Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Last December I made almost 8 times more money as I am making this December. Very similar number of pages with ads as last year, very similar number of people coming to the site as last year. Just way less money being generated by each click.
I sure wish Google had not introduced "Smart Pricing". It has really driven down the money that I am making from the ads.
i think santa has smart-priced me up the arse.
I'm getting much better click through. I think this is because of more well matched ads and a greater variety of them.
Also page impressions are somewhat higher.
If I hadn't worked hard all year at optimizing, improving and adding real content, I'd probably expect my revenues to have dropped.
If you sit still, you're going to lose. If you work at it and still see your revenue dropping, then you're not doing it right.
Interesting thing is that our traffic dropped massively last Dec. 10, down to almost exactly 1/2. It took six months to recover to our current levels.
At that time, for the first two weeks when it happened our CPM nearly doubled, so it wasn't too bad in the beginning. We were down in actual revenue only about 20% a day, not so bad considering how much traffic we lost. But it eventually slipped down to around 40% of our previous revenue high. The money did come back up again after 3 months, even if traffic levels didn't.
Since traffic has been very high as of late, and revenue has been up 50% over last year since the summer, so I'm pretty shocked to see that the actual traffic was at these levels at the beginning of Dec. 2004!
I think SmartPricing has done us a favour, since we're now making so much more than last year on the same traffic numbers. But who knows, maybe it's just the content that's getting read this year vs. what was getting read last year?
The big question for me is - "Are we going to slip again?" Will traffic drop like a stone, or was their a "Google update" that happened last year and knocked us down?
For our traffic to just up and fall 50% overnight is a little suspicious for it to be our audience just deciding "en masse" that they don't need our information for the next few months... at least that's what I'm telling myself.
All the rest of the month is more than December 2004
Interesting.
7 people that have done better this year and 2 that have not.
.... A large and scientifically selected sample! :-)
Me, I slacked this year; I was "semi-retired". I had plenty of months where I didn't add much content, others where I added none.
Now I'm feeling guilty. I swear next year we're going to buckle down. Overall we went up 50% in revenue this year with very little work. Imagine what we're capable of working full-time!
That puts me on track for just about a 400% improvement over last December.
