same impressions, same clicks, big revenue drop

due to less specific ads with lower payouts?

[wwuser]

I've been running adsense for over a year now. My story is that of the hobbyist whose site outgrew low cost hosting and was saved in the nick-of-time by Adsense. Adsense revenue neatly covered the costs of a dedicated server, a couple of web host accounts, and a bunch of domains. Until August and September, that is. August was bad (about 60% of normal), September is dismal (about 20% of normal).

Site traffic has been climbing steadily the whole time, and the click through rate is fairly constant. The revenue per click is down sharply -- and I noticed that the ads have changed, although the content of the site has not changed during this time.

It's going to be tough not giving specifics, but I'll try -- the ads have become more general. What's weird is that when I click on an internal link on my site, which is dynamic and uses GET requests, I see the old (profitable) ads. I believe that almost all of my clickthroughs come before a user clicks on an internal link, and so I think it's safe to say the almost all my current clickthroughs are on the general ads.

For example, say my site is example.com, it's about dogs, and the main page is index.pl. (My site's not about dogs, and these aren't real urls! hopefully I'm not violating the TOS here, but I have to do this to illustrate the point). Until August, the urls (please assume the http:// prefix):

example.com
example.com/index.pl

would have had dog related ads. In August and September, they'd be showing mammal or vertebrate related ads that don't pay much. However, if you were to click on an internal link, the url would become, say:

example.com/index.pl?somename=somevalue

and boom! the dog-related ads come back. In my real case, a GET url like that displays *exactly* the same content as the equivalents of the first two URLs (it was intended to take you back to the main page from some other view), and yet shows different ads.

Any suggestions on this? It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to "consider options" for the site if nothing changes.

[Bluepixel]

If you access your pages with a POST Request, the url will always be index.pl and it won't have any parameters, so it will show the same ad whatever parameters are set in the POST request.

[wwuser]

true - in this case that would be bad though :)

I guess my main point is that the ads have changed -- the fact that I can arrive at the same page via a different URL (GET, or otherwise) and get the original type of ads is what's mystifying me. Can anyone give me some hints about getting the specific ads back on the main page?