Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My revenue is dropping like crazy for the past 8 days. I say 30-40% drop as 'crazy'... the other guy in this forum mentioned 90%... which is a little extreme.
steve
See this thread with respect to declining revenues:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Advertisers bid competitively on particular keywords (with a set budget). At the start of the month the adverts with a high CPC (Cost per Click) are shown. Throughout the month these are clicked on and the advertisers with high CPC rates use up their advertising budget. When they have used up their budget Google then displays adverts from advertisers who bid a lower CPC. If clicks and impressions remain constant - the lower CPC rate explains the drop in revenue.
As traffic and CTR are usually pretty much constant this seems the only explanation for the way things happen. Of course this is only a theory but it seems plausible to me.
The only explanation I can think of is that the high-budget generic companies which usually take up my AdSense slots run out of budget, to be replaced by many specific adverts which have a lower CPC but are more appealing to readers because they are specific, rather than generic.
Hence, CTR goes up, CPC goes down, overall revenue goes up.
That's just speculation on my part.
October revenues are definitely lower than August or September revenues, but that's to be expected for a seasonal topic like mine. (FWIW, my affiliate bookings are down at this time of year, too.)
I have also noticed an average drop in earnings per click as well (about a 20% decline). It is difficult to identify any cause and effect - payout changes by google, less competition for keywords due to seasonal travel fluctuations, budget depletion due to more AdSense partners etc. No drastic "overnight" changes but a slow decline downward. I would tend to classify this as seasonal to my business but time will tell.
Even with the current declines in CTR and earnings per click I am still "extremely" satisfied with my partnership with google.
For example, traffic is higher at the weekend than during Monday to Friday due to the subject of the site. It's also even higher during the holiday seasons.
Thinking like this about why your site's traffic fluctuates may go some way to explain why the amount of daily impressions recorded by Google changes. Of course increased/ decreased impressions have an affect on clicks and revenue.
btw, i'm seeing a lot more PSAs than usual. Anyone knows if Google is experimenting with something?
My thought is that the Adsense mediabot, when it came out during the DOS attack, determined the content of the pages to be more or less about nothing determinable and served up PSAs for a bit. As the days passed and traffic caused the mediabot to return on more of the pages, ads got more targeted again. I spent some time navigating through my sites to try to get targeted Adsense ads to be served up for the visitors the first time they get "here".
Another poster mentioned that when she makes sitewide changes to her site, Adsense sales go down for a bit. Does anyone else notice that? Would using something like Xenu be a quicker way to cause the mediabot to visit to see the new (or "now back online") content?
Adsense sales didn't seem to be affected by new pages being put online -- or even a temporary disruption like a DOS attack -- before the "immediate serving of applicable ads" thing was disabled. Now, naturally, there seems to be a lag before the super-targeted ads can be displayed.
I'm thinking that when putting brand new pages online, it would be a good idea to either click through the pages by hand or (ideally) run something like Xenu that will crawl the site and bring out the mediabot.
We have no way of knowing what the ultimate value and benefit of the clicks is to the advertisers, but I'd assume that if some are rolling back they might not be seeing the ROI on their ad dollars they'd like. On the other hand, if we can see the same ads appearing consistently (by mousing over) and our % and revenue is staying constant it's probably safe to assume those advertisers are getting a good return from having their ads running on our site.
As far as this forum goes, I'm personally finding AdSense consistently performing way beyond any expectations I might have had, and while we're limited in the type of specifics we can discuss I've still got a few questions I'd like other people's opinions on and from my point of view this forum is a dynamite resource that I'll be taking advantage of myself.
Also, I've seen a lot of moderators and message board hosts in my time, and Jenstar is absolutely incredible. She's got to be one of the top ten on the internet.
I'm still seeing a ton of activity, but if there's any decrease in activity my evaluation would be that if anything, it's a good sign - that people have been learning and are busy applying what they've been learning.
Dave.
My revenue is dropping like crazy for the past 8 days
Maybe it's squid migration season? Or maybe squids hibernate?
then the explanation is simple... Adsense program cannot send us releveant ads to our pages, causing people not to click. I can at least confirm this with my 6000 content pages. They are displaying less targeted ads. Why? Perhaps AdWords advertisers are sending too much compliants that Adsense publishers aren't giving them quality traffic and Google is experimenting new ways to please the advertisers. I'm sure Google place higher priority on advertisers than on publishers. If advertisers are annoyed, they just suspend the account and go. If publishers aren't pleased with Adsense, most of them don't mind as this chunk of revenue is simply adding to the bottom line to most income statement. At least this is true for large publications...
Though, we as small publishers rely on Adsense too much; it's not very healthy.
Oh, I have another theory why my clicks dropped... I noticed a LOOOOT of people go to my site through Google's cache. When that happen, Adsense usually gives them PSAs.. this starts to occur this week. In the past (a week ago), I and my friends who check for me still got targeted ads... I'm sure of this as I watch Google's cache for updated content VERY closely. While I'm checking, I also skim through the ads as well.
Right now it's a small impact (compared to the other issues you are discussing) but adsense is very easy to block and the blocked numbers will be growing.
- CPM, CTR, EPC all average while traffic is up
This would also be something for Adsense to add, it would be nice to see how many PSAs we are showing (I guess I could redirect to a PSA). I think next month I am going to run Adsense in a banner rotation by itself, so I can watch the traffic on my side to match up to what Google is reporting.
BZ
Any way to automate a pageview vs. viewing each page by hand? I tried Xenu, but it seems to be treated like a hit from a bot (ie doesn't cause the mediabot to visit).
Those of you seeing a recent drop in Adsense revenue aren't attributing it to Google having turned off the "on the fly" serving of applicable ads?
Could you please explain what you mean by this? I'm at a loss.
