Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have similar sites and that was my take on yesterday too
I would doubt that image ads made much difference as there seem to be very few put out!
And thus I partially attribute the drop to an adjustment in smart pricing, which is affecting my other pages with good targeting, although I have no proof.
My Google Ads impressions are 1/3 lower and my revenue is ~75% :(Dont wnow why.. my nr. of visitors is constant.
So it would be hard to attribute this to AdSense. After all, if you generated 1/3 less impressions that resulted in 1/4 less revenue, those impressions actually earned you more than normal on a EPM (earnings per 1000 impressions) basis, which is what's relevant for comparison. It's doubtful that a drop in impressions was something caused or controlled by AdSense (personal opinion based on knowledge of AdSense).
It seems as though your visitors generated less impressions than usual. Possible reasons - they looked at less pages on average, a higher than normal percentage had JavaScript disabled (possibly related to recommendations made concerning the recent IIS trojan / IE browser vulnerability), more began using firewalls that block AdSense ads, etc. Most likely some combination of factors. Another very real possibility is that your AdSense stats for the 29th haven't fully updated yet. As reported in the AdSense FAQ [google.com], "Aggregate reports are typically updated hourly, with an occasional delay of up to 24 hours." You posted your message a mere 17 minutes after the AdSense reporting day ended (the timezone they use is PST, California, US).
Not just your normal day to day fluctuations but high and low swings that drive the graphs crazy, all moving down as the month progress is charted.
Have to thing google is playing with something daily in adsense, generating these swings? Noticed today "broad matching" is changing again, so may be that effect will be positive. Sure hope that July is better.
But I can't help wondering if we aren't also seeing differences in kinds of sites in AdSense. I run a small content site with a narrow focus and mimimal advertising. Others run large sites on broader themes (such as vacations) and are more focused on selling. Some sites are crafted by hand. Others are dynamically generated. Some sites are new, having been set up since AdSense got started, while others go back a number of years.
Given that, I think these discussions might be more useful if we gave brief and general descriptions of our sites when posting -- otherwise, we could be comparing apples and oranges (and maybe even pineapples) without realizing.
Does that help?
There are so many factors, I can't get a couple of my minor sites off the ground with AdSense as the ads are so poorly matched. So it's more than whether you have a large or small site/ comercial or content site. There are too many factors beyond that.
FWIW, 4.5 hours after the day ended my impressions are at about 40% of what I'd expect for the full day yesterday. My stats are usually at about 98-100% of their final values by this point, but over the last year there have been numerous days where only a fraction of the final values showed by this point in my reports.
I completely agree--there are MANY factors. Talking about EPC as if it happens in a vacuum just isn't productive.
Unlike some of the others here we have seen a complete errosion of epc since April. Googles smart pricing algo, and methods ads are being served has resulted in decreasing epcs over the last 3 months to a overall decrease of 70% across that timeframe.
Prior to the so called changes we could statistically interpet the results, now the only interpetation is how low will it go. After a year of riding out the program, the space has become more valuable for running traditional banner ads and its time to give some of our other partners more space.
Guess our site themes and google are not made for each other after the April changes. They have moved in our opinion from content to commercial related sites, and we can understand that change. However we cannot help but feel that the changes in their original mandates as they were stated could have been communicated better.
We wil continue to run adsense on pages where returns justify the space, and monitor the next few months.