Forum Moderators: martinibuster
By the way, I've had less than 20 clicks as well, but that's not so unusual for my site...
Anyone want to comment this?
You can't possibly know how much you earned from any given click you recieved today.
When it comes to your current AdSense stats, what you see, IS NOT (neccessarily) WHAT YOU GET.
Today seems a lot better, not quite so many clicks but the average so far is about $0.32
Paul.
Drives you insane doesn't it :( Normally when I get up in the mornings (8am, GMT+10) there's a good $4~$8 waiting for me, lately it's been $1~2 if I'm lucky. As with you the click counts have been much the same.
What has been /very strange/ though is that my Adwords campaign went from about 3000 impressions to 41,000+ impressions. Seems like someone out there is doing something naughty.
Paul.
dunno if this is normal, but i'd say get used to it.
you could try to improve your conversions, but for the most part, it's out of your control. if you're constantly feeling unhappy, as the last choice, you could change your site subject.
That's actually a pretty good explanation I think. Definately I notice that there's about an 8 hour lapse between when the ads _were_ running good and when they come back to life. One thing is for sure, they all come back to life after the midnight rolls over.
Paul.
If there are 10 advertisers in your niche, 5 high paying, 5 low paying, each with enough budget for 10 impressions per hour then if there are only 50 ad-views in your niche from 9pm to 10pm then only the 5 high paying advertisers will be shown on your site - there are enough impressions that pay well to go around.
At 9am, however, when everyone logs on at the office, there might be 100 ad-views in that hour. That would mean that google has to run all the advertisers - low-paying and high-paying. You, on average, will be seeing half your ads from the high-paying advertisers, and half from the low-paying advertisers.
That is a simplistic way of looking at things and does not include benefits for relevancy, inventory based on site quality, or smart-pricing - I hope it is able to demonstrate why the CPC and/or ad "quality" varies throughout the day.
Seems like whatever I do I can't get it up any higher. For a while I thought I was making it to 12 cents but it didn't hold. <sigh>
What has been crazy for me lately is the ups and down in CTR. I can't figure out if it's a difference in the ads or the visitors.
I think you could go nuts trying to micro manage this.
I'm thinking that it's the end of the month too..
Maybe the adwords-guys don't have much left and need to cut down on their ad-budgets..
As regards stability of epc, I think it's already been said that Adsense is a roller coaster, so get used to it and enjoy the ride.
I consider my epc to be pretty stable compared with some of the reports here. Yes, it goes up and down on a daily basis but the monthy trend on epc doesn't tend to vary much. It's difficult to say exactly why this is, but one theory I have is that not having MFA's on site is a big help. Certainly the stability has set in since I started blocking all MFA's last July.
Same here. I have been getting a lot of 0.02 and 0.03 clicks, it's so frustrating because my earnings have plumetted even though my traffic and click number has been stable.
I am seeing the same, daily income just keep deteriorating with every passing day. Have no idea how my account went from making avrage $80 p/day for almost 2 years to less then $40 p/day for the last 2-3 months. Hence my reason to remove adsense from 2 of my high traffic sites and replace by fastclick (valueclick now) and cbprosense. No longer interested in seeing them .02-.03 on these pages ever again, not interested in serving cheep CPM ads too. May give adsense a second chance once they start lifting their game. Right now, current click payout makes me feel abused.
End rant :(
Maybe the adwords-guys don't have much left and need to cut down on their ad-budgets..
Or maybe the Adwords plex guys have been instructed to come up with better figures for next reporting season.
Don't have loads of ad blocks on the page. Inevitably the lower blocks will be full of MFA's that will only serve to a) replace genuine ads and b) get your entire account smartpriced down the toilet. Also, having less blocks means that you often earn more, as well as having a lot less MFA's to worry about blocking. So have minimal ads blocks and keep an eye on what shows there.
Don't go mad on blocking. Only block ads you see appear on the site. There is controversy here on use of the preview tool for blocking. it's my experience that the preview tool doesn't show ads I can see on the page, but does show ads I've previously blocked so my opinion is that using it to block MFA's simply clogs up your blocklist with ads that would probably never show. MFA advertisers don't tent to target geographical areas - they adopt a splattergun approach, so wherever you are you are likely to see them without the tool. Also remember that you often see an ad only once, so only block the persistant ones.
I've had junk sites running that run the same site under different domain names, so I block each one that comes along when I catch them. There are a few like that.
I have noticed that the average earnings per click is way, way down.
The thing is:
1) I already have my filter full of MFAs
2) I no longer display more then 1 ad per page (for more then 6 months now). One ad and sometimes a search box on some pages at best.
3) I am upset about the fact that anyone and their dog can start a CPM campaign over my pages for peanuts and i have no say about it.
4) I removed the ads from two major sites (-3000 impressions p/site p/day now) and what do you know...daily income hasn’t changed. +- within the same daily figure. That's crap. Makes you wounder if there is some sort of daily cap employed per account.
If I’m to lose a viewer for 2 cents I might as well send them to a product page that pay me around 60% in commission per sale and send cheques twice per month. Hence my decision to go with cbprosense. Hell, they even let you remove their name branding from the ad display. It is a paid service but the returns more then pay for it.
If I am getting conversions (sales) via their ads (not bad at all BTW), then I must be getting conversions from the adsense ads as well. Smart pricing seems to be ignoring this fact for some reason. Go figure...I gave up.
Your sites are probably being milked for cheap clicks by adword advertisers bidding incredibly low ammounts for content network ads. They bid too low to show up on the search network, unfortunately they pop up all over content network sites with their 1,2 3 and 5 cent bids.
These sites never sell real products, you spot them by the fact they are running adsense, cj affiliate links, yahoo ads etc on the landing pages. Block them, if you can, but if you're in a competitive niche watch that 200 filter list fill up fast.
Your sites are probably being milked for cheap clicks by adword advertisers bidding incredibly low ammounts for content network ads.
Well I've made the milking stop. No reasonable PPC or CPM rates, then NO ads over my pages. And I really don’t give a hoot about the adsense algo or their filters...I have better things to do then helping Google's bottom line.
I'm too busy serving my hard earned viewers. They want to display ads over my site, then they better lift thier game and click payouts.
I wonder if switching to image based adverts would help?
I suppose that is the key to the whole thing, experimentation.
Incidently, I tried doing <!--google_adsense ...--> type focusing of my text but that still doesn't seem to bring in the good adverts (relevant to my site)
One last thing, it's a shame that there's a 2~3 hour delay between adding sites to the ad-filter and those filters taking effect.
Earnings flucctuate wildly. I have given up micro managing. I look at a 15 day average now. Of course the filter is full of MFA's...
* Why do we even have to bother with this filter when it comes to MFA's?
* Why there is no minimum CPM rate option available for publishers?
* Why there is no option to opt out of CPM ads?
* Why there is no option to set minimum CPC for publishers?
Now ask yourself what are google doing with their inventory of billions upon billions of unused ad impressions per day over the entire publishers network?
Answer, they sell them to MFA's advertisers for as low as .02 (and up) per 1000 impressions. You do the math. This also answers all the other questions above. Why would they bother with giving us such options, they will be lossing a lot of money if they did.
It was only a matter of time...but it is here now, live and kicking. Publishers network cynical milking that is, while G's bottom line gets fatter and fatter by the day.
Excellent analysis, gloomy, but still very realistic. I came to the same conclusions. Too bad.
That said, I just got a $0.92 click through, so maybe it's not so bad today.
Some excellent suggestions Web_Speed.
Many folks attribute plunging epc to smart pricing, when in reality they are being milked for cheap clicks like prized holsteins by the arbitrage brigade.
The arbitrage ads have such a high click CTR because of misleading ad copy, that they sometimes get shown on your site instead of the high paying ads.
Google please increase the competitive ad filter to something more reasonable, or let us set a minimum cpc on our sites. If an ad isn't available at the price we think is reasonable, switch to one of the publishers alternative urls. Just suggestions :)
