Forum Moderators: martinibuster
DaveN
Maybe ad budgets ran out in the middle of the month.
Maybe the big spenders shut off AdSense.
But it's really too early to draw any conclusions.
Rest of July (ie this week), CTR dipped and then recovered but earnings collapsed.
Today - first day of a new month - is poor on both counts but this could be due to delayed stats, people not wanting to start a new monthly budget on Friday, or ... who knows.
Mid-summer is probably a misleading time to try and make sense of a new service.
Just "CPC falling" does not tell me anything because there are too many different ads with different levels of "price-tags" there. If your site would only serve "one type" of limited ads, you probably could smell something.
Also, you need have clear idea of your site traffic, new visitors or "old faces".
AdSense dies slowly...
AdSense dies slowly...
I do NOT have the same feeling!
It could be because you would not have new visitors or your current visitors losing interest/ignoring the ads.
Nothing to do with Adsense!
My site is down probably 25% today, even after adjusting for the fact that Fridays are generally the slowest traffic weekday at my place.
FYI the last three days were lousy but the five before were my best days yet.
People tend to report bad news, or suspicions of bad news, more heavily. I saw countless threads, "Revenue declining in the past X days." Generally with lots of agreement.
SO, in a thread like this, when even a FEW chime in with increasing or level sales, give those reports disproportionate weight. Just because of human nature.
Why did I check the Forum tonight? And go to THIS thread? Because my CPC's for the last two days are a lot lower than average.
Today (Friday's) CPCand CTR is significantly less but we just added another site and have put it down to initial poor targeting until mediapartners bot visits.
There are a ton of variables to consider, including:
- advertiser bids changing
- total traffic on the web and on google fluctuating day to day
- your rank in the SERPs changing
- your own traffic fluctuating day to day
- visitor's inclination to click changing on a day to day basis based on type of search they're doing, proximity to pay-day, weather and who knows what other factors
Also, if you're getting less than 100 clicks per day, chances are that your day to day fluctuations are not large enough to be "statistically significant." That is, there's not enough data there to be able to look at your day to day results and deteremine the overall health of adwords, in general! (Not that I know a single thing about statistics, for that matter!)
Also, if you're getting less than 100 clicks per day, chances are that your day to day fluctuations are not large enough to be "statistically significant."
Even if you're getting several hundred clicks a day, you may have ups and downs in CTR, CPC, and total revenues. But in my experience, a low period is almost always followed by a high period, and vice versa. I see a lot more variation from day to day than I do from week to week.
No advertiser is targetting your website. That is because no advertiser knows their ad is showing on your site. The advertisers are basing their bids upon the "search" results, not "contextual results."
Thus, adsense has eliminated the competitive aspect from the ads being shown on your pages.
Take a look at this thread to get a sense of what I'm talking about.
The system is limping because the AdWords Googlers aren't communicating with the AdSense Googlers.
However i see absolutely no evidence that the
>>system is limping<<
There are ways to make it work better as it develops but its a long bow to draw to conclude the system is "limping" because a few adsense publishers say their average CPC is going down, some dont like competitive advertisers, some dont get targeted results, some get nasty emails, and that some Adwords advertisers are suspicious of the value of adsense clicks without any real evidence..
That would tend to ignore other evidence on its fast and wide ranging implementation, fair payouts, ease of use and major competitive advantages against leading competitive ad servers and affiliates.
On the contrary, i dont think it would be easy to argue that Adsense is not the most successful launch of an on-line ad-server service or affiliate program/aggregator in history.
On the contrary, i dont think it would be easy to argue that Adsense is not the most successful launch of an on-line ad-server service or affiliate program/aggregator in history.
I agree 100%. In fact, I may become adsense publisher in a few months time myself for the very reasons you listed.
I also agree that perhaps "limping" is a little too strong, so let me take a moment to reconsider my words, and soften them up:
AdSense is a great program with amazing technology behind it, however, there are a few kinks related to advertiser involvment that need to be worked out in order to improve relevancy- and improve the CPC.
As an advertiser I can't find value in a context ad statistic on CTR, CPC, and Average Position if I don't know what the other keywords are that I'm competing against, don't know who I'm competing against, and most importantly, I don't know if I should raise my bid (and the CPC) in order to score better on an unknown page I'm advertising on?
In fact, I can't even tell, within an adgroup, which of my keyword terms is the one receiving contextual exposure, so I don't even know which keyword phrase to increase the bid on- which also ties into the CPC.
I just wanted to pop my head into this thread and add a little food for thought from an advertiser's point of view.
As ever, you raise good points chiyo.
