Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Lets start a list of reasons to 'chill' (and maybe a few to panic over)
Reasons your stats may vary:
Got to be a whole load more - over to you guys
...in other words Google only give me total impressions, total clicks and total revenue.
I plot 7 day moving averages to take out the weekly cycle, and have graphs for 7 day CPC, CPM, impressions, CTR..
...I can theorise why one may go up, one may go down, or one remain the same.
Like you I have a lot of sites, and a lot of clicks coming in. Regrettably I have no idea why my CTR is going down, my CPC rock solid. I do know why my impressions are going up :)
Until Google give us more to go on, that is the way it will stay!
I've been with AdSense for about two months now, and the one constant on my sites I've witnessed (dramatically!) is this:
As impressions increase, revenues decrease... not just in terms of mild diminishing returns, but rather, for instance, impressions triple and revenues are one third of what they were before.
Completely counter-intuitive, I agree! And I'm completely stumped about it. Any guesses as to what may be going on?
Bad content sites will generate less adsense revenue than well targetted sites.
I was hoping that the list might help illustrate why we shouldn't try to draw conclusions based on the few variables that we ARE able to monitor.
Supposedly, Google are going to provide better stats at some stage - drawing up a list now might help to reduce panic a little, and lay the foundation for future analysis when the stats get better.
If we can identify the variables that are likely to be involved, we can hopefully avoid the wild algo speculation that used to surround Google updates.
Sure, we can't fix these variables yet - but we can try to list the ones that would need 'fixing' before we can draw any conclusions.
People see your ad.
If your lucky and it appeals to them, they click it.
If they like the site that the ad takes them to, they bookmark it.
If they do not like the site, certainly they will not click on that ad again.
Either way, the next time they visit your website there is very little chance they are going to click that ad again.
Of course, this does not apply to every one of your site visitors but I believe it does apply to high percentage.
It depends on the nature of your sites and the amount of traffic you get. If you have many thousands of pages with a wide range of ads, then it averages out. Also, some sites get few repeat visitors due to the information provided being of a 'one-off' nature.
In any case, I believe we covered it on the list as 'statistical variation' and 'site visitor desensitisation'.
Personally I do not believe it applies to a high percentage of my sites - yours may differ depending on your visitor profile.
