Weird Ad Sense Stuff

Ad Sense on my site acting up

[thepurpledestiny]

So get this, I implemented Ad Sense on my site about 3 weeks ago, and it immediately performed great, consistently pulling around a 14% CTR. Then all of a sudden 2 days ago, the CTR dropped in half (to around 6%), and revenue fell with it.

And the weirder thing, each time I visit the page, I only see PSA's being presented now (and I've visited the page from 3 different locations)

anyone experienced this type of weird behavior?

is Google slowing me down intentionally?

[Gibble]

I would think the drop in CTR could be attributed to the novelty wearing off.

If you have repeat visitors, the first couple times to the site with the new ads they read and click, after a while, they don't pay as close attention to them, and ignore them for the most part...

[JohnKelly]

It is my understanding that while PSA's/Alt. Ads are included in the impression count Google provides, they are not included in the click count.

WHat this means is that a site displaying a substantial number of PSA's/Alt. Ads will see a corresponding drop in their click-through.

Someone once suggested here that you run Alternate Ads to at least track the number of displays, and then subtract that number from your page impressions and calculate your CTR from *that* number to obtain your true AdSense CTR.

[richmondsteve]

I can verify that everything JohnKelly stated is true. I'm not the only one whose suggested setting up AAs to track the associated impressions so a publisher can track their real CTR, but I do it myself and encourage others to as well.

Due to a blunder I mentioned in this recent thread [webmasterworld.com], AAs are currently about 65% of my impressions on that site, compared to the typical 5-10% range I'd been seeing for weeks. As a result, the reported CTR has hit rock-bottom. The *real* CTR is really about 2 1/2 times what's reported though. I don't know if I explained this well so if anyone has any questions by all means ask.

[richmondsteve]

thepurpledestiny, what you've encountered is fairly common. Why pages that were previously showing paying ads are now showing PSAs can be for a number of reasons though. You need to do more investigating since it could be an ad supply/demand issue or it could be due to something like trigger words on some of your pages or pages inaccessible to the Mediapartners bot. In any case, if you have a CTR above 0 then some users somewhere are seeing paying ads and clicking them.