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 just might look into something like that.
Site makes $30k a month. No longer care if book sells.
Lol. Nice.
I love the way Adsense has put the power (and money) into the writer's hands. I was lucky to make $40k a year as a freelance writer. Someone else profited from my work by selling ad space in newspapers and magazines. Now, I research and write the same type of articles, but put them on my own websites, and run my own advertising. I don't make 30k/mo yet, but I make so much more than I did, it continually amazes me.
1. The biggest bidder on the most common ads to show on my sites appears to have backed out of Adwords completely. The result is that bids have dropped by 30% and more.
2. Site traffic has fallen about 20%, mainly attributable to Allegra
3. Click through up about 1%
4. CPM down 18%
Combine #2 and #4 and I am seeing a 40% drop in revenue. OUCH!
I had taken to heart the admonition not to count on Adsense revenues, I thought. Even though I considered "play money", I have to say, I am disappointed I won't be able to play as much with next months check :(
WBF
The key is outsourcing.
You avoid duplicate content problem by adding a two-paragraph keyword rich description of the article and how it will help the reader with "xyz" problem
- Do you mean you follow your own paragraphs with the actual third party article and author credit? And because you have in effect lenghtened the article it is received well by the search engines.
Thanks
1. The biggest bidder on the most common ads to show on my sites appears to have backed out of Adwords completely. The result is that bids have dropped by 30% and more.
That's where having a diverse range of subtopics can be valuable: If one advertiser pulls out and there are 100 or 500 remaining, your CPM may not even register a blip.
Meanwhile our CTR is the highest it's ever been, impressions are the same or higher and CPM/PPC is in the toilet! PPC is literally <1/2 what it was just 2 weeks ago.
My pure conjecture: they're tweaking to optimize CTR instead of CPM as they had in the past, so it looks like they have more traffic, to provide to more advertisers and more transactions to take a piece of (a higher trade velocity dollar for those into economics). It may actually work in the long term to burn out the budgets of the scrapers (i.e. lower the PPC and there's no longer an advantage to paying .05 to make .04)
Anyway, decided it just wasn't worth fighting over anymore. So I armed myself with an account at the competitor (I mentioned them in a prior post) and as of today Tuesday, we're now serving over 50% of our impressions to them instead of G and making more than we were last week. We plan on increasing that percent proportionately as the PPC drops at G. Don't whine, don't be lazy. Yes it's a bit of work cutting and pasting new javascript, but it's easier than the first time around, and you can easily make it look EXACTLY the same or even better so everything still fits the same! It's YOUR inventory. It's not like you don't have alternatives. Give it to whomever YOU want. Unite. VOTE for the better service with your business like we did. If G wants our inventory, they'll have to pay a fair price for it again. We'll be watching and if they come back with a fairer price, we may ease back to them cautiously as they prove themselves.
Good Luck all weathering the storm.
people like originality. it feels good, even if the content is below stellar. And it feels good because authenticity perpetuates a sense of trust. in an era of rampant spam, popups, hijackers, and bogus adsense sites, those who create original content will be positioned to fly high...which is why we need to form midnight posses to go after content thieves and 302 turds.
Thats a good point, surprised no one else replied to that.
I have nothing to compare to but last feb, and i am seeing cpm tank like never before.
Very alarming.
Then i remember the advice ive picked up here and figure i'll stick it out and trust it will normalize as it has several times before.
-Auction driven market
-seasonal variations
-Adsense competition
-Adsense technical difficulties(we all have em)
-Adsense spammers -less high paying ads as thousands of new publishers join the program buliding sites around high paying keys
And the real pickle
-smart pricing abuse( Advertisers who have a low conversion so get cut rates, yet it doesnt matter if they have only two choices when visitors get to there site, sign up and buy or click on an ad!)
There sure are a lot of variables at play here.
Just another reminder.
I have about 100K pageviews a day....something is seriously wrong.
Back to the bottle...
It also knows that pages which have certain characteristics (e.g., scraper directory pages) convert poorly and are likely to violate the AdSense TOS.
Are you just theorizing here?
Feels like google news :)
mikenolastname: ...got a response from Sunny......and as of today Tuesday, we're now serving over 50% of our impressions to them instead of G and making more than we were last week....
Same with our sites. A similar reply from Sunny and similar situation with EPC so much lower than in the past.
BTW, does G have any real 'competition?" Who is it?
Dave.
I wanted to get back to a prior comment in this thread, because the more I think about it (I just got an e-mail from one of my PPC services explaining how THEY track conversion) the more I wonder if this could really be a large part of the problem.
If they are tracking only access to 'conversion' pages (i.e. thank you forms, sale complete forms) then what about if the advertiser suddenly moves his conversion form (either accidently, or purposely divert readers to get a better rate) without telling G? Suddenly Zero% conversion! Or for that matter if they simply have more than one identical form for tracking paths through their site and only report one of them? Or if they post a phone number to call and get 90% of their traffic through that since their site leaves so much to question? Or how about scraper sites that really HAVE no conversion page, just pages of GAdsense or affiliate links? We get so many of them we can't filter them all anymore (>200). In one of our worst categories ALL but one of the adsense ads are from affiliates (because there IS only one original provider of the product) who redirect ALL sales to the original provider's site. How are THESE tracked as conversions? Is that what's driving down smartpricing? Even if you eliminate all those, that leaves a relatively small minority sites with votes averaged in. One doofuss, non-converting site could screw up your whole average! Penalize THEM by sending LESS traffic, not cheaper traffic!
I agree, performance responsibility SHOULD be solely on the advertiser side and the facilitator,far more than the publisher. Anything else is sheer idiocy! Otherwise it's like leaving the fox in charge of the hen house ("Them darn chickens just didn't LAY any eggs today.. I swear!"). We once had a client that insisted on banner advertising even though we told him his product was not of interest to our readers. On top of that he created a crappy banner, that only got about .5% CTR and then complained that he got no business from it. Duh! Told you so. Another banner advertiser cancelled his ads claiming he was getting no traffic from us at all. We pointed out to him that they had no way of knowing which traffic was coming from us. But not to argue, we turned them off, and two days later they came back begging because their site traffic had dropped 90%.
In this case the reponsibility is MOST high on G to provide ads in the RIGHT place to convert, THEN upon the seller to convert them or leave 'em (not say you need to charge me less), and only finally on the publisher who really doesn't have any control over either of these other two issues, other than to make reasonably sure that clickthrus simply aren't fraudulent. This is a prime argument for a 'minimum PPC' option for publishers. If the advertiser doesn't want to pay what the publisher feels it's worth, fine, go somewhere else, don't take my traffic, THEN CLAIM it didn't work out.. sorry Bud. Whether it's a photography page or a camera review page, if people weren't interested in a camera, at least slightly, in the first place do you think they would click? It's the advertiser's job to SELL, WE, as publishers, by TOS, aren't even allowed to draw attention to the ads, let alone KNOW what is going to show up and then promote it! Talk about "all the responsibility and punishment without the authority to fix anything". I'm sure a lot of us have QUIT jobs in the past for exactly that reason!
If this is true, it is G penalizing the publishers for everyone elses inadequacies, including their own, which is why we feel little loyalty to them at this point.
BTW, based on hour to hour updates, I'm seeing what MIGHT be an unusual slight (10%) increase in PPC today, (after yesterdays abominable ALL-TIME low CPM/PPC) but it could just simply be a blip.
About conversion, the way I see it, we send traffic, it s up to the advertizer to get the visitor buying. If the ads take you to an unrelated page with a useless offer site why should our click value be reduced.
Maybe the advertizers should be the ones that create a better landing page of value for the traffic we send. We send traffic, that's the bottom line.
The advertizers should make the best out of it and be more selective and honest in their ads description.
Please do not ask what industry I am in, this is all I am telling.
I thought you offered some interesting information in your post (333), namely about increasing demand for online advertising vs. decreasing availability. That can only be good for publishers in the long run.
You also said that Google disclosed the percentage they pay to AS publishers "when they filed their SEC/IPO papers." I'd be interested in seeing that -- is it available online, and if so, where? Better yet, could you tell us what it said -- or is it too complicated?
Finally, a general comment: I think this thread underlines the need for publishers to diversify their revenue streams if they're going to make web publishing a serious long-term financial commitment. A number of publishers have mentioned alternatives to Adsense, and I just received an e-mail advertising another that I hadn't known about. Is it time for WW to set up a separate forum for discussing these alternatives?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Read through most of the thread to see better how it works out.
Smart Pricing throws another big variable into the mix with a sliding scale. But keep in mind that Google is probably taking in less money as well.
That thread is all conjecture, albeit pretty good I think. Personally, I think the split is 2/3 for Publishers, 1/3 for Google - in the case of the average webmaster.
Here is another excellent article on Google's SEC IPO filing which reveals Google's dependence on Adsense as well as other juicy tidbits.
[searchenginewatch.com...]
The 20 percent growth in online advertising projection came from an ecommercetimes article.
Disclaimer: Readers can draw their own conclusions from the above links. I am not hear to argue the numbers/percentages with anyone. The earnings are in the SEC filing and available to figure out on your own.
I hope this post doesn't spark a new debate (on payouts) that drives this thread into 100 more posts because it really does need to end soon.
Freedom --
I thought you offered some interesting information in your post (333), namely about increasing demand for online advertising vs. decreasing availability. That can only be good for publishers in the long run.
It will be especially good for publishers of quality content, because:
1) The availability of good editorial venues is increasing at a far slower pace than the availability of low-quality venues like scraper sites, gmail, parked domains, etc.; and...
2) The largest untapped portion of the PPC market consists of mainstream corporate advertisers and ad agencies who are likely to take a more jaundiced view of scraper sites, gmail, parked domains, etc. than the traditional PPC advertiser does.
You also said that Google disclosed the percentage they pay to AS publishers "when they filed their SEC/IPO papers." I'd be interested in seeing that -- is it available online, and if so, where? Better yet, could you tell us what it said -- or is it too complicated?
Have you tried a Google search? :-) Seriously--look for "google q4 results" or something similar.
As I recall, 77% of Google revenue from ads on partner sites (including AdSense) went to the publishers.
Finally, a general comment: I think this thread underlines the need for publishers to diversify their revenue streams if they're going to make web publishing a serious long-term financial commitment. A number of publishers have mentioned alternatives to Adsense, and I just received an e-mail advertising another that I hadn't known about. Is it time for WW to set up a separate forum for discussing these alternatives?
It exists, it's called the Advertising Sales and Affiliate Programs forum, and it's at:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Most all the time Monday & Tuesday are my best days during the 7 day week, normally about 50% better than Sunday. However, last Sunday was a much better adsense day than Monday. That is the first time I recall seeing that since I joined the program 1-1/2 yrs ago. The prior week was similar with only slightly better Monday than Sunday instead of the normal 30 to 50% better.
Anyone else see that anomaly?
Of course, if your have the kind of websites which normally get lots of weekend visitors then that may not be an anomaly for you.
77% of Google revenue from ads on partner sites (including AdSense) went to the publishers.
No. 77% of their revenue went to "traffic acquisition costs".
The 77% includes many things including the amount paid to some premium publishers who were at one time getting up to 100% of a click's revenue.
That was my point, too.
EFV, where did you get the data to backup your statement that scaper sites "convert poorly" and are "likely in violation of the TOS"? Do you have access to data that we don't?
this morning I went ahead and split 50-50 my page impressions between showing adsense and adsonar, and revenue seems to be about the same as if I had had 100% adsense impressions.
An aside, adsonar isn't very targetted at all for my field. Anyone experience that?
