On or around September 21st/22nd Google adjust their rankings to feature stores that sell product more prominently for product related keywords. The change was both dramatic for some site owners (including myself) and fairly quick in that it took 3 days to propagate before the rankings settled. On sites like mine that are 50% informational and 50% transactional (I sell product and have affiliate offers) the different between the two is extreme, transactional traffic is down 90%.
Today, now that the dust has settled, the adsense earnings from the informational pages has risen threefold and the CTR is over 70% higher than the previous record for my sites. The total earnings are still lower thanks to the lost transactional traffic but the increase on informational pages is also extreme.
Why?
Is it because most stores don't use adsense and so more advertising dollars are now lumped on informational sites? That doesn't explain ctr.
Is it because information seekers are twice as likely to click an ad if they don't see what they want instantly? That doesn't explain the increased earnings per click.
How could reducing the number of transactional visitors have such a positive effect on earnings from informational visitors? Perhaps lumping more adwords dollar spend on informational sites was intended to balance the effects of sending potential buyers to big brand stores (brick and mortar or big online retailer), buyers being those that type in an exact match to a product name?
