Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Just wondering if Anyone else noticing a sharp decline in overhaul Adsense performance.
Jan was my record month with earnings well into three figures per day.
I am notice a sharp decline on all fronts since the beginning of Feb.
Page impressions are right on daily average target (+-5%) while CTR is down by approx 1.2% and “effective CPM” is down by almost 40%.
I have a network of sites (7 sites) on a wide range of topics. The traffic on the sites hasn’t changed much since the begining of Feb +- same number of daily viewers across the network , while earnings continue to slide daily (adsense alone, other aff products i have linked continue to sell well).
I did notice very poor ad targeting on a few pages recently. Pages which used to display very good targeted ads and this may explain the bad CTR and “effective CPM”.
Is there any major adsense update going on?….anyone else noticing this happening since the start of Feb?
P.S.
I did not update any of my content recently to warrent such update.
I'm hoping it's a somewhat worse than usual month-end. Advertisers' January budgets ran out and they haven't got round to restarting their campaigns for Feb.
If it continues like this past the weekend it'll be more than a statistical fluke and I'll start getting worried then.
I have started seeing reports around the web of double-hits. A much lower eCPM from Adsense and from lunchtime on Feb 2, Google seems to be have adjusted its algo and some sites are plummeting in traffic. A few have reported an increase in traffic. The net effect is income for the affected sites is about 20% of what it was. Now that's a hit.
I had two people comment on the same following event with Adsense earnings. Early Feb 1st morning stats were normal and tracking as per Jan, but then they turned south about lunchtime and have rested at a new lower level in the short time since. Normally I would ignore this - and still am skeptical - but to see the same pattern with two different-topic sites is interesting. The only pity is, we can't see hourly traffic.
But after a more careful analysis of various stats - something unusual seems to have happened/is happening. I'm going to keep a closer eye over the next few days.
I've had a huge drop in CPM, although some (but unfortunately, not all) of it is a result of higher-than-average page views on a low CTR site. But I am sure that someone else can state they are having record CPM levels ;)
Targeting seems to be spot-on though, so I am not having those issues. But I have always had excellent targeting of ads.
But I have always had excellent targeting of ads.
Me too on 99% of my pages. Hence my dismay to suddenly see ads for “web templates” "Banners design" or “dog” info related on a stock market content site where it used to display ads for stockbrokers and other stocmarket related widgets.
Something is really off last couple of days (and I’ve been with google for well over a year and well aware of the often up and downs but I have never seen such poor performance). I’ll give it another couple of days and see how we go. Might write to google if the poor targeting continues.
However, since there was such a significant drop yesterday, I have to post my experience as well.
My CTR is 1.5 percent down from the YTD average. The CPM, of course, is down as well by 40 percent.
I see that yesterday's stats are growing slowly since it hit Midnight in California now that it is about 1.5 hours later, however it's not "catching" up very fast.
Something seriously changed yesterday.
However, in spite of all this, I can't bring myself to point a finger at Google or feel very negative about this for several reasons:
1. Adsense earnings do fluctuate wildly and in the past, it has always corrected itself.
2. Google doesn't "owe me" anything and I can't get into that mind set.
3. My earnings yesterday are still strong and respectable despite a 1/3 drop and would be the envy of many a webmaster.
I think the best solution to days like this is to count my blessings, improve income diversification and continue working to improve my websites.
Me neither.
One site that has remained quite consistent over a fairly large period of time has dropped by a quite drastic amount. That is being compensated for elsewhere. For now.
I aim to look in more detail at what could be causing this. It may prove to be a learning experience that ends up making me more money :). The fact that SERPs seem to be changing as well - and page impressions are at weekend levels - doesn't make the analysis any easier (especially when you have thousands of pages featuring in SERPs for a lot of varied terms).
impressions normal, ctr just about normal, cpc through the floor.
SN
By the same token, traffic is down by 25 percent at one website that was high traffic/high earner.
I know, I've got that on one channel too. It only adds to the reasoning that something has changed quite sharply.
The clue is in identifying what differentiates those channels/accounts that have dropped from those that are seeing a jump.
We do need to protect against false stats....
>> Well my CTR is down 1.5 percent
A real 1.5% drop wouldn't phase me in the least. However, a drop from 2% CTR to 0.5% CTR is not a 1.5% drop. If you mean that it's gone down by 1.5 points it's still meaningless. A drop from 50% CTR to 48.5% isn't half as alarming as a drop from 1.5% to 0%.
A big chunk.
Sometimes, this sort of thread is wholly validated. Many of the posts in this one, for instance, are from long-time WebmasterWorld users---presumably operating in different content areas---who have all noted (with the exception of killroy)an anomaly occurring at approximately the same time: epc declines of typically 50%.
Traffic up.
Clicks same.
Earnings WAY DOWN. 1/4 of normal.
CPM 1/4 of Jan.
Damn.
BZ
How many people think that after the quarterly report yesterday of 7 fold earnings, Google needs to get the money from somewhere to impress WallStreet next quarter?
Just a conspiracy theory type thought. Don't take it too serious.
It was replies like yours - saying that you had no complaints - that got me thinking that I had to stop moaning and fix the "problem" at my end.
I did.
I was probably hoping you'd some here again and say that you had no complaints :)
I'm down but not by that much. Are you really down to 25% of normal figures? Ouch!
I compared Tues (Feb 2) to the Tues (Jan 26)
Here are my results:
Traffic down around 10%
CTR down around 10%
EPCM down around 10%
Earnings down around 20%
The EMPC # doesn't bug me - things happen w/ advertiser budgets
The CTR number does bug me - as it has been the same forever.
This is across a dozen sites. With adsense a long time and my stats are typically really consistent / even.
It would be good if others could post the same analysis.
I have heard Google is doing a back-link update but that doesn't explain this.
I hope it is temporary.
Apparently, a lot of sites were dropped from their Database - so perhaps it's because your traffic is down?
I just noticed that two of my sites completely disappeared from the SERPs. They were there the last time i checked approx 8 hours ago. My log files indicting the same, sharp decrease in the number of hits to the two sites in the last few hours.
And here are the good news (hope i'm not jumping too early), i just checked my adsense account and noticed that "Effective CPM" is way up (almost 80% up from the last couple of days figures). CTR is back to normal 3.5 - 4%.
There is a major update happening. On the SERPs and on the adsense system.
This is what it looks like right now anyway.
