Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It looked like the month was going to start out good but it went down hill again. I get about 1400 clicks a day and only $80-$90 from it. It used to be above $150 sometimes $175-$200.
I am a piece of seaweed
I live on a beach
And I wonder what lessons
Life does teach
One time lots of water
Was everywhere around
Then something changed
And no water could be found
King Canute then told me
No one's taking me for a ride
It's just a part of nature
The ebb and flow of tide
He tried once to stop it
A futile effort proved
"Accept the laws of nature
And you will be soothed"
Now my seaweed site does nicely
Thought it still goes go up and down
But a tidal drop in earnings
No longer causes a frown
Sometimes the waves are bumpy
Sometimes the ebb is strong
But the flow will be back
Before very long
1400 clicks a day and only $80-$90 from it.
The type and topic of content really can make a huge difference with Adsense. A friend earns about $700-900 per day with LESS than 1,400 clicks, and would probably hit thousands per day earnings if he gets 1,400 clicks (and no, he doesn't use Adwords or any ppc to get traffic - yet). Some types of websites just do more with Adsense simply by selecting the right type of content and topic
The type and topic of content really can make a huge difference with Adsense.
Also the type of audience (which relates to the type of content and content).
For example, a travel-narrative site that appeals to armchair travelers will do much more poorly with AdSense than a travel-planning site will, simply because most of its users aren't looking to buy tours, airline tickets, rail passes, hotel stays, resort packages, etc. On the other hand, those armchair travelers might be good prospects for books of travel narrative that the Web publisher has selected and offered via Amazon links.
Getting back to "type of content," I've mentioned elsewhere that photo-gallery pages do poorly on my travel-planning site (compared to travel-planning pages). Part of the reason may be audience: Some users are obviously finding their way to those pages via search while researching school reports or whatever. But another reason may be how users--even "hot prospects" for AdSense ads--interact with photo galleries. If a person who's planning a trip to Elbonia wants to look at pictures of Elbonia ahead of time, he won't look at just one page of a photo gallery--he'll click from page to page, racking up a whole slew of page views in a session. He might well click on an ad for Elbonia hotels, Elbonia tours, or Elbonia river cruises, and his click might well convert. But because he's looking at so many pages in a session, the CTR and eCPM for his visit will be low.
How can my site be over optimized? The themee is the same for the whole website.
How does the theme being the same mean it can't be over-optimized? A site (in theory) can be over-optimized whether it has one theme or many....
I'll use my site as an example of a site that is NOT over-optimized. To start with, I don't have AdSense on every page. There is no more than one ad on each page. The ad is usually a skyscraper, set to the left, starting where the content starts and running next to it, instead of being placed above the content or in a break in the content. The ads do follow the site's color scheme, but they are fairly easy to distinguish from navigation links. And there are plenty of non-AdSense links on every page.
I didn't set out to avoid over-optimizatation, of course. I set out to maintain a reasonable experience for visitors, and the by-product is that visitors, I assume, generally don't click on an ad unless they are seriously interested in it.
Of course, the reason for your dropoff could be something else, as several people have suggested.
So you have one person earning $1000 from 100,000 traffic while another on the same number of traffic earning only $50. Or you have 1,400 clicks earning $700 compared to some earning only $80 from the same number of clicks. A person running a forum may be hard pressed to earn the same amount from the same number of traffic from a person running a product review site.
You just have to accept that sites are not created equal in Adsense
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2006]
[edit reason] Cleanup Aisle 89. ;) [/edit]
Also, elguapo makes a useful point in saying "You just have to accept that sites are not created equal in Adsense." Heck, I do pretty well with AdSense, but I don't do as nearly well as more carefully targeted sites do. (I could increase my AdSense revenues substantially by focusing only on higher-paying topics, but I don't because I'm not interested in having an MFA site and AdSense is only one revenue stream.)
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2006]
It's frustrating to be subject to forces they can't control. You can't get angry at market forces, supply and demand, normal statistical and business fluctuations, but they can get angry at Google.
There's a real entity that can be subject of their rants! Or it could be Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Not that all these entities aren't deserving of constructive criticism, but any programs they run for affiliates/webmasters to monetize their sites will be in their best interests first and ours second.
Every webmaster should accept that and act accordingly. Likewise, I structure my sites for my maximum benefit, not Google's or Amazon's or Yahoo's or anyone else's.
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:18 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2006]
[edited by: martinibuster at 6:18 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2006]
You seem to get your kicks out of putting people down here. Why don't you wipe the cheetos off your mouth and get some fresh air.
that's not a valid excuse... if you were doing this on a professional basis, you'd have an ad server that limited the number of ad exposures per visit and per ad... i think that phpadsnew will do it for free?
your point about overall lower ctr with photo galleries is a good one.... however, one of the things that i do is photo gallery stuff, and how you set up the pages and the pics with the ads is crucial to getting a decent ctr... you should be seeing better ctr than what most people are getting with adsense on forums, especially if you limit the ad exposure.
that's not a valid excuse... if you were doing this on a professional basis, you'd have an ad server that limited the number of ad exposures per visit and per ad... i think that phpadsnew will do it for free?
I am doing this on a professional basis: It's how I earn my living. And since the vast majority of my traffic is on text pages--not on photo-gallery pages--it isn't worth the bother of setting up a system to limit the number of ad exposures.
Why would someone get paid more if he got less impresssions
I agree with the other points you make, but there is a rational argument to answer this particular question.
It is possible that an advertiser is interested in branding rather than conversions. In that case, it is the number of impressions that matters to the advertiser more than clicks/conversions.
So, if you reduce the number of impressions on your site, the advertiser may increase the price they pay for their clicks to try and get more impressions. From a publisher point of view, you end up earning more per click.
There are lots of ifs, buts and assumptions in this argument, of course, but this type of supply/demand is one possible reason why reducing impressions might sometimes result in an increase in earnings.
there are some real advantages to using an ad server, and not just for limiting ad exposures either... the tracking and report generation capabilities are very helpful, and if you do any volume of traffic, it's probably mandatory for integrating multiple advertisers... they can even have their own login to track their ads with.
i'm no expert on the subject of ad servers, but actually running one has been an eye-opener... it's creating additional fine-tuning potential for the site, that could make more $$$ off of the same traffic.
Let's get back to work!
Some of you were right about my site being probably over optimized.... my revenue went up from $80 to $155 for yesterday.
How do you know that the increase was a result of the change?
The point about the seaweed analogy from ealier in this thread is that income ebbs and flows even if you do nothing. The flow of earnings you just experienced might be due to the changes, but it might also be coincidental.
its been at $80 a day for about 20 days now
I hadn't realised that your earnings had been down for so long. If the new level is maintained then it probably is due to the change, but only time will tell.
can you be more specific about the revenue increase?
did you get more clicks? or did the payout per click go up?
