Sudden drop in AdSense revenue recently?

Has anyone else experienced this?

[huppy99]

Hi everyone.

We have a technology site, does some reasonable impressions and earns a good amount from AdSense. Seems those ads are quite valuable. Anyway, for the last month and a half, all has been going well, with some steady growth.

As of Tue 20th July however, our revenue has approximately halved. This is a marked change, and one that is not expected. No changes have been made to the site - apart from daily new content that we have been adding since the site opened over 12 months ago.

Has anyone else experienced a drop like this, in a similar vertical, or other?

We are not aware of any service changes etc...

[ogletree]

We have been doing great but yesterday was really bad.

[Elsmarc]

I took a looksie back to the beginning of the year and April 1 is still the point where revenue dipped over 50%. Right now it appears to have stabilized revenue wise, but ...

Impressions are almost always 2 to 3 times what they were in January (I have added some pages and I also see an slight improvement in search engine placings for a lot of key words), Clickthrough rate has dropped a bit but appears steady for the last 2 months, 'effective cpm' has dropped over 50% since January (on 1 May there is a dramatic shift downwards with respect to cpm).

I'm still doing 'OK' but the trend isn't positive on any indicator *except* that the number of impressions is continuing to rise. I am seeing a lot more ads which are definitely of 'less value' but I expected that with the April 1 change.

[trader]

My experience is very similar to Elsmarc. EPC declines started on April 2. My impressions and clicks are steadily going up but I need to work harder and longer and get more and more traffic just to maintain the income status quo. However, I am still well satisfied and happy with Adsense.

[Elsmarc]

I'm definitely not unhappy. I was ecstatic, now I'm 'just' happy. I was a lot happier when I was making twice as much as what I'm making now, but what I'm making now is OK.

Oh, I could **** and complain, I guess. You know, 'rail against the unfair Google machine' and all that, but to me picking up AdSense was like icing. I had low expectations to begin with, actually. I was shocked at first to see the numbers I saw January through March, but none the less even with the drop I'm still making a lot more than I initially expected to make off AdSense.

May was my worst month - June and July have done OK. But oh - I long for the 'old days' of January through March!

[ned911]

CTR has doubled, revenue remains the same. Bunch of work to increase the clicks have yielded nothing but clicks, no additional revenue. Thinking of blocking the really low paying ads.

Ned

[icedowl]

I'm having the best month since I began late in February. Why? No idea, but I quit experimenting with adsense layouts, sizes and locations, and just left it all alone since late June. April-June sure was was stinky.

Some will say this is just normal cycling and I'll tend to agree. Who knows what August will bring?

[Clark]

Summertime is slow but CPM keeps going down while pageviews go up.

[Loony]

Mine has been going down each month. Today, however, something strange happened. I was thinking it was some kind of glitch and am still even a bit concerned. I show a low number of clicks with 4x the revenue than I've ever earned on a single day. I don't bring in too much normally, as I don't have much time to put into it. If I made as much as I did today everyday, I would quit my day job. Anyone else notice anything like this today?

[suidas]

I have a site with a very very diverse set of subareas. In effect, the site is really 20 sites. Giving each area a channel allows me to see how a given "type" of site does in Adsense over time. The overall level is quite stable, like buying an index fund. Individual areas go up and down in all kinds of strange ways by day, week, month, like individual stocks do.

So, my advice is: if you don't have a highly diversified site, nothing your stats do means anything. Live with the uncertainty...