Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've spent the past three months working with AdSense and experimenting with ways to get my revenue to increase.
Initially I was doing $2-3 a day, but thanks to my experimenting, I was getting $10-13 a day.
Also during this time, thanks to search engine optimization, my traffic has close to doubled.
My problem is that for the past five days or so, my numbers have been way down. I know that there's normal fluctuation, but I've only been doing about $5 a day, less than half of what my revenue was before.
I have changed nothing in my site. My traffic is the same, my CTR is the same, but my revenue is cut in half?
I also experimented with my block-list, wondering if MFA's or scammy sites was hurting my earnings, but blocking sites like that further hurt my earnings.
Does anybody have any idea other than random fluctuation why my numbers have dropped so drastically? I know that smart pricing affects your revenue, but my numbers and CTR have gone up. Shouldn't that make my ads more valuable, not less?
Anyway, I'm open for anyone's thoughts. Thanks.
Can Smart Pricing Hurt You?
Q. Can a whip hurt you?
A. Only when it is used on you!
Smart pricing (I assume) did something similar to me about three months ago. After working my butt off to build it up my Adsense revenue dropped by more than 50% overnight. Unfortunately I have neither the time or the knowledge to do anything about it. I am just too tired to play this game to the max any more.
Here's an example. Maybe before, out of a hundred visitors, they each clicked 2 ads, and eventually 10 of them converted. So that's 200 clicks, with 10 conversions, a 5% conversion rate.
Now that the ads are more prominent after you've tweaked your site to increase CTR, they each click 10 ads, but still only 15 of them ever convert. That's 1000 clicks, with 15 conversions, or a 1.5% conversion rate.
So your new clicks are less valuable than before. Theoretically, it shouldn't hurt you, because after all you produce more total conversions now (15) than before (10), but the algorithm can't always get it right with limited statistics. So yes it can hurt you.
The morals of the story are (1) Increasing traffic is better than increasing CTR, and (2) When you tweak your site for adsense, don't just base your tweaking on your CTR -- base it on your eCPM, accounting for the several-week delay for smart pricing.
If not, have a very close look at the advertisers - these might be low paying ads, working off arbitrage. Also, you might want to completely erase your blocking list and build a new one. Takes only a few days, but you've got all the latest MFAs and Aff's blocked.
(Then again, as it seems to not work for you, you may consider to leave the blocking list blank.)
That's why I really don't understand what's happening. EVERYTHING is exactly the way it was before and my revenue has just cut in half.
I currently have 3 ad blocks running per page. Should I try cutting it down to improve CTR?
One in the left navigation, one 468X60 bar above the beginning of my text, and one 280 square within the body of the text.
All in all, the three ad blocks perform very similar, coming within a dollar of each other's total for March. However, the left navigation does have the lowest CTR and eCPM, and it loads first. Am I better to get rid of it? My only concern is that my other two ad blocks don't display as many ads, and cutting that left block would knock out half my total ads.
Does this sound like a good idea? Overall, have people had better revenue with less ad blocks?
Re multiple adblocks. I only use one. You can definitely reduce your average click value by using more, because every additional ad you show, in theory, pays less than the one "above" it. Whether too many ads can have an impact on smart pricing is debated here, but it's not debated that less can be more. Try it and see.
Finally, I don't agree that increasing CTR necessarily means getting hit with increased smart pricing, and seeing your gains canceled out. There are ways to increase CTR by getting better targeted visitors to your page that will not hurt conversions....
