happy penny click day

well, minus the happy part

[amznVibe]

Okay here's my quarterly whining that something has changed, let's see if anyone else is seeing it too.

Woke up to a very bad stats report - traffic is higher than ever - CPM is lower than ever - in fact radically lower than ever for yesterday.

Took a look around the sites and sure enough Google has radically changed the ads, I can't even find a trace of the good advertisers, except for the buried pages in the sub-sub-content - main pages overwhelmed with "junk" ads again. Time to start "weeding". Note that content has NOT changed.

I know it's still a few days early for this:
[webmasterworld.com...]
so anything else going on? Perhaps the recent pagerank update?

And why on earth are advertisers still running xmas ad copy?

Google seriously needs to ban this kind of ad:
KEYWORD
get good keyword here
more info
blah

Single word topic ads look ugly and don't get clicked cause the content makes no sense (dead pets anyone?)

[maximillianos]

My ads are showing fine. Sometimes I think that Google cycles through a set of ads to try different things with a user that has visited a page more than once. (like us webmasters who are constantly reviewing our pages) I see different ads all the time. Maybe try refreshing the pages a few times... see if the relevant ads come back?

[Macro]

All metrics are normal here. There was a post similar to yours to which I replied (msg 25) here. [webmasterworld.com]

[europeforvisitors]

My EPC, CPM, and total revenues have been climbing since January 2. They're now comparable with what I was seeing before "smart pricing" was introduced last April. That isn't unexpected, since my travel site's traffic and revenues always climb after the first of the year when people start thinking about their next vacations. So for now, I'm just chalking the rise up to "seasonal factors."

[taps]

Very stable, very good results since 2nd of January. CPM seems to rise slowly in the last few days.

[Freedom]

My CPM was down a bit yesterday and I was a little concerned, but we'll see what today brings. Google CPM is like the weather, if you don't like it now, wait 5 minutes and it could change. Better or worse.

[amznVibe]

I guess I am just upset because I had the ads and rates really well filtered and doing well. Everything seemed to be purring along for weeks now. I always anticipate new advertisers and new ads but not entire block changes.

Sigh, I guess I will be patient and watch what happens. The trend is most definitely continuing today.

Thanks for the input everyone.

[jim_w]

I have found that just changing a 'few' words on a page can change the target ads. That and of course the advertisers sometimes halt a campaign with certain KW's, et. al. They also may be running into the dreaded thing with too few clicks on KW's so they have to reset them.

I also believe, with no evidence of course, that the quality of your traffic vs the advertisers counts. i.e. if you are a B to B and most of your visitors are businesses, like Fortune 1000 companies, then your ads are more stable, if the advertisers are getting a good ROI that is. If they are not, then (G) changes the target ads a little.

But what the heck do I know.

[edit]
I also removed all blocked ads, and my revenues increased.
[/edit]

[level80]

I also believe, with no evidence of course, that the quality of your traffic vs the advertisers counts. i.e. if you are a B to B and most of your visitors are businesses, like Fortune 1000 companies, then your ads are more stable, if the advertisers are getting a good ROI that is. If they are not, then (G) changes the target ads a little.

I think more what you're trying to say is it's best to have advertisers on your site who can afford to stay in such an expensive position (eg have deep pockets) without blowing their meagre budgets and having to wait for cashflow to improve. ;)

Example:-

Impressions: 20,000 (/day)

These are hypothetical numbers BTW. ;)

Day 1 CTR: 0.4% Clicks 80
Day 2 CTR: 1.8% Clicks 360

Day 3 CTR: 1.2% Clicks 220

Those figures for clicks are just variations based on randomness amongst other things, the higher the daily traffic, the higher the statistical sample and the more smoothed out the variatoins will be. Also pages with double or triple ad units on will skew your results as each ad unit (even on the same page is classed as an impression).

[amznVibe]

Just to follow up on this, after ALOT of monitoring, statistics studying and tweaking of the filters I finally got up to 50% of the average performance before this event where all the ads changed.

I can usually compare certain days of the week to prior weeks and unbeliably this Sunday I had 300% more clicks than any previous Sunday. However I also had about HALF the income!

It comes down to one particular ad (being run by five affiliates and being shown in rotation or up to three at the same time) that changed everything. I am afraid to block the URL (unfortunately they all use the same one) as I can't possibly guess how it will affect the rest of the ads shown.

This is going to get really interesting on the 12th when only one of them with the highest bid can be displayed. Basically Google will be doing the filter work for me and I am hoping it becomes a positive thing.

[moftary]

Take a look at my thread [webmasterworld.com...] for a very similar experience.