Forum Moderators: martinibuster
What are they up to this time?
[webmasterworld.com...]
From what many others are posting I assume they are seeing similar?
I've seen some very strange statistics this past week. Yesterday, Saturday 13th, saw a straight 10% off my average EPC and my lowest earnings' day since the first week of January. The Easter weekend was positively steaming in comparison.The AdSense Page Impressions were "normal" at 70% of weekday PI's, CTR was down 13% and eCPM down 14%. I'm checking out the last two years' stats for comparison.
What I shall also do is reinstate a niche AdWords campaign I halted a few weeks ago since the CPC was going through the roof. If these bids have returned to a more realistic level then I shall have my answer, if not, then something else is amiss and hopefully Saturday's maintenance will have tweaked it back into line.
I had to reduce the served ad impressions to a ridiculous level to remain viable.
If you are going to try the first one I would advise careful gradual testing.
Reducing ads to limit them to the higher paying ones potentially increases your eCPM, but doesn't it also potentially decrease your CTR as readers are presented with less choices?
I went the other way than you last week and changed a 120x240 (2 ads) to a 120x600 (4 ads) to hopefully increase the CTR. Perhaps that was an unwise decision.
P.S.: My niches don't seem to get MFAs. What I do get are lots of ads for products that are what I consider to be scams (free ringtones that aren't free) and obviously illegal services (download any song, any movie, including music and movies I know are not legally available).
I've recently been resorting to all of the above-mentioned tactics, reducing the number of ads, relentlessly cracking down on MFA's, but it hasn't helped. The value of my clicks is still lower than it's ever been.
I give up -- AS will do whatever it does. Thinking of removing it entirely for now, and am working really hard on my Amazon store. :-)
actually it raises my ctr but what it can do is lower your final earnings if you do not know what you are doing.
blocking the scams also will work towards your visitors trusting your site more and clicking more.
17-1 self click = 16
I am interested in creating other sites in the future, though, with a focus on articles rather than images! So what I've learned about AS so far and continue to learn will come in handy.
I can't complain at all, really--initially, like many here, I added AS to my pages in hopes of covering the site's costs, and like many, I've done much better than that. Even at worst, it's a little extra spending money.
miki
