Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Starting in early 20th of March, the total adsense revenue for all my sites is 30% down.
Would you mind sharing your URL?
My sites are travel, or better say destination related.
Vit
I'm in the same boat is you. The majority of my sites are about travel, others about consumer credit and finance.
My takings have dropped at least 50% on a daily basis.
Maybe the good days are now over?
zeus
We seriously need competition for adsense and, at the moment, that could only come from Overture.
Originally I thought Overture would counter Google on AdSense, but I've seen no evidense they are interested in that route?
What works for one advertiser does not necessarily mean it works for another. Maybe the bulk of their conversions come from an 800 number - that's sure not trackable for google, even if they're using the tracking functionality.
Any self-respecting marketer spending specifically allocating a chunk of their budget to ppc advertising is not going to be thrilled that google will handle all analysis for them. What's next...google telling them how much they will be bidding? or when they introduce their next product line?
I'm not asking for a marketing/ad agency when I sign up for adwords, just access to a channel.
I think the the pay out will stay as it is, so I have started to remove the Google banners, 65000 impressions and for that you get 6,50$ thats just not enogh.
zeus
i guess these 'new changes' means alot of us will be dropping google over the coming weeks... :(
funny, in the other really long thread (near the end), someone mentioned a gardening page specifically. something about skunk de-odor product ads showing up on the page, when nothing on the page referred to skunks or odors. it was regarding the new problems with targetting.
so, just as a guess, i'd say it's not just the spammy type sites that are having a problem.
personally, i'm not having a problem on my sites, which are mostly tech oriented. so far, things are up, but i'm holding my breath to see if it stays that way.
I'm not saying your sites are spam, i'm saying google may just have gone after sites that are in spam categories. For instance, i see people running travel sites, credit cards, mortgages etc complaining. What i don't see is people complaining about things like "gardening tools" etc
Agreed totally, my guess is that 80% of those seeing big revenue drops fit into the spam-like category, and maybe 20% are innocent victims.
The main difference is in the EPC, but clickthrough rates have also been eroding, possibly because of flaky ad matches. (I've seen more goofy ad matches in the last several days than usual, and there appear to be more big swings in ad topics where my entire leaderboard will be on topic A for a while, topic B the next day, then topic C a few hours later. I don't know if Google is tweaking the ad-matching algorithm from hour to hour or what, but it does seem odd that all the ads in a leaderboard would change to a different common topic and then, a few hours later, change back again.)
IMHO, Google would have been better off introducing the new changes in two different stages: first the variable pricing and then the "improved" keyword-matching scheme, or vice versa. Doing both at once has just added to the general confusion and consternation.
Another thought is that there are advertisers that have such broad keywords that they don't care where their ads land.
Anyway, my impressions for today are way above average and CTR & EPC is down.
name.com/widgeting/how_to_widget.htm
Page title: How to Widget
Bold Heading: How to Widget
1200 words on widgeting
about 1/2 the ads served are not even close.
My revenue went from $X to $0.XX even $0.0X.
It looks like the drop is 1/2 because the EPC is less and 1/2 because many of the ads are offtopic.
My second site is in a much better category, AdSense-wise. It has also been negatively affected but not very much.
From what i've seen, if a add shows on a page deep within your site, there is a good chance that it will start rotating across all your pages. If before april 1st all your pages where targetted towards the highest paying keyword you could think of you would have been hit hard.
I will bet that sites with free information, free downloads of stuff, our just information sites with more visits then normal ecommerce sites get hammered in earnings, the sites are not bad, but they get a wide spread of visits, where a ecommerce site offers products which the surfer is looking for, so the Google advertisers pay more for a ad on such a site/category.
So if you site are down in earnings, it will problaly stay that way until the next change at Google Adsense.
Here is our example:
Thursday, April 1, 2004 IMP.65,528 Clicks 248 0.4% $16.27
Friday, April 2, 2004 IMP.63,774 Clicks 254 0.4% $6.43
