Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm new here but I've been doing google adsense/adwords for a couple of months now. I was advertising at Google Adwords for less competitive keywords that only cost me 5 cents and I tried to optimize my site for relevant but most expensive keywords. So I was getting a very nice ratio, I would spend a little on adwords but get much more in adsense. Until today....today I actually lost some money due to a fact that adsense didn't make much money at all even though the click through rate from adwords was pretty much the same. The drop is very significant, about 90% or so. I just can't understand this, could anyone please explain this to me? Could it be because google is doing the Florida update? Or maybe something else?
Another question I have is...I was running a campaign at google adwords for web design keywords and my site was getting around 500 clicks a day for 5 cents. But then, about a weeek ago it went down to 10 clicks a day and then 0. Now I'm not getting any clicks for that same campaign even though I didn't make any changes. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks :)
Impressions have remained more or less the same and I am getting very few PSA's
No disrespect, but unless you said PSAs, but meant alternate ads, you may be underestimating the frequency with which non-paying ads are being displayed to your users. Though there are obviously other possible causes for what you're seeing, you really need to rule that out. An increase in PSAs (or alternate ads) wouldn't reduce the EPC, but it would reduce the CTR since CTR as reported by Google is calculated as follows:
Numerator: Clicks of paying ads only
Denominator: Impressions of paying ads + PSAs + alternate ads
I have verified that this is the case numerous times, reported it on WebmasterWorld several times in the AdSense forum and it's been confirmed by other publishers. This is obviously misleading to some publishers since many expect the denominator only to include paying ad impressions and/or the numerator to include clicks of PSAs.
Here's how I handle it [webmasterworld.com]. And on one of my sites, I have to do this b/c it has thousands of pages and has had multi-day stretches where it showed 95% paying ads, 0% paying ads (due to negative content word filtering issues) and everything in between.
