Saturday April 1, 2006:

Worst AdSense Day in 8 months

[con771]

What the heck is going on today?
eCPM is down about 300%

[Andrew Bassett]

Maybe your site isn't optimized for April 1; there may be some April 1 optimization tutorials out there.

[Nitrous]

Mines up!

[wheelie34]

optimized for April 1

Nice one, glad my site is though, as eCPM is fine on my account, if anything its holding high figures a lot longer today.

[G_Smitty]

On track for record day.

[adamxcl]

31st was really bad and now the 1st is up. After seeing this a few months now, I think it's the budget factor. People run out of a monthly budget and start anew on the 1st instead of spreading it out.

[hal12b]

The 31st was pretty bad for me too. Today seems on track.

[weela]

“I think it's the budget factor. People run out of a monthly budget and start anew on the 1st instead of spreading it out.”

I agree as I’ve noticed the last couple of days of the month are generally bad for us. I think advertisers are missing out on some good buys by letting their budgets deplete late in the month.

[leadegroot]

eCPM is down about 300%

Look, its really important that you don't panic about one bad day. Adsense goes up and down; thats its nature.

Some things to look at, before you start panicing that Adsense Doesn't Work Anymore

- is your site up? is your host having problems?
surf your site yourself and see if everything is working. Have a look at it through some different proxies to see how it looks from elsewhere. examine the control panel your host gave you and look for problems

- is your traffic down?
look at your referers in your logs (you have a host that gives you instant logs, right?) are you getting normal referals? maybe you've lost position in the serps? has a link to you that normally delivers big traffic gone missing?

- are your ads normal?
ad delivery getting out of whack can happen, BUT its very rare, its the last thing I check, not the first. Check that your ads are displaying what you expect. If they are suddenly off topic you might need to let adsense know. If you have click tracking installed its very easy to see what the change in click pattern is.

But, while you can check all of the above - one day of poor results can happen! The whole thing is a statistical crap shoot and you will have up days and down days.
The last thing (literally) you should be doing is running here to say your ecpm is down - you have too many things to be busy checking.
Go on, you have work to do!

[crick]

Yes, definately the traffic is lower today. Then again, most of my visitors come from the US, so the peak hours are still to come. I think joke and other similar sites will see an up day today before going back to normal tomorrow.

[djohnson]

As always, some sites do good and then some do bad. Even ones that do good can do bad every once in a while. Statistics are your friend. Watch over a longer time then 1 day and you will feel better. :)

[nonni]

Down 300%? That is strange. The most my site has ever gone down is 100% (to zero).

Hopefully it is just a blip and will bounce back up. Fingers crossed for you.

[G_Smitty]

I can't believe there are some who think it is possible to drop 300%. So how much do you owe Google?:)

[Andrew Bassett]

I'm guessing he meant down 75%.

[Tearabite]

earlier this week I had my best 3 or 4 days in a row, ever.. Fri and today, my worst EVER... ZERO clicks in 2 days!

i've checked everything.. traffic is the same, Ads are targeted, site is up.. just no clicks..

my traffic is low enough that this is just one of those statisical 'things' ..

.

[futuresky]

Awful day here too (eCPM very low).

Page impressions are slightly down but hey it's a weekend and also april 1st so maybe people are doing other things.

Not sure if it's related but for the first time ever I've seen the "Change to ads about" thingy on my adsense units (never seen that before although it looks like something other webmasters reported last year). I wouldn't expect that to reduce eCPM though - would have epected it to be highter.

[marsradio]

Maybe all of your advertisers disabled their ads just for today as an April Fools joke. :-)

j/k

[eyeinthesky]

April Fools!

[joaquin112]

hey guys did you check Google? It says eCPM was down %80 because of April Fool's day. O crap it's 12:11 - just forget anything I said.

[Scurramunga]

My ecpm is actually soaring. My ctr is on track yet my revenue is fairly flat. Sign of a slow day, nothing more.

[jetteroheller]

eCPM is down about 300%

You have now to pay Google for the ads the double amount, You earned before?

1 minus 300% is -2

[flashher]

my eCPM suck on April 1st. CTR drop a lot and Earning drop > 50%.

Google put irrelevant ads on my site make a joke on me?

Hope everything will return to normal today.

[Mr_Fern]

April 1st my 4th best day ever. With the top 3 during those Ford ads in December.

[jema]

Well my traffic tanked badly yesterday, but earning held up pretty well :)

[Mohamed]

April 1st was my best day ever, my ctr increased 40% and I got xx figures.

[Hobbs]

You should include level of traffic and how old the site is as fluctuations in small & new sites can be dramatic.
Having said that, yes April looks like a sobering month compared to March, but give it few days.

[Nitrous]

7k page views a day. Best day this year was april the 1st! above 150 dollars.

[greatstart]

April 1st was no April fools joke for me. I had the best day so far this year, almost double my average for any day in Feb - Mar 2006.

[europeforvisitors]

April 1 was my strongest Saturday in recent memory and one of my strongest days period (in terms of eCPM and total revenues) in the last few months. On the other hand, I had near-record low eCPMS for a few days at the end of March.

I've always felt than Adsense revenue patterns look more like sine waves than straight lines.

[G_Smitty]

Best weekend in over 2 years. Higest eCPM and page view.

Site is over 6 years old and 30,000 page views daily.