Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It appears the work I did in May with AdLinks and some minor ad block adjusting have made a difference as the CTR is at an all time high for my site even in the midst of the summer traffic slowdowns.
Anyone else seeing an upward trend in June?
BTW... the adlinks thing seems to be doing more than it's share of the heavy lifting.
Hopefully it'll keep going. :)
I usually get a significant bump in traffic during updates, and that's helping a fair bit. If history repeats itself I'll see about half the bump disappear when the update settles down.
OTOH - it could be all the fresh blood in the contextual advertising pool - after every major update there are a flood of advertisers, which increases competition and drives up CPC - good news for publishers with traffic.
:)
I'm hoping for my first $500 month, which I know is small potatoes for many on this board, but would be a nice result for my very part-time work.
I will be happy if I could just average like 75-80 a day. Bourbon must have had an impact as more traffic comes from Google since around May 5th.
Hunterdown: I think a much bigger challenge with Adsense is getting a site to go from initially earning 0 up to 500 dollars a month, than it is to get a site to go from 500 up to 1000 a month.
That's when I went nuts and put AdLinks on the site, shuffled things around, and it came back better than ever.
That seems to have salvaged May and June we shall see where we end :)
Guess I'm not a fan of the "ride it out" philosophy.
[edited by: incrediBILL at 6:23 am (utc) on June 11, 2005]
I was about 15% up in May and I was happy. June is down to a lot till date. My daily earings is about 25% less than those in May.
CTR 20% up
EPC 25% down
Impressions 10% up
After all, little bit more than in May
When I would have my current Clicks combined with my EPC froum June last year....
I'm up in the wee hours (3am) and Friday, which is particularly sucky in general closed on a high note and the early morning Sat which tends to be slow is cranking at an incredible pace.
My first update after midnight was over $10 for a handful of clicks, almost spit gin across the room when I saw that.
I dont want to sleep now as I'll miss this astonishing AdSense day unfold :)
I look at my logs and so many times I see 4-6 clicks on Adwords from same IP same website during 2-5 minute time span - poof - they won't be clicking on my ads anymore.
This leaves more money for the few of you who aren't scrappy scrapers :)
If I were you I'd try it out again - could be the position on the page was causing a problem. On my main site I have a main nav element to other site pages on the left hand side - I placed adlinks directly below this. Ads display fine, are on topic and bring extra clicks/cash to the page.
The Adsense program is diverse and dynamic. There are always people having better or worse months. There is no grand conspiracy.
By the way Oswald shot Kennedy on his own by himself. Crop circles are made by humans. My cousin dated a girl who looked like bigfoot's sister, so I guess at least that one's real.
Oh and last month was up for me, this month is down a little. My overall traffic and SERP's ranking is the same.
google adsense is one of the few business agreements where one party is left surprisingly in the dark. specifically, publishers are not told what percent google is taking for themselves.
considering that google is a public company and has to answer to its shareholders, i would not be surprised at all if they started to play with the percentages when it was advantageous to them. that could include increasing payouts to certain publishers.
adsense is still a new phenomenon, and i think google is still figuring things out.
whenever i see one of these threads, i roll my eyes too, but i think in general it is a good thing for publishers to be open with their findings so at least we have the chance of spotting some trends.
Just discussing trends with no need to be snide, pretty uncalled for really.
Oh well...
Although MY visitor numbers and page impressions are climbing nicely, according to Adsense they are decreasing, so much so that there is a 100% discrepancy between G and myself for page impressions on Friday 10th.
Earnings are now down 40% from 2 months ago and I have NOT been affected by Bourbon, I am still #1 for all optimised terms.
I still maintain that whatever happened on 05/05/05 has done this and I now feel the only way to rectify it is to remove Adsense possibly from all sites.
I need a beer to think about this tonight but will it really matter since at this rate of decrease nothing worth having is going to be left within a couple of months!
Hunterdown: I think a much bigger challenge with Adsense is getting a site to go from initially earning 0 up to 500 dollars a month, than it is to get a site to go from 500 up to 1000 a month.
Why do you say that? I'm interested to hear this because my site started out in the 200/month range, from the day I put AdSense throughout my site. I've only recently got above 400/month, after building up earnings from a low of $136 in Sept. of last year. So I'm wondering how much higher I can reasonably expect to go.
My site, by the way, is even nichier and low-traffic than yours. The question for me is, what is the ceiling beyond which I can not go unless I add significant amounts of new content or increase traffic? Perhaps a question others have too. But I suspect that the only way to find out what the ceiling is is to keep trying to bump into it.
The question for me is, what is the ceiling beyond which I can not go unless I add significant amounts of new content or increase traffic?
Adsense is a moving (and many says, an increasingly difficult) target, that maintaining your status quo (content and traffic the same) may mean a decline in revenues. I don't know this to be true, but I am scared NOT to add traffic or content for fear that the Adsense income may decline.
So our strategy is to always think of ways to add content and increase our traffic, and so far it worked as we see our revenues increasing month after month albeit at a slower growth pace. In our case, the cumulative growth rate of our site's Adsense revenue since we started in June 2003 (computing from our first full month of July 2003) is 21%. We saw a burst of growth in the first few months (from $500 in our first month to $2500 in the second month) when we were tinkering with layouts and all, but it slowed to single digit in the last few months.
There may be no ceiling - as long as you keep on working on your site. Sure, it is sometimes discouraging that you seem to work so hard adding new content on your site only to see your Adsense revenues marginally increasing. Sort of like the law of diminishing marginal returns at work.
