Clicks down from last year?

compare your number of clicks to last year's figures

[moTi]

taking up the current discussion on adsense aversion.
please ascertain if your sites meet the following criteria. i think it's important to get things straight here.
for comparison purpose, let things be more or less equal, that means:

- you already had a well established, professionaly designed and highly optimized site one year ago

- you didn't do significant changes of navigation and site layout (including ad placement) since then

- traffic has been relatively steady and statistically convincing

- your dedication to your websites hasn't changed (working time, rate of content addition)

are such webmasters out there?
my only significant change was the removal of bad performing ad blocks, which should be irrelevant, because they only got a marginal click amount.
also, switching the filter list on and off doesn't have a noticable impact on overall number of clicks. that seems to have a rather inconsistent or at most minor effect, because of low quality catchy ads versus high quality targeted ads balancing each other in terms of visitor click affinity. plus my filter list is small.

i for one can say, that my sites are seriously hit. whereas the other metrics went in different directions from time to time, decline in number of clicks (note: not ctr!) is massive, about 50%.
up to thousand clicks/day one year ago down to a few hundred clicks/day now.
please let me know, do you also suffer from click decline? or is everything fine? what's up with the other success measures?

[ann]

I have all of the above. I think I will give adsense another month or two to see if it comes back up but at this point in time I am beginning to doubt it when I have to check every landing page that they are supposed to check and block so many bad ads.

My clicks are down about 60% from November and it is getting pathetic.

One ad that shows up under first its own name and then with several different advertising "companies" are forever getting killed off only to reappear under another name. The ad, if left alone would pepper my site, as it is it is there by twos and threes....just getting very weary of it all.

just sign me disgusted.

Ann

[miguelito]

I'm sorry to hear that people are having click trouble, my sites have been unchanged for over a year now in terms of clicks.
I am a very lazy webmaster, running forum sites, the dynamic content is done by the members so i just sit there and maintain the server, tidy up etc.
If i can maintain clicks by doing so little then there must be another reason why hard working webmasters are suffering other than a general downturn in google clicks.
In fact, this month is going to be the second best month in two years according to current stats on income.The sites are not holiday or seasonally affected.

[Hobbs]

just sign me disgusted

and my name right under ann's

[Jean]

Comparing the last 6 weeks with the same period last year my CTR is about the same and eCPM up by 30% so ads are actually paying better. This is not the result of optimizing but (probably) better advertisers pool.
So things are not bad everywhere.

[gamiziuk]

Compared with a year ago, my impressions are down by about 50%. However, CTR and CPM are both up, so income is about the same for me. There are wild fluctuations from one day to the next for earnings, too.

I'm not sure how to interpret all of this.

[OptiRex]

Comparing 5th May 2005 to 5th June 2005 and 5th May 2006 to 5th June 2006 since it was 05.05.05 when they changed their metrics presentation:

Page impressions +38.61%
Clicks +2.32%
Page CTR -26.16%
eCPM +20.18%
Earnings +66.52%

Conclusions?

My widget industry is advertising a lot more on-line hence the increase in AdWords bids and my earnings.

Is the CTR down because of increased avoidance of Google ads or because the visitor may have seen the same ad on another site?

I have no idea, it may simply be more visitors generally surfing and reading information.

Overall my earnings have nearly increased every month however compared to January 2006 my CTR is -8.40% but with the major increase in eCPM the past few months I can't complain...yet!

[security56]

Is the damn crappy ads some of us are getting lately :) we need a bigger filter list.

[G_Smitty]

My stats are equal to last year. I have some good advertisers in my niche that seem to stay steady.

[Hobbs]

>we need a bigger filter list

Or a bigger shovel!

[OptiRex]

Or a bigger shovel!

Or a JCB...Caterpillar to Yanks!

[netmeg]

My impressions and clicks are way up, but my CPC is in the toilet, and while overall my earnings are slightly better than last year, they're in no way proportionally as improved as the clicks and impressions are. In fact, I was doing better (on a CPC basis) during the 'off' season.

[bumpski]

At the end of March last year Adsense introduced Adlinks.
For me this makes comparing April, May, June, and even July of last year to this year difficult.

Adlinks made a huge impact on clicks (and earnings) when it was introduced. I think it almost doubled my earnings. Adlinks still produces well, but when it was first introduced it had a very large positive impact on all stats.

So keep that in mind when comparing. Clearly there was a visitor learning curve with Adlinks.

March, April, May 2005 Adsense had "impression count" bugs. if you used Adlinks, impression count was double actual, another comparison problem!

Analyzing one stable site using Adsense since 2003, overall my Februrary of this year was twice as good as 2005, BUT, my May of this year is less than half of May 2005. Overall this year, to date, is slightly better than last year. (I do have more content so I would have hoped for more improvement, not stability)

[GoldenHammer]

With respect to last year performance, I got similar traffics in terms of impressions and clicks. I can confirm that, the difference is the averaged EPC which has dropped -30%.

[soona99]

Sign me disgusted too under Ann's response. The junky ads are killing me. I could seriously use a filter list of 1000 and it wouldn't make a dent. My income is down 50% from last year. One company in particular is ruining adsense. They have individual domains under every topic you can possibly think of with the landing page filled with only ads. They're all "directory this or that" or "just this or that". I'm so sick of these ads!

[Jean]

One company in particular is ruining adsense. They have individual domains under every topic you can possibly think of with the landing page filled with only ads.

Just curious...which company is this?

[foxtunes]

".....My income is down 50% from last year. One company in particular is ruining adsense. They have individual domains under every topic you can possibly think of with the landing page filled with only ads. They're all "directory this or that" or "just this or that". I'm so sick of these ads!....."

Thoroughly agree, the adsense spam situation is out of control.

[Richie0x]

82 clicks yesterday compared to just 8 clicks on the same day last year. And the site has been established and had a steady number of unique visits for about 5 years. No major layout changes within the last year. CTR is up 300% on this time last year too.

[yummybanas]

- you already had a well established, professionaly designed and highly optimized site one year ago

- you didn't do significant changes of navigation and site layout (including ad placement) since then

- traffic has been relatively steady and statistically convincing

- your dedication to your websites hasn't changed (working time, rate of content addition)

Could this be the symptoms of a slowly decreasing CTR?

[moTi]

Adlinks made a huge impact on clicks

ok, people who now have success with adlinks possibly can't compare clicks to last year's figures. i had no luck with adlinks and removed it. it really depends on the website.

Adsense had "impression count" bugs.

impressions and ctr are anyhow difficult to compare, for example if you have removed high impression count, hardly clicked or bad performing ad blocks completely from pages in the past. that's why among other things i was rather concentrating on absolute number of clicks for comparison reasons.
a decrease in clicks has not necessarily a bad impact on earnings. but it helps to detect, if there is a widespread tendency, that people simply don't click anymore as they used to.

Could this be the symptoms of a slowly decreasing CTR?

well, you have a point there. that's what i called "website maturity" in another thread. mind you, no one could really reconcile with this idea.
but let's face it: if you can't gain market share anymore, only add content regularly as usual and apart from that leave the website as is, your stats might actually go down.