Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Do others notice these types of fluctuations from day-to-day? Have you noticed a trend, for instance, that a particular day of the week, or month, has a consistent pattern of CTR, or does it appear to be completely random?
This month will be a little harder to evaluate, due to the holiday season, but by January, you will likely see a pattern develop of what your site's best and worst days of the week are.
Don't forget that it can take up to 24 hours for your stats to be completely updated for the day, and they have definitely been running behind for the last several days. Be sure to check in your account 24 hours after the end of each day for the updated stats.
To try to give you something to compare to: I serve around 10K impressions/day. My CTR for the most part stays within a +/- 10% range of average. On the occassional day it falls outside that range.
I have day to day fluctuations in hit rate, Adsense impressions (related, of course), click through, and earnings per click.
The hit rate or impressions comes from my readers. Most people are using an office computer, so the impressions drop over the weekend. But they do change day to day.
The click through rate has the largest variation. Often, if there is a spike in impressions, this spike is not reflected in clicks, therefore a lower CTR. I know that sometimes these spikes are when a college professor (often in a 3rd world country) with a large class list my site as a reference on an assignment or hand out. (Sometimes there may be over 100 students involved, many of whom go to the site more than once) These are usually followed by e-mails with questions from a few students. These students don't usually click on adsense ads, so the CTR goes down (but the number of clicks stays the same).
Another cause of variation in clicks and earnings per click is due to advertisers. Often they spend a certain amount of money on a campaign; after a given amount of time or money they stop the campaign. If an advertiser starts or stops a campaign or if he changes the ad text or keyword selection, my CTR changes.
It goes up and down, but the general trend of what is important, dollars per day, is a gradual increase.
I would suggest, just dont ever bother to look at these stats. Just put the code and read the TOS and FAQ. And forget about Adsense. Just check once a week to do a little tweaking and account checking. That would be the best $/time-spent you would make :)
