Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Why? Is it a conspiracy by Google to punish me for rapidly climbing traffic?
Nope; it turns out that there's a simpler explanation: One of my articles was just featured by A.Word.A.Day, the vocabulary newsletter, and a lot of A.Word.A.Day readers are looking at that article today. Since those readers are interested in vocabulary and etymology, not in European travel, most of them aren't clicking on my AdSense ads, which means that many of today's impressions are "waste circulation."
This is a perfect example of how what might appear to be an AdSense anomaly is, in fact, the result of external causes. So the next time your earnings appear to be out of whack, look for reasons that you might not have thought of before complaining that "Google has cut the payout" or "Google is penalizing my growth."
Maybe this is out of topic of this thread but do you find rotating color palettes useful? I am using the blend in option for my sites ads. Do you think it will help if i switch to rotating color palettes?
THanks.
Rotating ad-background colors help to prevent "ad blindness" by subliminally telling readers that each ad is a new ad, not the same ad they saw on a previous page. (This approach obviously works best on sites with real content where users are likely to view more than one page.)
Muhahahhaha!
I also find it hard to believe that Google would punish a publisher for getting more traffic.
However, it is hard to compare if earnings are affected from a spike in traffic due to an article and an increase in overall daily traffic.
Why? Is it a conspiracy by Google to punish me for rapidly climbing traffic?
Of course it's a conspiracy!
You've read all the AdSense threads, Google's out to get you and reduces your payments right before posting quarterly earnings to look good for the investors.
Yup, a conspiracy.
Couldn't resist poking fun at the paranoid peers among us.
Is everyone experiencing the same?
The only think I have noticed different is that quite a few more image ads are showing now than have been - if these are "per impression" ads, I guess it would bring down your entire CPM? Am I right in this assumption?
So this could turn into a punishment after all, but it wouldn't be known until weeks later, when and if that adjustment takes place.
"per impression" ads, I guess it would bring down your entire CPM? Am I right in this assumption?
But they do penalize you for more traffic. I have had this happen on many sites. When traffic gets back to lower levels, CPC always seems to increase.
Why do you assume that you're being "penalized"? Consider:
1) There could easily be only so many high-paying clicks available for a given set of keywords, in which case higher traffic may result in a greater number of impressions from lower-paying ads.
2) Google may have a cap on the number of clicks on a given ad from any single site, partly to protect advertisers and partly to keep an individual publisher from hogging all of the clicks for a keyword or keyphrase.
3) As traffic increases, the nature of that traffic is likely to change. To use an extreme hypothetical example, let's say that your site has an article on buying purple widgets that has an average EPC of 50 cents. You have another article about the difference between transsubstantiation and consubstantiation that has an average EPC of 5 cents. MODERN LUTHERAN links to the latter article, and your traffic increases by 20%. Inevitably, your site's average EPC will fall now that your article on the chemical makeup of consecrated communion wafers represents a greater percentage of your traffic.
