Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Does anyone know whats really happeneing/happened?
Please only post facts, and if your earnings are down state traffic/income because less that a good few thousand and say 50 dollars a day is too statistically liable to variation to be of any real use.
In my case I went from an average of 128 daily dollars for months to about 120, 110, 90, 85 dollars daily, not in that order, but its odd. Around 7000 page views a day. And stats are REALLY slow...
Been stable for years. Traffic as reported by google adsense is low. So it must be a bit "down" somewhere!But only a little low according to my own server stats.
I suppose they will fix things but its interesting to know whats really happeneng.
I noticed on another site that I am developing, a serious amount of clicks disappeared in the stats when I view them today. I guess someone was clickfrauding the site and they accounted for it? From what I saw last night, to what I see when I checked "yesterdays stats" I lost about 70% of the clicks that were there last I checked.
Who knows..
To work out what is "normal" for your site, please refer to my Golden Gate [webmasterworld.com] post from last year.
As fo the topics on "Googling Zombie networks", I have looked for some up-to-date information on them but most topics/articles are from 2004.
My stats (income) are always within 10 percent the same for over a year, and pretty similar the year before, taken over 15 sites and averaged..
The usual variation would be much, much less than this. And apart from the income drop there is the huge amount of MFAs suddenly appeared, (I had none, all in the full filter!) bad ad targeting, psa ads on some peoples sites where I never normally see any, no ads at all on some pages I visit at all, funny S L O W stats updating, etc. Since the beginning of this month there is some kind of big hiccup going on!
Trust me...
I have no doubt they can fix it. But could allowing the MFA ads just be googles way of taking a bigger cut after the recent news? After all if everyone has to click twice for every true product site google get TWO slices of the pie...
Or it makes advertisers "happy" because there is more "real estate" available (mfa) so bid prices (and your epc) fall, or whatever?
My stats (income) are always within 10 percent the same for over a year, and pretty similar the year before, taken over 15 sites and averaged..
In your opening post, you said of your earnings:
I went from an average of 128 daily dollars for months to about 120, 110, 90, 85 dollars daily, not in that order, but its odd
But in the Golden Gate thread I referred to you said:
So how come my income over 2 years is almost always (90% plus figures) within 10 dollars of the all time average of $90 per day?
I’m not sure whether your long term average is $90 or $128 therefore.
But whichever is the case, all these figures are in the same ballpark. There might be some trends up and down, but that is the nature of a market that is driven by bids. If you actually do the stats I suspect you'll find these apparently-aberrant numbers are mostly within 2 or 3 standard deviations of the mean.
Year one was lower.
Year 2 was higher because I added a 250 square in the content on most pages.
Started off with old existing sites with good traffic (built for fun) Traffic improved with time. (more links etc) which amounts to maybe a 10 percent increase?
Adsense epc stayed about the same over year one but targeting improved as did income month over month. But not by much.
Over the next (last) year it has still been rising very slightly. However Jan, feb, were 4k months due to a strange image link from google images... But this is unusual and will not "stick" I think. That one image/page gets 2000 hits, and earns lots! But its an aberation. This is what I meant by "last few months) But I still have that traffic/page so far!
Depends how far back you go! And how long a time frame you use for your average. Adsense keeps improving slightly, traffic keeps improving slightly.
But I never saw any overall wild income swings. Individual sites saw some v big swings, but added together things are amazingly steady. Overal total income was always within 2 or 3 hundred of the previous month which is about 10 percent.
Up until this month! All that 2.4 years of amazing consistency is all up the creek! I am not worried, it will be fixed! And by the end of this month it might be back to normal earnings.
If I (and loads of others) are earning less for whatever reason then they will soon fix it because google will also be earning less!
I was really just interested in the cause!
[edited by: Nitrous at 1:48 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2006]
I was really just interested in the cause!
The "cause" is a combination of Natural Statistical Variation and the natural ebb and flow of bidding rates.
Another analogy I like is that of a beach. If you take the perspective of a piece of seaweed, you can get perturbed because occasionally things can seem to dry up inexplicably (exactly how you experience it depends on how far up the beach you are). But if you stand back, take a look at the whole beach, and understand how the tide works, (moon-based ebb and flow, high and low tides, etc.), then there is much more "normality" in all that variation.
Much of the content of this forum is the sound of seaweed baking in the sun at low tide. But to spot the real dangers and anomalies, I think you have to take the perspective of a lifeguard, raising yourself above the beach to see the big picture, which is where doing the actual stats can help.
Bugger adsense I'm off to the beach...
Easy for you to say when it's on your doorstep! I'm 12 miles (19 kms) from it and that North Sea wind's still a bit too breezy:-)
Had ads for a very expensive brand of luxury car running all over my web site, which is totally unrelated to cars and the demographic is high school and college kids. Predictably, almost no clicks. What clicks there were likely didn't have much conversion *LOL*
Leva