Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have a set of websites with different topics and with not too much change in traffic and SERP's, and with only little change in content. Say we define my best day in earnings as being 100% (that was late december 2005).
After december my earnings have fluctuated from about 75% (early january) to 25% (end of january) then back to 50% (mid february) and back to 25% (end of februari). Right now I am at about 40%.
Just wanna know how your earnings are fluctuating through the year. Do you ever go under 25% of your best day? Is your average day also about 50% of your best day?
Kind regards,
H.
My current average is 70% of this, the worst day of March 64% of this, the best day of March 77% of this.
But to compare best days with monthly averages is no good idea. The record had been by some extrem high paying clicks.
My monthly average is going up. The development is very stable.
Earnings vary considerably from day to day within a given week, if only because traffic is higher on some days of the week than on others. ECPM is a better metric than earnings for day-to-day comparisons within the same week or month. In February, my lowest day's eCPM was about 26.5% below the February average, while my best day's eCPM was 35% above the month's average. The swings haven't been quite so wide since the beginning of March (but then, we're only 9.5 days into the month).
And I know it is statistically not very clever to compare your average earnings with your best day, but it has some psychological significance. One will always aim to "beat" the best day.
My ECPM doesn't fluctuate as in "moving up and down", as of december it has slowly decreased to about 50% of my best ever ECPM.
Plus, as I keep trying to get across, it makes more sense to track the underlying factors that affect your earnings: impressions, CTR and CPC. The dollars earned makes for a nice feelgood figure, but the number itself has little information value.
If it's possible to have fifty to hundred dollar variances between weekend and weekday performance (not to mention holiday and seasonal fluctuations), I have to imagine that people in the two digit per day earnings can experience pretty volatile swings.
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:11 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2006]
I think the difficulty is with using a daily statistic to many things outside of our control plus and public holidays Sports weather etc
Idealy try to look at the following
1 Traffic monthly as a percentage of the same month from last years traffic
2 ECPM as a percentage of last years ECPM
I have just done some quick calculations using the formula above
Traffic February 2005 - February 2006 -32%
ECPM February 2005 - February 2006 + 22%
This effectivily means my income has decreased in the last 12 months but due to the increase in ECPM not as much as could have happened
steve
The lowest epc was 21% of the years top earning month. This was when I started blocking MFA's
Earnings at the lowest (same month) were down to 50% of maximum.
CTR was at it's higest when showing loads of MFA's and also during the lowest month, The highest was 4 times the lowest ctr.
ecpm varied by about 50% - again the lowest point being just before I blocked MFA's.
Given the variation in traffic, and the fluctuations of adsense I'm not sure how much of this helps.
Given the variation in traffic, and the fluctuations of adsense I'm not sure how much of this helps.
If nothing else, this discussion of fluctuations will help to dispel any incorrect beliefs that advertising income is as steady as a weekly paycheck.
dispel any incorrect beliefs that advertising income is as steady as a weekly paycheck.
That depends on the sites.
My AdSense income is much more stable than my income from my internet promotion company.
From 21 AdSense month, 17 had been highest ever, only 4 a little bit less than last month.
I was 1980 to 1985 employeed, but my paycheck was never so good developing, only very few raises.
If nothing else, this discussion of fluctuations will help to dispel any incorrect beliefs that advertising income is as steady as a weekly paycheck.
I did consider posting some details of last month, but the OP was looking for yearly data. Interestingly enough, it was quite volatile last month and I had daily variations of 60% (ish) up and down from the average for epc, ctr and epcm. I'd consider that normal. The month itself turned out to be an average month though. That may illustrate the point that daily stats are interesting and have their uses, but weekly and monthly stats have much more meaning.
Highest day 18th - 135.6%
Lowest day 1st - 57.3% - not very surprising!
Forgetting 1/2 Jan then 8th - 73.3%
Feb 1st to 28th
Highest ever day 20th - 124.1%
Lowest day 25th - 76.8%
March 1st to 10th
Highest day 8th - 122.2%
Lowest day 5th - 75.5%
But once you've isolated the AdSense component of the stats AdSense still remains a black box leaving you only to speculate about the reasons for the fluctuations. I see fluctuations in every metric and each can have its own individual reason hidden from our eyes by Google's silence on the matter.
For the record I see 20-30% fluctuations in every metric after doing my best to isolate it from other factors. I don't think this is a productive exercise, it is much better to spend time improving the site(s) for visitors than to obsess on things you can't control anyway.
So experimentally changing things on your site does not necessarily account for changes in your stats--you must set up a control page. Since you can't have duplicate controls with so many variables no test is completely reliable and sometimes you are just left with hunches and gut feelings...
So your Adsense swing reaches also rather far Optirex.
What do you think in your case would be the main reason for these large fluctuations?
Or is that hard to say?
The simple answer is traffic numbers, my highest earnings have nearly always been on my busiest days and vice versa with lowest earnings of 50-60%, however since January 9th this year all that has changed and even the lowest traffic weekend days are earning 70+% of the monthly daily average.
Recent Sundays have been quite amazing apart from last weekend when many of us had a rollercoaster ride.
I see these stats as being quite normal for me since they've more or less been like this for the past couple of years and 25% plus or minus from the mean average I would have not thought was a big swing!
Maybe I'm wrong but that is how I've seen sales for the past 30 years in the offline world too however I'm sure 21_blue will chime in at some point about the tide and seaweed:-))
...sales for the past 30 years in the offline world too...
