March 27, 2006

Last 3 Days My Income has Dropped 50%

[cg6453]

I have been a long time reader, first time poster. Has anyone else noticed their daily earnings drop in the last few days. My page impressions and click rate has been consistent through the month however my ECPM has gone down by half if not more the last 3 days in a row. I have had adsense for the last 3 months and have never experineced this, anyone else in the same boat as me? Or any anyone have any suggestions?

Thanx

[Visi]

Keep in mind that many advertisers work on quarterly budgets and this can affect earnings as the end of the quarter approaches.

[bhopkins]

I find this always happens to me towards the end of the month. I guess the advertisors who target my site content run out of money for thier monthly budget and my earnings go down as a result.

[cg6453]

THAT MAKES SENSE, BUT IT DIDNT HAPPEN AT THE END OF THE MONTH FOR JANUARY OR FEB. IF IT IS NOT BETTER BY APRIL 1 ANY SUGGESTIONS?

[jomaxx]

No, no changes for me whatsoever. A while back smart pricing was rumored to be calculated weekly, on a Thursday IIRC.

[Marcia]

Every single month things slow down for the last week, Adsense and sales.

[Nitrous]

Did you use the tool and check that you are not displaying ads for dozens of mfas? everytimr this happens to me thats the cause. ban every site that displays ads or does not directly sell a service or product. Then whatch your income go back up! only bothe checking us uk and canada. Dont help the scavengers or share the advertisers budget with them.

[vordmeister]

One of my sites halved in income in the middle of February. Another (the highest earner) took a dive from the start of March. Overall earnings are now 60% of normal.

I feel on this forum we need a disclaimer - I have data for around 2 years and there is reasonable traffic (7000 page impressions daily), and the sites were built before adsense to add information to the internet that wasn't already there.

CPC is the main reason, although CTR is slightly reduced which suggests targeting. The ads are discreet so I'd describe overall CTR as medium.

I emptied out the competitive ad filter the other day just in case, but earnings look like they are on a further dive. CTR didn't go up either.

Fair enough eCPM has increased steadilly over the last 6 months and we aren't at the bottom again (yet).

I'm going to play around to see if I can't push the sites back into where I want them. If I find the answer i'll let you guys know.

[EdisonCarter]

20,000 page view a day for a very consistent site that has been around since 1995. Been running AS since 10/2004.

Numbers in the tank since about 3/10. Even worse today.

ec

[carminejg3]

jan and feb where great months... seems like march resembled googles stock for us...

almost cutting our daily numbers by 45%

[martinibuster]

Obviously there is no 50% massive cutback going on across the board. It's likely something limited to your space. As others mentioned, you are at the mercy of advertisers and their budgets. Revenue streams are rarely consistent on a daily basis, you should expect dips that generally correct themselves.

[carminejg3]

I've read a lot of people have noticed big drops in adsense income.... my take is less advertisers... and way too many adsense sites...

the bonus to this is you learn to use other programs, and increase your site stickyness.... down side is lossing 1-2k a month does hurt a bit.

[jomaxx]

Too many AdSense sites... suddenly in the past 3 days?

[carminejg3]

not last 3 days decline in march past 25 days

[21_blue]

cg6453, your stats may be quite 'normal', as aberrations are to be expected occasionally. See [webmasterworld.com...] for more info.

It may also be worth checking your site hasn't been hit by junk(MFA) ads or CPM ads - search WW for previous threads on these topics. If your ads are OK, wait and see if things improve at the start of April - making hasty changes can reduce your Adsense performance.

[Jean]

The last 3 days have been my best since July 2003 so it's definitely not dropping here.

[carminejg3]

when you say your best.... are you talking dollars or hundreds of dollars per day?

[21_blue]

carminejg3, March will be a record month for me and I'm taking close to UPS club figures (not got into 5 digits yet, though).

[Chico_Loco]

This month thus far has been pretty poor, with it decending even moreso today it would seem.

Have a YPN account but never really used - going to spend some time using YPN on some pages instead of AS during this week to see what happens!

[Jean]

when you say your best.... are you talking dollars or hundreds of dollars per day?

Does it matter? Enough dollars to make it statistically significant.

[europeforvisitors]

I've noticed a very slight softening of eCPM on my site since March 21, partly because of a modest slip in clickthrough rates. Maybe Google is playing around with its ad-matching algorithm again, or maybe it's just the end-of-the-month budget blues.

[carminejg3]

well all i was saying was our rev's slipped from jan-feb to an ok month in march....

I'm thinking people are starting to become adsense blind to an extent.

And we aren't going to kill every link on our page to booast the adsense income how some suggest you have a paragraph or two and then an adsense ad....

I think google needs to play with hidding the ads by google text on their ad blocks for the text blocks so that users can blend the ads in completly.

either way didn't want to start a war on this was just agreeing with some people that march is a crappy month to the past few, but well see what happens....

[G_Smitty]

20,000 daily impressions, online since 1999, adsense for over two years.

This will be a record month again for me. $00,000

I see major fluctuations in the daily eCPM but the monthly average is up.

[carminejg3]

nice... we aren't that high but a few new sections we should climb above current limits....

[cg6453]

YET ANOTHER LOW DAY, THIS HAS BEEN THE LOWEST DAY EVER MY ECPM HAS DROPPED TO 1/3 OF ITS NORMAL, I REALLY HOPE THAT THIS WILL RESOLVE ITSELF BY APRIL 1ST.

ARE THERE ANY ADSENSE CONSULTANTS ON HERE LOOKING TO MAYBE MAKE A BUCK TO LOOK AT MY SITE AND SUGGEST IMPROVEMENTS?

[jomaxx]

Give it some time, at least a week. I don't know if it's smart pricing or not, but there's nothing to be gained by making major site changes in haste. You might also want to look at your stats in more detail, adding some channels if you haven't already done so.

[marcel]

It seems your loss is my gain, I've just had my best day ever :)

[21_blue]

I'm not a consultant, but the web counter on your home page suggests that you aren't getting the volumes for a 50% drop to be statistically significant (do the stats in the link I posted).

Having said that, the ads I saw were poorly targeted. I expect this may be because there probably aren't many advertisers in the area of street gangs and crime (you could use the traffic estimator in Adwords to find out). Look at having some text on the page related to the topics you think your visitors may be interested in and use section_targetting - eg: provide some info on tourism in Chicago.

I'm away and only able to check your page via my pda which displays pages in a slightly funny way, but the design of the page looked good, the ads were well blended. But there was something funny at the bottom of the page, "ads by.." with no name. You may need to check that your page is compliant with the TOS (ads should be fully displayed, code not altered, no competitive ads on same page). It may just be my browser, though.

If you find that 'consultancy' useful and want to pay a fee, please make a donation or subscribe to WebmasterWorld :-)

[ugamis1]

I would assume many sites would see a decrease in everything toward the end of the month. In the past, if you set your daily minimum to low Google would not display your ads throughout the day and try to 'guess' how many impressions were to be had (it wasn't good at guessing then), thus advertisers back then would set a really high daily limit under the accurate assumption they would never hit that limit (but would maximize impressions). I am not sure how much better Google has gotten, I have not tested their guessing ability since the beginning of last year.

Anyways, toward the end of the month your budget is XX,XXX and you hit it on March 25th you might pause your entire adwords account until April 1st. That would trickle down to all of the AdSense publishers.

[jema]

This month will be a record :)

A little drop off has occurred in the last several days, but nothing that could not be dismissed as irrelevent, advertising budgets come and go!

I have in the past see a few days which were 3-4 times expected revenue, other days google seems like it is clawing back duff clicks and the revenue plunges.

All you can do is look at overall trends on a month by month basis.