovering. My homepage is now back on the top 3 of my SERPs (very competitive 2.4 billion results), and many of my pages are coming back to the top spot. Traffic has significantly improved and we are only down by about 20% pre-Jagger.

BUT - my eCPM and CTR are still 50% off from previous levels. It's not increasing, and worse, it is slipping day by day.

What I'm doing now is to remove the least performing banner type (skys for us) and leave the large rectangle in the middle and at the bottom of the articles. I have also removed the Adsense code from non-performing pages (pages which get significant impressions but next-to-nothing clicks).

Anyone else experienced drastic decrease in traffic and eCPM but recovered later? Any suggestions? Thanks!

[maxgoldie]

It seems like all that we can do to improve eCPM is:

1) remove ads from pages with very low eCPM (not necessarily CTR though)
2) limit the number of adblocks per page
3) make the content on the pages as easy to target as possible with all the usual "spider food" SEO stuff, page titles, page names, descriptive original content,etc..
4) use the URL filter judiciously to block obvious MFA sites
5) blend the ads in as naturally as possible
6) try a 336x250, above the fold, centered in the content, or a leaderboard

Besides this, it really seems that everything else is a mystery. A frustrating one too.