Earnings going down since January in an unnatural way

[Giano]

Hi everybody.

- Scenario
My site is up and running with AdSense since August.
Since 5 months I have same layout and ad format (336x280 Large Rectangle). And I always use section targeting.

- Side Notes
Since Google started to put one single ad or two ads in the large rectangle (instead of 4) I observered double earning.
Since January they are sparely putting back 4 ads and every day this happens I earn half the money.

- Actual trend
My site is growing uniformely in popularity, raising 500/day new impressions per month since 4 months.
Earning were raising as well. Until early January.

Since second week of January I continued to have raising page impressions, raising clicks and raising Page CTR, but my Page eCPM become the half or less than usual. My earnings halved as well, stopping the raising trend I was having.

I did some day-long observations and found that eCPM doesn't stay down the whole day. It lowers when I start having good values.

Just a speculation but it seems there is something capping me to avoid growing more than what I already achieved so far.

- Countermeasures
What can I do to stop this and start growing again?
I'm already growing in visits and I already saw that I can reach much higher Page eCPM and earnings before this started to happen.

Abandoning the popular Large Rectangle for a 2-ads only format like 468 x 60 Banner could help me?

Other suggestions?

Thank you.

[Nitrous]

Go through all your ads.

Every month I get a new stack of MFAs to get rid of.

Ban every site that isnt related (bad click through)
Every MFA, fake search engine with aff links or ads by adsense or yahoo.
And anything that has no phone number, and isnt directly selling a product in fact.

Every time I do this my income goes back to normal in a day or so.

[G_Smitty]

The topic of a cap seems to come up quite often. I personally do not believe in the cap theory, since my earnings are linear with my traffic. However I can see where this would not be the case.

I believe in order to accurately compare traffic to revenue you must do this on a channel basis and not the big picture. If you have many differently targeted pages your increased traffic could actually be targeted by the lower paying ads thus reducing your total eCPM and total revenues.

I hope this makes sense.

[hunderdown]

Two good suggestions so far. You've really got to get beyond the averages for the site. Averages hide things.

And here's some encouragement: my site has twice hit a plateau that might have seemed to be a cap. In both cases, I was able get off the plateau and keep climbing.

I don't believe in caps. Believing in a cap just gives you an excuse to not do careful analysis of what's happening on your site, and careful planning of how to start increasing your earnings again.

[sailorjwd]

Perhaps you are wearing out some advertiser's budgets and a few drop out during the day thus decreasing the bid competition and lowering your CPM as traffic/clicks increase.

I believe that has happened to me.

[Chapman]

I initiated a topic similar to this a couple of weeks ago. As I didn't get (maybe didn't deserve) much of a response, I did just what G_Smitty recommended... going through my channels and comparing the eCPM and revenues.

My situation was that for a good number of months, my traffic and CTR was making me enough daily to buy a good bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Suddenly, with the same number of impressions and about the same (if not better) CTR, I was making only enough for a can of Coke!

After comparing (spread sheeting) a few dozen channels over a three week period I discovered that the eCPM for the clicked ads had simply dropped to 10 percent of what it had been. As my web site is an eight year old modern art history reference site, I pretty much know my advertisers and to the best of my knowledge the ads I was serving at 10 percent eCPM were the same ads I was serving at full eCPM.

I still don't understand what was happening, however, after a few days the eCPM went back up although it still takes rather consistant dives that I never saw previously. Since I'm not as familiar with the advertisers side, I often wonder whether there are day of the week, time of day or country of access values that come into play.

[FrostyMug]

there's no cap. there are flat times where nothing you do seems to raise the revenue, but it does go up! keep working on it, keep adding content.

[boplicity]

Of course their IS a cap -- it's called the advertiser's budget. There's also something called an advertiser's daily budget ;)

It is real. It is undeniable.

Spend a few weeks playing around with adwords and you will learn a ton about adsense.

[LifeinAsia]

You also have to assume that a lot of visitors are repeat visitors. They're going to see the same ads over and over again. Or, they've already gone to some of the advertisers and there is no need to click on the ads again.

Yes, there will be some new advertisers (depending on your topic)- more likely if you are adding new content. By the way, you didn't mention anything about it, but you ARE adding new content all the time, right? RIGHT?

[Chapman]

"Spend a few weeks playing around with adwords and you will learn a ton about adsense."

boplicity-

I've often suspected this to be true... although I don't believe I've actually seen it stated. Thanks for the advice. I need to go do that!

[Chapman]

"You also have to assume that a lot of visitors are repeat visitors. They're going to see the same ads over and over again. Or, they've already gone to some of the advertisers and there is no need to click on the ads again."

LifeinAsia-

It's not about whether we're getting clicks... both the OP and I have maintained or rasied our CTR's but the value of the click has become worthless. In my case, on one channel, my 50 cent clicks will suddenly be three cent clicks! Then, in a day or so, they'll be at 50 cents again.

[Nitrous]

Lifeinasia said:
but you ARE adding new content all the time, right? RIGHT?

Well I added NO new content in 5 years. My adsense income increased fron 2.5k to 3.0k during the two years I have used it.

[Nitrous]

Plus you dont have enough data for stability in your figures unless you have say 5 to 8k daily visitors, and say 5 to 700 clicks a day.

Any less ant natural mathmatical variations will always be seen.

Plus...
Clicks valu depends on MANY things. Like, actual ad copy, targeting, traffic source, time of year, advertisers budget and if they decide to advertise elswhere at times, adsense algo changes, smartpricing, etc etc...

Thats why you need about 15 websites on different subjects, and many hits/clicks to be able to see any real trends.

[Giano]

First of all thanks to everybody answering so far.

Sorry if I omitted some details to give you the complete picture.

I'll add them here and on the original post, so others can help without problems:

1) I add from 5 to 15 new pages per day. Every day, sunday included.
So no: the cap theory isn't an excuse to not work or add contents :)

2) I use AdWords enough on other projects to be sure something here is not going in a normal way.

3) I only have 1 ad showing (the large rectangle). And all my contents are read in a uniform way.
There is no need to use channels.

Thank you for any further help!

[hunderdown]

3) I only have 1 ad showing (the large rectangle). And all my contents are read in a uniform way.
There is no need to use channels.

This could be the key to your problem. I only use one adblock on my page, but I do NOT assume that all my pages perform the same, which you seem to do.

I don't set up a different channel for every page, and if you have a large site you can't, but you can group like pages together into channels, and if you set up channels for the most-visited individual pages, you can start learning about the performance of your different pages.

Otherwise, you could be going in the wrong direction with the pages you are adding! I have learned that certain pages on my site don't do well with AdSense. Others do very well. So I try to add more of the ones that do well.

There's lots more you can do if you set up channels to track pages, but that's one important thing to start.