The cure from adsense addiction

is called smartpricing

[frox]

I have just now checked my stats after 48 hours of leaving them alone.

The trend of the last abt 10 days has been confirmed, ernings down by abt 70-50%. insert a few bad words here.

My first, impulsive thought was to just remove Adsense from my best site. Forget about it, put them back in a month, see what has happened.

Second thought: re-design web pages, add content, fiddle with ads placement (that btw has been quite optimized..).

Third thought: sell the website based on last months' performances.

What would you suggest?

[edited by: frox at 7:41 am (utc) on April 18, 2005]

[martinibuster]

• Could be traffic patterns have changed
  
• Could be you're having less impressions (for whatever reason)
  
• You don't say how long your benchmark existed (was it six months or was it six weeks?)
  
• Could be a seasonal aspect to your website
  
• Could be your website might be affected by current events
  
• Could be you lost some inbound links (and traffic)
  
• Could be that the people advertising on AdWords figured out they could create two campaigns, one for search (set at a high price) and another campaign set to bottom feed contextual ads
  
• Could be it's a good idea to create more websites in different niches to shield you from the ups and downs

[lammert]

What would you suggest?

Ten days of bad earnings is not a solid base to make strategic business decisions. Maybe it is just caused by one high paying advertiser who ran out of budget and starts advertising in a few days again. In my experience weeks with really bad earnings are followed by a high earnings week.

Based on your current AdSense earnings, you could try to find affiliate advertising that wants to pay a comparable amount. It is always good to diversify, although this can be difficult in some niches.

[frox]

martinibuster: yes, all good points.

but my site is a very generalistic site (sort of an encyclopaedia, 19.000 pages on VERY different aspects) and this (I think) up to now gave me a good protection about local effects like events, time, single advertisers etc. This also makes it very difficoult to find affiliates..

Benchmark time is limited, i know. I only have two months of history, up to now it had beed a CONSTANT growth of weekly averages, then all of a sudden this certainly significative drop.

lammert: Ten days of bad earnings is not a solid base to make strategic business decisions

Yes, that's why I am just sitting back, I decided to give it a full month from "Drop day", then decide. but it hurts ...

[photo200]

yeah - yeah.

IT @$%&*#@ hurts.

I always trying to reoptimize my sites in those cases.
Sometimes it works. Last 10 days EPC down 3 times.

[ken_b]

Frox; If your site was performing reasonably well before, I'd wait a while, a month anyhow, before making any big changes.

I've seen slumps income, done nothing, then seen the income bounce back up again. Sometimes it's apparntly just the cycle of advertizers available budgets. Actually that's almost become a pattern for me. Somehow it seems to work out in the end most of the time.

[ownerrim]

This stuff seesaws all over the place. I find myself bit#@ing all the time about this aspect of adsense. But as long as it evens out in the course of a month, it's not so bad...of course, there is that "running faster on a treadmill to stay in the same place" thing that is very irritating.

[ronin]

Don't worry frox, it's nothing out of the ordinary. If you can't find any statistical visitor trends that it might relate to, you probably don't have anything to be concerned about.

I tend to find that AdSense earnings are three steps forward, one step back, two steps forward etc.

[trillianjedi]

My first, impulsive thought was to just remove Adsense from my best site. Forget about it, put them back in a month, see what has happened.

Second thought: re-design web pages, add content, fiddle with ads placement (that btw has been quite optimized..).

Third thought: sell the website based on last months' performances.

What would you suggest?

I would suggest you re-read the above quote tomorrow and then decide if you think it may have been an over-reaction.

We can all get fed up when business doesn't quite go the way we want it to go. But you cannot base any sound decision on the back of your earnings being down for a few days. The minimum amount of time you need to ascertain true growth rates and long-term potential, in my experience, is 3 months.

TJ

[entropicus]

At first, the solution would be to simply add more and more sites to displace any losses created by a drop in performance from one's main site.

But, imho, this is not so easy because of the sandbox.

For eg. I could concievably create a new site a week, with about 20-30 pages content, and add AdSense to it. By the summer's end, I could perhaps have 15-20 new sites, but I doubt they would really be converting before quite a few months, because of sandbox.

For me, if this were so easy, I would simply create 300 sites, which each average a dollar a day. Then I wouldnt have to give a rat's continental about Smart Pricing, advertiser changes, etc..

[StephenBauer]

Wasn't tax day last week? Some people do have to pay quite a bit and those expecting refunds (by mail) will not get them for weeks.

This may have some impact over the last ten days...

[frox]

thaks to all for the precious advices.

And yes, my post muight have seemed a little impulsive, but trust me, I am being more reasonalbe. (trying to..)

Or at tleast, I could concentrate on some SEO. That will not hurt :-)

[Sweet Cognac]

Could the new Google FACTS cause a drop in his traffic, if his site is encyclopedia based?

[synth78]

Don't stress, As I knoe exactly how you feel,

Just keep faith and listen to your averages,
They are what is important,

If you further broke down the cycle, and measured your success per hour, rather than per day, or even per month
Everyone would be freaking out,
Just because we measure it on a daily basis, doesn't give it reliable consistency,

Definately work on a per month basis,
The troughs and peaks always even out,

syn

[Oimachi2]

I've had dramatic drop also. Never seen anything like it since the beginning of adsense. I'm talking a steady %100
drop in CPM since April 1st...drops and drops and drops.

I'm not the only one apparently, this guy also has seen the same thing at <snip>
This might be the start of an epidemic...

Thanks

[edited by: Jenstar at 12:55 pm (utc) on April 22, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLS as per TOS, please! [/edit]

[bbcarter]

As I've posted before, I was getting 20k visitors per day, then the rankings alg changed and it was down to 10k... but my Adsense income has dropped to 10%, not 50% of it's previous... which is a drop to 20% of previous income.

We have about 2000 pages on all kinds of topics, mainly ones related to products and services... and written by about 30 different authors.

What I found when I looked at individual author channels was that they only ones doing well were

1. really old articles (3-5 months old)
2. new articles in topics that have always gotten low CTR anyway

Those in group 1 are some from my original site's theme, and their CTR was not great, but ok, tho the eCPM for this theme is pretty good.

And the rest of group 1 are the all kinds of topic type pages I mentioned before.

So I think the effect is a combination of ageing filter and smart pricing.

I look fw to getting all my traffic back in 3-5 months, but am also exploring revenue models wherein I keep a higher percentage of the revenue. ;-)

B

[incrediBILL]

What would you suggest?

The best I can say about AdSense is it's like a slinky, it goes up and down and all around, but the difference is everyone loves a slinky cause it's a fun and wonderful toy.

When I get really upset with things I go play poker as taking money away from people face-to-face is very satisfying. For now I'd suggest a nice dinner of surf and turf with 5 martinis then sleep on it and see how you feel about it tomorrow :)

If it doesn't come back, then try updating SEO a bit, never hurts to change things up a little.

[frox]

Just a small update: things are going better, in an unexpected way...

I was (and am) sitting back, just seeing what happens. I am glad to see that things are going better (recovered at about 60-70% of original revenues).

The funny thing is that I expected to see the CPC rise again because of a "kinder" smart pricing, courtesy of the Google algos.

What I am seeing instead is a very clear increase in CTR, so something that is NOT directly in control of Google (I can't believe they on purpose put ads that are less or more targeted).

And it's not just a matter of a few hours. The average CTR of last 7 days is exactly the DOUBLE of my usual average CTR.

So, I am convinced this is not a random fluctuation, but it's significant change. Significant of what?

JamesR3's data of a few weeks ago largely confirm this: I am about an order of magnitude above the relative changes pointed in:
[webmasterworld.com...]

A "visual" check of targetting seems to me much the same, and I have changed absolutely nothing in the meanwhile.

Not that I complain.. Just wondering...

[DingoNY]

I took AS off my biggest site... CPC was down by 70% from what it was 1.5 months ago. It use to make me good money, but now it drains visitors that I can profit from in other ways, off my site. Just not worth it.

I'm not mad at G really - a little disappointed sure... But now they have lost my business. (They likely only made a couple thousand from my site at most though)

[Oimachi2]

"Don't stress, As I knoe exactly how you feel,

Just keep faith and listen to your averages,
They are what is important,"

I don't think so, this shift is hughe and unheard of. It's not a minor fluctuation as usual.

I'm thinking of pulling adense off my pages also.

PS. How do I get to make the reply text in a small white boxe. Like this for example:

"Don't stress, As I knoe exactly how you feel,

Just keep faith and listen to your averages,
They are what is important,"

[frox]

Oimachi2, you can use use [ quote ] quoted text [ / quote ] (without spaces)

more info in the link "Style Codes are on" at the left of the box where you enter the message

[Oimachi2]

Thanks Frox,

I finally got it!