CPM dropped from $3.80 to $2.50

[ckissi]

Hello,

Did anybody noticed same thing? My CPM dropped more than $1 (from $3.80 to $2.50) from one day to another (from friday 15 apr. 2005 to saturday 16 apr. 2005), and it seems to stay on the same value so far. I didn't change anything on the site. The average CPM was between $3.70 - $3.90. Do you have some idea what can cause that? btw: the banner size is 468x60 and it is almost on the top.
Thanx in advance.

[trillianjedi]

Do you have some idea what can cause that?

Any number of things which are not within your control (campaigns finishing, bid price lower, smart pricing etc).

TJ

[http200]

My CTR also get a drastic drop in recent two days.

[ckissi]

My site has about 120.000 pages with about 7500 different products on them, so I run thousands of different adsense banners. This is why it is very strange for me.

[OptiRex]

And mine have been up significantly...best weekend ever...thank you:-))

[sailorjwd]

There's a lot of changes with Adwords.. Most everyone is having to decrease the number of keywords they are using (reduced bid competition). And, the new Bid Optimizer tool may be lowering the bids slightly. I had to decrease number of keywords by 30,000 the other day.

[ckissi]

One more thing...
I run 4 types of banners and I experienced this only with 468x60 style banners. This style created the best revenue for me. But now it seems to be history already ;((

[wildfiction]

Isn't it the new way of reporting that they have enabled? There is a drop down on the report section so you can compare it to the old reporting method.

[ckissi]

No, because my earnings dropped too. It dropped down about 25%.

[ckissi]

Just got info from my friend. The same thing happened on his site from saturday. He has much lower traffic than me and also the site content is different.

[howiejs]

"I had to decrease number of keywords by 30,000 the other day."

Exactly - they are pushing all the advertisers to lower the number of keywords they are bidding on

[hunderdown]

I guess your visitors must have come to my site, because my eCPM doubled over the weekend.

[incrediBILL]

OK, sanity check - your eCPM dipped on FRI/SAT?

Let's examine a possible cause for this:

- People can either go out and party on the weekend, play outdoors in the sun, enjoy life OR....

- Stay indoors and click on your web ads

Ever since spring has thawed everything my weekends are taking a nasty dip and I expect this to continue for a month or so until tornadoes, floods and heat stroke temperatures chase everyone back indoors.

[ckissi]

I think it's not because of people are out, because the CTR is the same (2.1%) as it was at thursday or wednesday and about 30 days ago, so the number of clicks is the same but I earn much less then before.

[bbcarter]

I have observed an overall drop in eCPM since March 19th, but mainly because mostly only my older pages are still bringing traffic, and they weren't really adsense optimized.

My best theory/answer for you would be that adsense may not be displaying the highest pay ads on publisher sites- but to test this we'd have to compare what's showing on our sites to what's showing on equivalent google search results pages.

That's on my list for today, but not sure if I'll get to it. Even if I find that they are, all I can conclude is that they want to pay us less and make more money, which is a safe bet anyway.

I can only hope that Yahoo and MSN agressively enter this market and make Google compete for OUR attention.

[hunderdown]

Seriously, a smart pricing adjustment or a big advertiser moving in or out of your keywords could easily cause that. As I said, my eCPM doubled recently, due entirely to CPC doubling, which in turn might be due to a couple of big advertisers now showing up in the ads on my site....

Analyze it. If the cause is something you can fix, then fix it. If it's something out of your control, then work on something that you can control....

[incrediBILL]

who cares what your CTR is, what's your overall traffic and impressions?

If you had 10,000 impressions M-F with the same CTR as 6,000 impressions on Sat-Sun, you would earn less money on Sat/Sun even if the ad rates were 100% the same.

[ckissi]

Here are the numbers:

Saturday, April 9, 2005 CTR:2.2% CPM:$3.41
Sunday, April 17, 2005 CTR:2.1% CPM:$2.83

[edited by: ckissi at 10:05 pm (utc) on April 18, 2005]

[lammert]

ckissi, You might want to edit your post because going into so much detail is not allowed according to the AdSense T&C.

Personally I'd feel no reason to panic with this difference in CPM. These are well within normal fluctuations. You can read some other horror stories on this board with people losing 80% or 90% in CPM overnight.

[incrediBILL]

The 2 numbers you posted were within $20 of each other, I'm not sure what's to panic about.

Your stats are very similar to mine and my eCPM waffles from $2.50 to $4.50 within an average month.

As long as it's breaking $100/day I'm not complaining as it's still almost double what a zit faced graduate from FFU (french fry university) makes standing over deep frying spuds all day.

[ckissi]

I edited my post. One important think I just noticed: 2 from 3 ads on my pages do not appear. there is no public ads just the empty space, also the one that appears on page is not very context relevant. When I refresh the page it seems to fill relevant ads to all spaces. Sometimes I have to refresh the page 2 or more times to get relevant ads and fill all places. I also noticed that googlebot is crawling my site more than usualy today.

[hunderdown]

Low ad inventory, or nothing that's a really good match, sounds like.