Dramatic drop in clickthrus today?

Clickthrus down to .6%?

[lingstar]

Good afternoon,

I signed up for Google Adsense 10 days ago
and was happy to see a conversion rate in the
single digits. Today, I'm seeing the same number of impressions
but only 3 (!) clicks. Is this a glitch in the system?
Or will I be credited for people who did click....just
sometime later? Has anyone else seen this?

Thank you for your input,

Barbara LIng

[europeforvisitors]

Google's statistics are sometimes slow to update, and clicks may not update as quickly as impressions do. In any case, it's impossible to make an accurate judgment about clickthroughs when you have such a small sample. The larger the sample (in this case, the traffic), the more meaningful the results.

[loanuniverse]

What EFV said. In addition, 500 impressions is too small a sample to determine anything. It could have been one single individual that really liked the site, visited a couple of hundred pages and threw off the whole tracking. When your site does not have that much traffic, looking at larger periods is much better.

[Vermont]

Also, if you have a certain number of regular visitors to your site, they may click on ads and then its "been there, done that" - they have bookmarked those ad sites they like.

Until fresh new ads cycle through chances are they are not going to click as much as at first.

[Bluesplinter]

Something similar happened to me today, and my stats are usually steady enough that an anomaly is worth investigating. Simply checking my server logs showed that one page was getting thousands of hits because it happened to come up in the top three of various serps for a hot news story folks are checking out today.

However, the normally appropriate AdSense ads weren't at all related to the news story these folks were searching for, so the CTR fell dramatically while the impressions skyrocketed. I just replaced it with a more closely related affiliate program... no reason to burn AdWords advertisers' impressions when they weren't being clicked anyway.

Anyway, point being, there are several different things that can throw stats out of kilter over a short period, and sometimes you can figure it out by checking your logs.

[lingstar]

Good morning,

Thank you to all who answered!
In checking my stats, yesterday turned out to have the highest number of clicks, the lowest clickthru right (I added adsense to many more of my pages) and the lowest generated earnings.

My question is (I'm new to ppc), do earnings drop if the clickthru ration drops but the total clicks increases? I wouldn't think so, but am baffled by the numbers.

Also, is there any way of seeing which page generated the most clicks?

Thanks in advance,

Barbara LIng

[JohnKelly]

Barbara,

If you've just recently added AdSense to pages they may be displaying PSA's until Google's mediabot gets a chance to crawl the page. PSA's would lower your click-throughs drastically, since they're rarely relevant to the page content.

Aside from actual clicks, the other thing that can drive earnings down is what Google does not show you in the report -- average earning per click. Easily calculated by dividing a day's earning's by the day's clicks, however my experience is that average earnings per click (EPC) varies quite a bit.

[Blue_Fin]

She said her clicks were high, so that would not indicate a lot of PSAs. Earnings per click is not in any way connected to the number of clicks that you get. We experience a very wide range of EPC from day to day so there is nothing unusual with your stats. You've been in the program for too short of an amount of time to determine any patterns.

There is no way to determine which ads are being clicked upon or from which pages or sites (if you have ads on more than one site).