february: a brick wall

[smoger]

hi all,.. i started adsense back in November and while earnings are nothing exciting yet, i was suprised to see that i was earning at least a little and improving each month.

That is until Feb. came around. Clicks dropped to almost nothing, and the ones I got were paying next to nothing. Traffic is up a good amount, and nothing major has changed aside from adding some content. No layout changes or anything like that.

Adsense is showing less page impressions than previous months, even though my logs show traffic is up a lot. In fact, for this year, im currently at about 1/3 of the traffic I received in 2005 altogether, with Feb being the bigger of the two months this year.

Any of you guys have ideas? thanks in advance!

[hunderdown]

Any change in the ads you see on the site? That could have a big impact.

I wonder if you are getting PSAs.

[incrediBILL]

Traffic being up is meaningless as all the rogue spiders and bots that find out about your site will beat on your server mercilessly until they get their fill. That will often be the difference in what AdSense page impressions and stats variance is all about, then consider people with ad blockers and javascript disabled to account for the rest.

[Thez]

You need to use some log file analyzer to really see what your traffic is (I recommend awstats), it could be that all your "extra" traffic is just spider activity. Some search engines have found your site and are now spidering it hard, thus making "hits" to logs yet no real page views and thus no ad impressions. In fact, your "real" traffic could be lower if your clicks are now less than before. But it's impossible to tell, as there are dozens of factors that affect both earnings and ctr, you just have to keep trying.

I just raised my site's ctr by 0,4% over the weekend with some work. :)

[smoger]

thanks guys,.. i do have an analyzer but havent had a chance to take a look at the logs from jan and feb. yet.

will do that tonight and post my findings

[longen]

i do have an analyzer but havent had a chance to take a look at the logs from jan and feb

A daily check on logs to spot problems developing early would be recommended if you plan to make a living from a web-site.

[smoger]

yeah this is just a hobby i intend to make a few bucks on.. nothing that i expect to support myself with.

if it gets to that point, that would be great. but thats above and beyond the goal.

[smoger]

update: i took a closer look at the adsense reports and noticed that the impressions werent nearly as different as i thought.

i only had about 700 less impressions in feb than in january. CTR is 50% of what it was in january

ads seem to be the same?

thanks again for any ideas

[jomaxx]

If you get a lot of repeat traffic then they have probably seen the same ads lots of times and have more or less programmed themselves not to direct their attention to the ad block.

If this is the case, you might get results from a minor redesign or having rotating ad block colors, something to shock people into seeing your site with fresh eyes.

[longen]

Choose the page with the highest traffic - then change the ad format/color once a week, and monitor results.

[JohnKelly]

Traffic being up is meaningless as all the rogue spiders and bots that find out about your site will beat on your server mercilessly until they get their fill.

IncrediBill, do you have a robots.txt that blocks these rougue spiders that you would be willing to share? It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on server load.