Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I heard once that earnings do not go up linearly with traffic.
Some two weeks ago I started using adwords again.
I went from 300 uniques to about 1000 and my clicks on adsense went from 50 to +200. So I had a 300% increase on clicks but....only 200% on earnings.
Nothing wrong here because I could see that my advertisers didn't have enough money to spend, the problem was on the next days when the earnings just kept declining...Smart price attack!
So it isnīt a 2x3=6 thing....
Hope it helps :)
I noticed this for us in the Bourbon update. For the 4 weeks or so our site lost 95% of Google traffic and 9/10ths of its traffic... but we still had 1/5th of our revenue. You'd expect it to be 1/10th the revenue if it was linear.
Morever, you'll see increases and decreases throughout the year, depending on your topic(s). We went for a six month span without many updates, as a test and because we were working on other projects. The difference between the lowest month and the highest month was over a 25% increase... for doing nothing.
And finally; we had a mass of articles which brought us to a reasonable amount per day. But when we added more, we still dropped nearly 40% at Christmas and well into January... so, its quite a voltile medium.
For my planning purposes, we're going to double the amount of articles by hiring help, but I'm budgetting around only a 25-30% increase in revenue at best to be safe. I do hope it will be higher, perhaps 50%... but I'm not willing to bet money on the higher numbers.
You want better visitors, not more visitors.
On a more serious note, your earnings may increase "more linearly" if the additional visitors come from additional topics/sites, rather than "more of the same". So it would be a good idea to diversify.
I *do* think that advice is more important for people going from 6000 to 600000 than it is for those going from 60 to 6000, though...
Smart pricing will hold you down to the floor harder and harder as you add more and more visitors.
All of my traffic is SE generated. On one particular site, I recently started receiving more than double the traffic that I was receiving the prior month from search engines.
I am now officially earning less than I was before thanks to the value of my clicks being next to worthless now. The CTR is slightly lower, but the EPC is pure garbage. I continue to add content to try and compensate for the losses, and fight my way out of the bent-over-ankle-grabbing position. Hopefully I've hit rock bottom in terms of smart pricing. Then I might even get an increase in revenue the next time I double my SE traffic.
I think that Smart Pricing is a necessary evil that is flawed. I'm currently running my first AdWords campaign to gain a better understanding of how Smart Pricing works, and to better understand the way conversions are setup and tracked.
I can already see that many of my "conversions" are probably not being tracked. I believe that Google will admit that the Conversion tracking model is not yet even close to perfected... that said, these imperfections are probably to blame for some of the revenue loss that I and many others are seeing. I mean seriously, one conversion improperly tracked can skew your conversion rate by HUGE amounts if you aren't cranking out thousands of clicks a day.
I could be wrong - it's happened before and will happen again, but I still don't understand all of the ins and outs that could be affecting the value of my sites clicks adversely.
In short -
It's certainly and uphill battle for most, and income typically doesn't rise with traffic for the vast majority of people.
Even if you have thousands of clicks you still get hit hard. And from what I understood from google adsense department it takes about 2-3 weeks to adjust itself again. (reminds me of the google dance)
So if you are taking it up the gazoo, you would be holding that position for at least 3 weeks.
How low can it go?
less than a penny click IS attainable.
You're right... I don't know what made me think that less clicks would have made it harder in this area. It should be equally detramental - you're right.
As far as the 3 week thing goes.
Does this suggest that G only tracks conversions based on the past 3 weeks, or that it only updates your "conversion rate" every 3 weeks, at which point your EPC would go up or down based on conversion rate?
Holy run on sentence, I just confused myself. I'll quit while I'm behind here.
Thank you for the input Lapka.
The 3 weeks was my interpretation of a 'couple of weeks'. Also he was equally vague so I dont know if there is actually a specific date that smart pricing is adjusted to all publishers at the same time or it just takes a couple of weeks to go through the system before an adjustment is made.
