April 2006 - Dropped $25/day to $15/day Average

[creativepart]

After 6 straight months of increasing earnings Feb and March brought about a plateau in terms of earnings. But April is just down down down every day. From $20 to $25 a day averages since November I'm seeing a $15 average and having trouble holding on to that lately, with $12 and $13 days.

I've made no changes to my site or my Adsense settings. My forum views and clicks are about the same too.

I wish I could figure out what causes these fluctuations and take control of them. Of course, when it was going up every month "I" was a genius. Now, that its going down it's what's wrong with Google.

I guess I shouldn't complain. But I am anyway.

[Eazygoin]

Hee hee...nicely put post!

It is difficult to know the reasons, although it may help to look at your stats, page views etc. There was a rather odd PR update earlier this month. Data centers are somewhat unstable, and the Big Daddy infrastructure finished the end of March [although changes are still being made in relation to that].

Added to that,you may have changed your page ads, or some other content, but it sounds like you probably didn't.

Anyhow, I hope it gets back to where it was for you, ad soon :-)

[jema]

The clue may be "forum views" forums develop advert blindness, even shaking things up a bit may not always help.

[vordmeister]

I had a similar thing last month. It's worth checking your traffic and sources of traffic - my drop coincided with a drop in Yahoo traffic.

I changed a lot of things, then changed them back, and over the last few days things have started to look promising. Only because CPC has taken a big step back in the right direction so that's probably smart pricing.

It can be very de-motivating when this sort of thing happens. The important thing is to keep at it.

[martinibuster]

A ten dollar drop in average earnings is hardly a dramatic drop, strictly speaking in terms of dollars and cents. As a percentage of total earnings it is is still within the range of normal.

Nevertheless, a more realistic view is to look at it in terms of dollars, it's not a dramatic drop, much less horrible.

I think the REAL issue here is that you are misunderstanding how AS works. AS revenue is not stable and earning fluctuations of 30% are not unusual at all.

[greedy player]

it happened to me this month too.. however my site has risen against it, so effectively its better than it was before, Although knowingly it would be alot better than it is. :)

[sven1977]

Good post. Thanks for making me aware that my party might be over at some point (hope it will still take a while though).
It made me aware of the fact that I'll have to look for alternatives soon to diversify my income. I already saw this when I increased the number of my page and topics I cover. I'm now much more stable in terms of Ad-targeting and other stuff. I don't really care anymore if one particular page gets crappy ads. It doesn't matter. All other pages catch and buffer those things.

I'll do the same with website revenue and diversify as much as possible (yahoo, affiliate, etc..). Right now AdSense is my only income but posts like yours definitely scare me and motivate me to think about these things.

[greedy player]

Simple fact: dont put all your eggs in one basket and relly on the Value, work on the traffic , the value is your reward but it's never the same (it goes up and down every month)