Rise and fall in earnings despite constants.

[PalSys]

Hey guys! I realize that there are many posts pertaining to subjects and problems like this, but I can't seem to gather the top three or five most important factors.

Most of my numbers from day to day are constant: impression, clicks, CTR...but my earnings rise and fall constantly. On a good day, I will earn about $50...a bad day (today for example) can be as low as $18.

All of my traffic is natural, and these rises and falls occur on all of my sites (sites from RPG related sites to webmaster forums, etc).

If anyone could shed some light on what the most important factors are here and, most importantly, what I can do, I would appreciate it a great deal.

Thanks in advance!

Chris

[humblebeginnings]

There are many reasons. One of them is bids and budgets of advertisers. Today they are prepared to pay you for example 10 cents a click, tomorrow for example 5 cents, or the other way around. Today they have budget, but tomorrow they might pull the plug. And then an other advertiser steps in who has a load of cash to spend...

[Green_Grass]

This is the Google world .. Ruled by smart pricing . I find no logic too. Earnings flucctuate wildly. We could keep analysing it but without knowing how google works , we are really just guessing.

I suggest work , with a long term average. Don't worry too much on a day to day basis.

[wheelie34]

I have noticed that smartpricing can take months to find the value of your site/s, when I started with adsense (when it started), as with many on this board, I just pasted a load of ads on a few pages and left them, made over $100 each month for a year or so then decided to start playing with the ad placement, blending etc.

Within days the earnings were going up then bang, down again, research proved smartpricing, each week would give suprises of good eCPM (thats what gets affected) some days at the end of the day eCPM was mid $50, bang, down to mid $20 for atleast 4 days or so, then another good day, the good days were always showing lower eCPM than the highest ever was (late $50's), after 8 months it all seemed to settle into a rythme, for the last 3 months my eCPM has stayed within low $32 average $40 highest $45 (all figures rounded out) from quotes by other members here, I believe eCPM of $30+ is good.

I have also noted that when you add new pages thats when eCPM seems to fluctuate again, depending how many pages get added. I even moved my main site, a .com to a UK IP and traffic boosted radically so eCPM started to bounce again.

In a nutshell, it seems smartpricing finds your sites true value and keeps the site honest, after it knows the site, it controls the value it offers.

Has anyone else seen this "nature of the beast" happen?

[david_uk]

Adsense is a roller coaster, and sometimes the best strategy is to concentrate on your site and not worry about it. There are too many factors beyond our control. In my case, epc and ctr are extremely stable, but traffic volume and if the traffic clicks or not aren't.

The thing that seems most closely related to my earnings is if the US is at it's corporate desk surfing instead of working. For example, weekends are always low, as are public holidays. I'm not expecting great things this Easter. However, when corporate USA is at work, I make up for it.

I'd agree with you about smartpricing finding a long term value on the site - that's what seems to have happened in my case. However, being a big corporation, big corporation mentality rules supreme, and the departments that develop smartpricing, targeting, ad sales and so on seem to never talk to each other to integrate the program for best effect. I guess that like most companies, the respective departments are more interested in inter-departmental warfare than actually improving the program for the benefit of advertisers and publishers :(

[21_blue]

One important factor is natural statistical variation, which explains why numbers can vary even if everything seems to be held constant. I've detailed how to check whether your variation and any apparent aberrations are in fact normal in my Golden Gate post [webmasterworld.com].