Forum Moderators: martinibuster
However, my CPM took a huge beating today, it's a mere *third* of what it was yesterday or the previous days. Anyone else experience this today or any other time? Does Adsense make errors and correct them later? How could this happen, supposing it's not an error? I'm confused...
I thought I was stuck at $50/day, then $100/day, then $200/day, and up and up and it just keeps climbing but it took almost 6 months to get everything ironed out to get top notch performance and I think I can take it higher.
8 days is an insignificant blip on the radar.
Give it more like a couple of months.
See for me, it's really as if all the variables are the same, except that I'm getting a third less on what otherwise is very good day as far as traffic. Anyways, I'll just have to wait and see.
The CTR fluctuated a lot in the early days, but we were experimenting with ad format and placement.
You can't much influence CPC. But you can significantly influence CTR. My main recommendation for you now would be not to worry about daily fluctuations. However, take the opportunity to experiment with different format and placement on different pages using as scientific a basis as possible over at least a four week period.
This means you need to establish a baseline for the first couple of weeks using the same format/placement on each page (because pages will perform differently). Then, for the next two weeks, put different formats/placements on some pages (leave others the same to compare).
That should give you some data to work out which format/placement yields the best CTR on your site.
Then, implement the best formats/placement on all your pages and don't touch them - get back to producing more high quality content.
Over the next month or two, the Adsense system will be doing it's own experimentation to try and maximise CPM, so you need to be patient as earnings fluctuate. Eventually, they will settle down.
As far as 21_blue's idea of measuring differences as scientifically as possible, does Google allow me to put their adsense code into a random generator script with channels attached so i can measure what's working and what's not precisely?
I'm still bummed out about doing one-third of what I was without any apparent reason. Oh well, move on and hope for the better.
It might be where your ads are located on the page, whether they're blended into the site, or what type of traffic you're getting that could cause lots of variations.
Also keep in mind that the amounts of the bids go up and down all the time, so if the top bidders exceeds their budgets and run out of money the rest of them can back off a bit and relax until higher bids return.
