earnings went up by 500% overnight, what's wrong?

[ClassyPete]

I have been using adsense for about a year now and our stats are usually the same every day...

.3% clickthrough on about 40k pageviews

I just loged in today and found out that starting on Dec 21, our clickthrough rate has been .1% and the pageviews about the same, but daily earnings are up 500% more! ecpm went from sub $1 to near $5!

On one day we received 3 more clicks but earned $75 more then the day before.

This is most likely too good to be ture, the ads seem the same... is there anything I should do?

btw, we are in the automotive industry and nothing has changed on the site.

[ken_b]

It sounds like you have some CPM ads running. They could result in the kind of earnings rise you are talking about.

[hunderdown]

Could be due to recent changes on the AdWords side that seem to be pushing up bids.

[Sobriquet]

simple.. check ur traffic increase too. google index is updating and seemingly recovering after jagger update.

[novice]

btw, we are in the automotive industry

The auto industry is fighting tooth and claw for year end sales. Could be some aggressive online ad campaigns.

[ClassyPete]

Ok so it sounds like nothing to worry about.

Our traffic has not increased. Clicks are DOWN by 50%.

I was just worried about some sort of scam/hack or something like that.

[hunderdown]

Yes, if clicks are down, I wouldn't be worried.

Daily clicks doubling or tripling might be a worry, if you usually get a sizable number of clicks, meaning that large fluctuations are statistically unlikely to be due to chance.

[ken_b]

I'm in a similar situation, and also auto related. The ads I'm seeing are auto related, so at leat they fit the general topic.

For me, there was an immediate jump in eCPM on about Dec, 7. What puzzles me is that my eCPM keeps going up. I'm not complaining about the extra money, just not sure what is going on.

I think the regular advertizers that had been showing on my site must be increasing their bids in an effort to get back some exposure. Just a theory, but it would explain the rising ad values.

This has really driven the CTR on some of my pages down though. That makes me a little nervous. Hopefully when these ads dry up my visitors will start clicking on the text ads again.

Yesterday, to see what would happen, I added a small Adlinks block to some of my pages where where the CTR has sunk to essentially nothing since these CPM ads started running. Those pages didn't have Adlinks units before.

I did that because on most of my pages where I do have both Adlinks and regular ad blocks the Adlinks performance has really picked up since the CPM ads took over the other ad blocks.

In general, the Adlinks units are what's propping up my sitewide CTR right now.

I've had some other image/CPM ads in the past that didn't perform as well income wise, so I'm pretty content at the moment.

[GoldenHammer]

From a position points of view, Google may have made something effective to due with scrappers, the ads distributions aloghtom/smartpricing are now working effectively that the right bids are delivered to the right publishers instead of scappers.

Hope my assessment is correct .... :)