Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'm seeing a 50% decrease across a few sites for the same volume and was curious what others are seeing for earnings. All sites do over 150k page views a day and up.
So my experience was the opposite of yours.
It's already right back on track this month so far.
I hope it picks up soon.
EPC has gone down quite a bit.
I seem to stay within a band of earnings no matter what happens to traffic. Traffic goes up, epc goes down. Traffic goes down, epc goes up.
Anyway, $ are comming from google and this is good.
Everybody's happy!
6.6 million pages view per month should be a nice chunk of change and a good measurement tool. If you are down a tad on earnings then that should be a fair indication across the board.
There will always be some niches above and some folks below.....but a site with 6.6 million page views per month should be a decent indicator of events.
clicks up earnings down in January.
Just thought I'd add to the findings.
Keep the following in mind.
-- Customers have exhausted their budgets in pre-xmas campaigns.
-- Many customers and CPC managers are on holiday and should be back this week
-- 2004 Budgets are under approval (you'd be surprised to find out how many corporations have freezes in place until they analyse their year end data and get board approvals)
-- Shoppers are not in a mood to purchase the types of products and services due to post holiday blues (financial and other..)
Give it a week or two to stabilize.
Not so, it depends what sector the site is in.
As others have said travel sites go down in November and up in January, Christmas present sites go up in November and down in January.
Basically you cannot buck the market
Not so, if it consistently gets 6+ million pages views per month, which was the indication, then the content sensitive Ads should be applicable to the sector it is in given a medium/large scope. If the site remains topical based upon traffic through the season so should the Ads it displays......hence a wash, and a good indicator!
December was lower than November and October but January is also off to a flying start where impressions and CTR are concerned, but my EPC in January so far is way down on October and November so earnings are about the same.
CPM up 50%
SN
Not so, if it consistently gets 6+ million pages views per month, which was the indication, then the content sensitive Ads should be applicable to the sector it is in given a medium/large scope. If the site remains topical based upon traffic through the season so should the Ads it displays......hence a wash, and a good indicator!
Not necessarily, because advertisers could choose to run fewer ads--or no ads--during a season when, to use a travel-industry term, the "look-to-book" ratio is down. (I say "could choose to run fewer ads" because that's going to vary by advertiser. Some advertisers hang in there month after month, bless their hearts.)
Speaking of the "look-to-book" ratio, the CTR on my own site declined noticeably during the fall even as traffic held steady until right before Christmas. That CTR started climbing right after Christmas, just as my affiliate sales started growing noticeably. The topics of my pages didn't change, nor did the topics of my AdSense ads. What did change was user behavior, which (for my topic) is influenced by seasonal factors.
- Impressions and average impression up
- Clicks and average click up
- Click through ratio up
- Total revenue down
- Earnings per click (EPC) down
- Cost per thousand (CPM) down
None of that is very good...
Hopefully this will turn around in the next month or so.
BZ
None of that is very good...
I don't know... it is good that your impressions and clicks are up, otherwise it sounds like your earnings would be way down.
It is similar to my trend... earnings have only remained stable because my impressions have carried on going up (because i continuously add new pages and sites).
In my case it is EPC that is going down.
My effective CPM remains pretty stable as my CTR has improved (i think due to the same seasonal reasons that EuropeForVisitors talks about above).
Either advertisers are learning how to use Adwords more effectively and so are paying less per click, or Google is taking a bigger piece of the pie.
Either advertisers are learning how to use Adwords more effectively and so are paying less per click, or Google is taking a bigger piece of the pie.
There are many, many factors that determine impressions, CTR, EPC, effective CPM, and bottom-line revenues. Individual examples or case histories are always interesting, but we shouldn't make broad assumptions based on limited samples.
I seem to stay within a band of earnings no matter what happens to traffic. Traffic goes up, epc goes down. Traffic goes down, epc goes up.
This is our experience also. No matter what we do, income stays within a band.
Also here is my small case history:
- Pick up in CTR since Christmas (about a 0.5% increase).
- EPC has gone down quite a bit. Since July/August EPC has gone down by about 43%. This has been a slow continued downward trend. (Causes: lower bid prices, smaller rev share from google OR both.)
- Traffic to my site is up (seasonal increase). (750,000+ AdSense impressions in Dec.)
- Cost per thousand (CPM) down
- Total revenue is coming back up only because of an increase in impressions due to traffic increase.
As small % changes in Adsense performance on our sites could lose or gain me several hundreds of dollars I have devoted some time to monitoring various factors. I've identified the keywords that are paying well on my sites, setup a spreadsheet to monitor how much those keywords are costing advertisers, and tracked those main keyword prices through good and bad weeks.
The size of the sample is not 6.6 million but it is large enough to convince me that Google hasn't changed the % payout. I can't give you anymore details on the keywords and prices for obvious reasons.
Contrary to what I believed earlier:
- Income does NOT stay within a band by design (maybe coincidence)
- When EPC drops sharply it has always been the case that some of my main advertisers are taking a break. If more of you could track keyword prices for the keywords that work on your site you'll see the same results.
- Google hasn't dropped the share of revenue (While we can never exclude Google dropping payouts - and while I still think it will happen - that does not seem to be happening at this time).
Adsonar's imminent arrival is unlikely to be given a boost by Adsense dropping payouts :-)
