Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Has anyone else seen this?
Does anyone else know how to deal with this? Should I exclude sites which I think have a high CTR but low CPC?
Wish we could get a little more stats (which pages clicks are originating in) and control minimum CPC
I noticed this effect on my site in both July and August. (I had a record day on August 22; my daily revenues then dropped precipitously but shot back up on September 1.)
I don't know what others are doing, but I like to take a big (upto 25.0%) portion of the "cake" I earn from Adsense and plough it straight into Adwords - a little like a voluntary GoogleTax. We could call this the "GoogleTax" strategy...
However, I am beginning to feel a little 'dependent' upon this single company as a source of revenue and advertising opportunities. It doesn't make for a good business plan. And as they say, "Never put all your eggs in one basket", although I "never look a gift horse in the mouth", but its important to question "Which comes first, chicken or egg?"
[edited by: jonnyr9 at 6:34 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2003]
Or even... there are more eggs?
I don't know what others are doing, but I like to take a big (upto 25.0%) portion of the "cake" I earn from Adsense and plough it straight into Adwords - a little like a voluntary GoogleTax. We could call this the "GoogleTax" strategy...
I can see how that might work for an e-commerce site, but I doubt if it's a viable approach for most content sites (except possibly to generate traffic on a handful of high-revenue affiliate pages).
I noticed this effect on my site in both July and August. (I had a record day on August 22; my daily revenues then dropped precipitously but shot back up on September 1.)
EFV, didn't you comment previously that 8/22 was the day you experimented with leaderboards? If so, I think that may account for your record day rather than advertisers' budgets.
I switched over to leaderboards from banners late at night on 8/20, as soon as they became available, and 8/22 was my second best day. I've seen a steady decline in EPC starting a few days later and so far in September, it's lower than it ever was in August.
EFV, didn't you comment previously that 8/22 was the day you experimented with leaderboards? If so, I think that may account for your record day rather than advertisers' budgets.
I don't think that was the day. If it had been, I wouldn't have switched back to skyscrapers. :-)
In any case, my daily earnings were quite strong until the last week or so of August, and they shot up again on September 1, so it isn't unreasonable to hypothesize that advertisers' budgets may have had something to do with the pattern. (Actually, my numbers started climbing late on August 31, because I get a lot of traffic from Europe, which is 8 or 9 hours ahead of Google time in California).
<added> oops just realised that this would affect the click numbers and not the CPC - doh!</added>
I'm experiencing exactly the same.....revenue on the way down while number of impressions have considerably increased (i've considerably increased the amount of pages the code is on).
Also, ads do not show up all the time......approx 8-10 hours per day. The system does not deliver ads most of the day...
Anyone else experiencing blank ads most of the day?
Since the TOS forbids revealing actuals, I'll refer to my July CPC as 100%. August CPC was 75%. Eight days of September are running 45%. On a daily basis, my site gets thousands of Adsense impressions and dozens of Clicks, so these results are not blips based on just a few clicks.
Others experiences over the past few months?
SN
Yesterday and today, my CPC has dropped to less than half of what it was the day before. Ouch.
I wonder if Google is slowly decreasing the percentages it offers us?
I wish they'd at least give us stats by domain. :-)
[edit to say "My CPC" instead of "CPC" so as not to imply that I was speaking for anyone other than myself. :-)]
Maybe some advertisers have not gotten the results they hoped and simply dropped out, reducing bid competition.
This could explain why many adsensers are complaining of reduced CPC. Those who have not seen lower CPC may be in more profitable areas, more competitive areas, or the advertisers simply have not yet wised up.
I think we have to take Google at its word that it has not changed payout policies, and look at the advertisers side of the equation and how widepread changes/refinements to advertising strategies can effect websites in a measurable way.
1) More and more sites are showing Adsense.
2) Advertisers come and go depending on their maximum spend (among other things).
These factors will work together to give more exposure to lower bidders. Ergo, downward pressure on average CPC.
That's my theory, anyhow!
Impressions up about 15-20%.
Click-thru % down about 15-20%.
Revenue--close to normal.
Seems to be much ado about nothing (knock on wood). I could almost think that Google might have slightly altered how they calculate their stats instead of inferring a broad trend as some of y'all are.
Silver_Surfer
What does this mean? Perhaps a lot of new pages are being hit these days and they have the public announcemnt ads instead of money-makers.
God! I wish google would give us the option to enter a default ad to display. It is to give donations to these companies, but I'd rather have the money come to me (I can go donate it myself).
Maybe Sept 11 was a bad-ad day, but the reduction seems awfully high to be just due to a few advertisers changing their bids.
On the other hand, my site gets a fair number of impressions. I suppose it's possible that one or more advertisers who were getting clicks on my site decided to block Adsense ads from their campaigns, but if others are seeing big dips in revenue too, it makes me wonder what's really happening.
It's times like this when better reporting from Google would be especially helpful. It's going to be difficult for me to stay with a program that doesn't have a more stable revenue stream (or at least reasonable explanations for big variations).
Of course I'm hoping that the dip is temporary, but when the change is so large and so sudden, it's certainly unsettling.
Camster
Has anyone else seen a disappearance of eBay ads?
Looks to me like google are keeping for themselves the high paying advertisers. They are distributing them to adsense publishers only when search volumes on the google network are low (I read somewhere that search volumes DO fluctuate considerably). So I think that the drop in CPC and click revenue to publishers coincides with search volumes on the google network. This might also explain the reason for ads not displaying most of the day or a sudden few hours of only unpaid ads.
I don’t think we are seeing adsense advertisers bailing out. Exactly the opposite, much more advertisers are getting in. Don’t forget that much more publishers are coming in as well.
All in all my average daily revenue is decreasing slowly with the odd 10% spike on some days. Viewers volumes unchanged.
