Did the new worm affect anyone's earnings today?

[aroach]

I heard that there was a new worm making the rounds today that was pretty bad.

I was just curious if it was affecting click-thru rates.

[div01]

Lower ctr last two days but no effect on earnings ... touch wood.

[bether2]

Impressions are looking about the same as usual. But CTR so far is very low today. Maybe the AdSense stats haven't caught up yet. I've noticed that some times they seem to lag more than others.

[chiyo]

CTR is at the lowest of our daily ranges ever and impressions slighly down on average. However revenue per click is at the highest of our daily ranges ever, more than making up for the CTR drop and slight impressions drop for a tuesday when you look at total earnings.

[Blue_Fin]

I think these are all just normal fluctuations. My imps are normal. CTR is higher than yesterday and EPC is slightly lower than yesterday.

The stats seem to be current to me. I don't think there is any catching up to do.

[Camster]

I launched an improved version of one of my site yesterday and my CTR dropped by more than half... OUCH! Went from an ugly "affiliate" site to a more polished look and feel. I switched back to the old one at 12aPST last night and CTR is still low. I sure hope it's Blaster that's blasting me 'cuz I can't figure out what else it could be!

[chiyo]

Camster.. give changes a few days before checking their performance, I find when adding adsense code to new pages, CTR goes down for a while, but then increases as the pages are spidered by the adsense spider and start returning better targeted ads. I know the general feeling around here is that the ads are targeted fairly quickly within say 30 minutes, but we find it takes a day or more for them to really work well for some reason..

[Sharper]

Didn't think about it maybe being the worm's effects (since I'm an all FreeBSD/Solaris shop, it didn't catch more than passing interest for me), but yeah, I did notice that CTR was down about 33% for me today, but impressions were normal. I've been passing it off as a possible remnant of the unavailable stats this morning and hoping they caught back up.

We'll see. I'm assuming things will be back to normal tommorow and just hope that isn't proven wrong. Too early to panic in any case.

[Jenstar]

Curiously, mine is higher all around.

[Imaster]

ctr is pretty low and so are the earnings.

[Laisha]

Today was our best day so far.

[tombola]

CTR was normal, but there were considerably less impressions.
The reason was (I guess) because this worm infected a great percentage of Windows operating systems, so users could not connect to the Internet.

[Imaster]

I am noticing PSA's in most of the pages which were earlier targeted and I believe that's the reason for the low ctr..

[Camster]

Chiyo, thanks for the tip on patience after making a change. I had also changed a couple of other variables and couldn't tell what was making the difference. I'm going to relaunch again in a more controlled fashion and when I do I'll let it ride for a few days before panicking! Camster

[luchtzak]

Yeah,

having PSA on many pages! In fact 1 click from a PSA is only 0.01 € :( not much...

ciao,

Bart

[Sharper]

Well, today is looking "normal" again. Yesterday finished out with CTR 33% down for me, but Impressions was normal and the CPC was up enough that I hit my averages. On the other hand, affiliate sales were up a little bit for me, so who knows.

The moral of the story might be that one day does not a trend make.

[Blue_Fin]

Bart, Google does not pay for clicks on PSAs. If you look at the Properties on a PSA link, there is no tracking info. This is also addressed in their FAQs.