Analysis of how US Thanksgiving affected AdSense earnings

Were people surfing on their day off, or too busy eating turkey?

[Jenstar]

Looking at my stats, I first thought things had tanked - the majority of my visitors are US-based. But once I calculated it out, it actually wasn't as bad as I would have thought, and an increase in CPM helped it out a bit. Here is what I found, when compared to the previous Thursday.

Total earnings: Down about 33%
Impressions: Down about 65%
CPM: Up about 25%

The rise in CPM *really* surprised me. I guess people were hoping to get an early start on the biggest shopping time of the year. Most holidays show that CPM drops off significantly as people lower bids or pause campaigns for the holidays. If only my impressions were at their normal levels, I would have had an extremely good day.

Although it is still very early in the day, CPM is also higher than normal, right at Thursday's levels as well.

What are others seeing for total earnings, impressions and CPM for Thursday (Thanksgiving) compared to the previous Thursday?

[longen]

Traffic and revenue down Thur, Fri, Sat. Big rebound on Sunday, looks like visitors came back for their regular fix, before the return to work.

[anallawalla]

During US holidays I don't see a drop in AdSense rev - often it goes up a little, but for b2b sales through Adwords definitely equal weekend performance, i.e. low.

My well-performing AdSense pages are informative, so I imagine that people with turkey inside them surf, read and click rather than buy.

[taps]

As I mentioned before: We had a big drop from friday to sunday. Since yesterday the CPM is slowly recovering. But we did not reach this months average again.

I'm wondering if Thanksgiving has any influence to other countries. We did not have any holiday last week.

I guess it is the End-of-Month problem.

To offer some really weird speculation: Maybe the adsense people were in holidays too and there was no one to adjust all those strange and obscure Smart Price throttles in the Google central. And so all other Adsense partners outside northern america had been affected too.

;-)