What are some reasons for CTR going down?

Anyone else having this problem?

[annej]

My AdSense earnings have been down a bit over the last few days. At first I thought it might be a smart pricing change but it seems to be my CTR has slowly moved down.

I haven't moved any ads lately. What else could cause this?

[driris]

the same is happening in my case....
may be ad blindness is the factor

[Vlad]

Same here for the past 4-5 days. Lost 40% of income. Looks like our biggest advertiser baled out.

[ronburk]

What else could cause this?

AdWords advertisers know that small changes in ad copy can cause significant changes in CTR. One savvy advertiser dropping out (or cutting back) and a couple new ones with lousy copy appearing can put the hurt on many sites. Do you have any idea how diverse (or narrow) your advertiser base is?

[annej]

It does help to hear some others are experiencing this. I was thinking about changing my ads around but do't want to do it if the cause is something out of my hands.

My topic usually has tons of ads to draw from but lately they seem to be showing a lot of the same ads page after page. I wonder if it's something about how the algo is choosing ads. For my site variety might be more important than just getting the top bidders over and over on page after page.

[Hobbs]

Hold tight annej before staring to change things, give it few more days.

I am experiencing the same here too for 2 days now:
CTR down 50%
ecpm down 65%
visitors down 15%
earnings down 35%

And like you I have tons of advertisers and it is not likley that I can get affected by one or even 10 adverisers changing things or even dropping out.

So I am thinking there is a trend that needs more time to monitor before taking action.

---Hobbs

[con771]

I have been experiencing the same issue. My site is over a year old and had some strong growth before Xmas that continued into the new year. However at April 1st things changed. My traffic has remained stable, even grown, but my earnings have dropped about 40-50%. I have tweaked my pages, site, and added significantly more content but so far nothing has broken me out of this slump.
Each day I wake up and hope this will be the day things get back to normal.
In the meantime there is nothing I can do except add content, tweak the site and pages for seo, and try to gain more traffic (which I find is the hardest part).

[Hobbs]

Each day I wake up and hope this will be the day things get back to normal

maybe this IS the new normal ;-)
just hang on, earnings are wave shaped and there is no high without a low.

[Alex_Miles]

I just had my record day yesterday, on a Friday?

People don't shop for my stuff on Fridays!

I track the best performing channels, and its not from any of them. CTR up slightly because I redid a site with rubbish click-through that was a quarter of my impressions, but the whole $4 a day its now bringing in wasn't what caused the upswing.

I'm as puzzled as the rest of you over it all, though possibly less distressed.

Something changed, thats for sure.

[JuniorOptimizer]

CTR goes down when good advertisers lower bids, IMHO. When they fish aren't biting, the advertisers lower bids.

When Google shuffles SERPS a lot, the whole datastream suffers, and CTR drops.

[annej]

I had a huge plunge in Aug 2004 and it took until the fall of 05 to regain that level of earnings. Looking back there was a slight drop in CTR but a huge plunge in CPM between July and Aug 04. The CPM never made it back up. It looks like my increase in earnings since aug 04 was totally dependent on increased traffic.

After looking at those stats I realize my present downturn is pretty minor next to that.

[mattg3]

Last week saw increased visitor stream on one server and falling ctr and ecpm. Now visitors are falling too. Since 4 weeks it looks as if there are simply not enough ads in German. Competitor the same so it can't really be just us. Every Google "improvement" just negates the work we put in. Depressing. It starts like feeling Bust Mark 2. We are doing this since 10 months, btw. The biggest problem is that all this Google changing makes it near impossible to have a decent plan, besides finding new income streams, which is hard in Europe as most beta programs are US only.

[Nitrous]

Of course it could be the sheer number of mfa sites that are turning people off google ads. I know it does me!

[annej]

I'm trying to block them but as has been discussed elsewhere it's hard to catch them all.

[Nitrous]

Sooner or later google are going to have to fix this themselves.

In the meantime try blocking every site that does not sell a real product or service in uk, us, canada with the preview tool. On all your pages. It might take a few hours monthly but it really does work like a charm.

[Hobbs]

The last few hours of April 8th saw a partial recovery, let's hope it continues to April 9th and beyond.

[andrewshim]

yep... the first week of april was awful, but my ctr suddenly jumped back to normal on the 8th... i hope things get better.

[Hobbs]

interesting that some here go through common fluctuations..