Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Aside from having a frustrating cold at the moment (achoo!), I'm rather bummed about having my AdSense revenue decline by over 90% in one week's time. This isn't a one or two day blip, either. After a pretty consistent weekly average of $x dollars a day, I've now earned 10% of $x daily over the last week.
Oddly, I'm getting approximately the same number of impressions as I was before, both reported by Google and by my own independent stats, and I've not made any appreciable changes in my sites' content.
Since I'm unemployed and sadly depending upon Google for part of my interim revenues, this is quite an unfortunate turn of events, and I have both the time and drive to try to "fix" things.
But I'm a bit flummoxed about where to start. Since I can't see what people are or were clicking on, I can't think of what I'd update on my sites.
Would Google be any help with this? If I wrote them, might they be able to say, well, we've lost a major advertiser that was showing up on your pages, or you have some negative trigger words on the pages that were previously earning you the most income, or...?
I'm not (and was not) earning in the triple digits daily, so something tells me I'm not of really great importance to Google. But I'm willing to try anything... heck, even sending homemade cookies to the AdSense team or whatnot :D
Oh wait a minute, they already get great desserts there. Nevermind. But you see my point! :)
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have for my troubleshooting.
A different theory to explain why some not others are seeing it, and why every month we see the same type of posts, from different people. Is it posible that revenues are "tweaked" after a certain number of days of participation? We perhaps got a feel for this in Jen's PSA thread.
It's Saturday morning and the brain moves to the paranoid side on the weekends:)
daunk: "My revenue has gone down previously I was making X $ a day now it is about $X/3 dollars a day, impressions are up and most importantly my clicks are staying constant."
I usually don't respond to this type of tread because most people start posting with just a day or so of history attempting to "see" some trend. Not a productive exercise at all. But, I've been tracking our history for months now, and we are seeing the same trend since August that daunk has noted.
Why? The entire makeup of our Adsense advertisers has changed. Although the ads continue to be well targeted, the “big boys” of your industry are no longer represented. We get only second tier players now. If you go to Google and input our primary keyword all the “big boys” are there in Adword. Conjecture: The good paying Adword advertisers have dropped “content sites” and this leaves us with only the second tier advertisers who have a lower EPC.
The entire makeup of our Adsense advertisers has changed. Although the ads continue to be well targeted, the “big boys” of your industry are no longer represented. We get only second tier players now. If you go to Google and input our primary keyword all the “big boys” are there in Adword. Conjecture: The good paying Adword advertisers have dropped “content sites” and this leaves us with only the second tier advertisers who have a lower EPC.
Depends on the industry, I guess. I'm seeing the same small-to mid-size companies whose AdSense ads have been on my site along, plus some new biggies (such as the top online travel agencies and a major airline).
So to conclude - over supply - insufficient demand for my target which leaves me with constant earnings which have stayed at this level since the start of the month of $x/3 daily amount as opposed to $X which had been consistent throughout October (in fact the trend had been that it was increasing month on month as impressions were going up). The crash when it came was really sudden obviously this is just my niche, but the results are devastating from being able to support my site through adsense its gone back to the bad old days when I have to shell money out of my account to make ends meet, fortunately the money I recievd in the previous months will delay this till march. The worst thing is there is absolutely NOTHING i can do about this! Oh and the sites in similar niche to mine - first they asked users to click on the ads and secondly they run adsense in rotation at top and always on at the bottom resulting in sometimes 2x impressions per page loaded! Its crazy but I already mentioned it to google and they didn't get back to me :S.
Spreading the value much more thingly across the board, if advertisers do not want to compete to counter-act the effect of this depreciation and keep #1 position. Then those of us using adsense to generate some reveniew for advertising ads on our sites, we will suffer in lower revenues as a result.
Perhaps the monthly cycle could be as a result of budgets limits been burst, and advertisers holding back until the next month.
I think you have probably hit the nail closely on the head here. I started using Adsense in September on one site in the computers and technology sector and after excellent revenues in September and October the impressions have stayed the same for November and so have the CTR's, but the actual revenue per click has dropped to about 50% of the previous 2 months.
I have not seen many PSA's, but I have seen a big change in the type of advertiser.
I then logged into my Adwords account and created a new dummy campaign and found that I could get higher positions with relatively low bids! If this is your case, then the overall campaign is dropping in value.
Has anyone found any better alternatives that do actually pay out?
The good paying Adword advertisers have dropped “content sites” and this leaves us with only the second tier advertisers who have a lower EPC.
That's the kind of sweeping statement that makes no sense when you're talking about targeted "contextual content ads." Some of us are seeing bigger and better advertisers on our sites. It all depends on the category and, for that matter, on the specific keywords or keyphrases that draw ads to a publisher's site.
AdSense isn't like the traditional CPM network where all publishers are divvying up the same run-of-network banners. If your site is about PCs and mine is about travel in Europe, what happens to bids for "PCs" or "Windows software" has no effect on my revenues for keyphrases that involve hotels in Naples or barge cruises in Burgundy...and vice versa. Even within a given overall topic, there may be substantial differences in bid levels and how many ads there are. For example, at this time of year there's obviously going to be less demand for vacation cottages on Danish beaches, but there will be more demand for ski chalets in Zermatt.
Too many Webmaster World members assume that their personal changes in revenues, search rankings, etc. apply to everyone. That simply isn't so. My European travel site may see a drop in revenues during November (when few people travel to Europe), but the publisher of a site that's devoted to reviews of parkas, long underwear, and winter boots may be seeing higher impressions, average clickthrough payments, effective CPM, and total revenues than he's had since spring.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that, overall, AdSense revenue trends are currently headed up. They could be headed downward. I don't know, and neither does anybody else on this board. And even if we did have definitive evidence of an overall trend, we wouldn't know the reasons for that trend unless we had access to proprietary information from Google.
Yes, it is hard to make sweeping generalizations like these. My home business site, where EPC and revenues have dropped since September, still has the big name advertisers that we had from day 1 we started with Adsense back in June. In fact, the ads appearing in our Adsense appears to be relatively the same (with a few exceptions). The point is: I cannot agree with the above statement made as I do not see evidence of this on my site.
Yet, we are getting ready to accept that Sept. may be our all-time high for Adsense given the downward spiral of our revenues.
To stem the downward trend on our site, we first changed the ad format on our homepage from banner to leaderboard. That increased our CTR which helped push up the revenues. Instead of the 30-40% drop in revenues we expected for October, we were able to contain the slide to only about 15%. But a slide is still a slide :o(
But leaderboard blindness may have started to seep in particularly from repeat visitors as we saw CTR drop down to our pre-leaderboard days. So now we changed the color of the leaderboard, and CTR (and revenues) is back up again.
Our strategy now is simply to increase traffic, continue experimentation on how to present Adsense ads, and simply hope for the best.
Regarding the big players pulling out. Yes I noticed one huge company is no longer there, but didn't bother to check if they still show up in SERPS adwords. I have an idea of the search phrase, but frankly I think it changes and I have no time to be chasing a moving target.
I think there just are too many variables too expect stability. Besides the tweaking, one must account for advertisers starting or finishing campaigns and targeting that sometimes might seem fickle.
Besides the tweaking, one must account for advertisers starting or finishing campaigns and targeting that sometimes might seem fickle.
I think targeting may be a big factor. On the one hand, you've got "broad match," which may be hurting some publishers (and advertisers) and helping others. On the other, you've got sometimes flaky targeting for specific keyphrases, such as ads for "ATM equipment and supplies" in my article on using ATMs abroad and the "SudsBuddy beer cooler" in a travel article on Munich's Oktoberfest. (In the latter two cases, I would have been better off with "broad match" ads.)
IMHO, the best way to smooth out peaks and valleys is to do what a good content site would do anyway: have a reasonable amount of editorial diversity, so that you don't depend entirely on revenues for certain keyphrases and advertisers. You still may be subject to seasonal or industry trends, but at least you won't have all of your eggs in a handful of baskets.
What strikes me most is the continuous decline of EPC from the time we started until now. We joined on June 20; but looking at 7-day averages beginning July 1, we find that our EPC has dropped by a huge 87%.
It appears like the banners all over again: big bang at the start then slowly slowly wither away. I hope it will not happen with Adsense, but I am not too happy with the downward spiral that I am seeing.
EFV said:I think targeting may be a big factor. On the one hand, you've got "broad match," which may be hurting some publishers (and advertisers) and helping others.
Visi said:Is it posible that revenues are "tweaked" after a certain number of days of participation?
Visi said:loan...that was exactly my point in the post above, If you look against "all time stats" the numbers don't look bad. Break them down by monthly trends to see the impact. No doubt here that there was a dramatic shift in our categories (ads being served) in October, and the trend although slowed is continuing this month.
Effective CPM and overall revenues have dropped considerably more than that, mostly because my clickthrough rate has been much lower in September and October than it was in June, July, and August. But again, seasonal demand is likely to be affecting those numbers. This is the time of year when prospective leisure travelers in Europe are more likely to look than to book, and my impressions may be inflated by visits from students who are researching term papers. (I should mention that affiliate revenues are down at this time of year, too.)
For what it's worth, I've noticed a slight increase in daily AdSense revenues lately, maybe because some readers are starting to think about their winter vacations. So for my topic, at least, there's no evidence that the sky is falling--it's just a little drizzly and gloomy, as it usually is in November. :-)
This change would both increase the profitability of AdSense for Google, while also discouraging both fraudulent clicks on high value ads and the proliferation of websites built around high-value keywords. Unfortunately, it also reduces revenue for sites which have some legitimate mid- to high-value keywords.
