Change in Google Revenue Sharing

My clicks about the same, but revenue off by 70%

[Sharky]

Has anyone else noticed a significant drop in their Google revenue over the last few days? I'm getting about the same number of clicks as usual, but my revenue has dropped by about 70%.

Of course it could just be that the higher-CPC ads that were matching my site expired or something (I sure wish G provided better reporting tools)....

[esllou]

well a lot have reported a big drop in CPC, but then again people who haven't seen a change wouldn't post about it!

Google have explicitly stated that they haven't changed anything with the revenue percentage for us....so other issues are at play...

[europeforvisitors]

well a lot have reported a big drop in CPC, but then again people who haven't seen a change wouldn't post about it!

I haven't seen a big drop in CPC or effective CPM in September.

For what it's worth, my average daily revenues are higher than they were in the last week of August, though not as high as they were in my best week of August.

I think we need to remember that AdSense is a network whose rates are determined by supply and demand (i.e., bids). We'll often see swings from day to day or week to week, so the long-term trends (and, more important, the long-term revenues) are what we should be worrying about.

[Sharky]

I have an idea about what might be happening in my case.

I decided to look on Overture to see who the highest bidding advertisers were for my primary keyword. It turns out that eBay was the top bidder, by a factor of 5X the next highest bidder.

I used to see a bunch of eBay ads on my site, but now I'm not seeing them any more. So that's a possible explanation for why my revenue has dropped while CTR and impressions have stayed the same.

The funny thing is that I ran a bunch of eBay affiliate ads a while back, and earned precisely zero from them, in spite of probably hundreds of thousands of impressions. It's the second-click nature of their affiliate program that messes me up.

I also went to Google and searched for my primary keyword, and was shocked to see that there weren't any Adwords ads shown for it at all! However, after refreshing the page a few ads did appear, including a sponsored ad from eBay. Seems like a strange pattern. Maybe eBay has opted out of Adsense? Is anyone else out there seeing Adsense ads from eBay?

I'm planning to use this same approach to find related keywords or keyword combinations that have more advertisers and higher bids, and refine my site accordingly.