Dramatic drop in Click Thru % and Clicks

Clicks and % of clicks way down today...

[triumph]

Has anyone else experienced a dramatic drop in Click Thru Rate and Clicks today? I have about the same amount of impressions.. And then to boot, Adsense was down for about an hour... any connections? or am I just paranoid?

[sezampicika]

mee to

[whizkiddo]

should i also mention that PSAs have reared their ugly head one too many times in this month? I never used to see PSA on my index pages but 3-4 times out of 10 I get to see them. Should I ask G about it?

[TheDave]

There seem to be a lot of this type of post on quite a regular basis, and I also watch my click through rate and earnings per click fluctuate from day to day. The fluctuations are caused by so many factors outside of our power that we should not (in my opinion) concern ourselves with them. There are advertisers joining adwords every day and there are probably also advertisers scaling back their adwords spending as their natural SERPs improve. There are all sorts of different users, and they will click on different ads, all of which I believe pay according to the advertisers bid. Some people around here even believe earnings are held back and deposited later, just to keep us 'guessing' as to how the system could work. I find it hard to buy into that angle myself, but you never do know, google has been keeping many webmasters (not to mention the competition!) on their toes lately ;)

edit - Just checked my AdSense stats, CTR for today is average and EPC is slighty higher

[Marcia]

Impressions on the high side of average, clicks, CTR and $ way down. It's been pretty much the same advertisers for months, so that's not it.

[irock]

I've been trying to blend in my ads with the content so click-thru isn't dropping for me... but CPC dropped to all time low. so i guess click-thru compensates for the loss of CPC drop.

[onfire]

This game is one hell of a roller coaster.

Just in the last 5 days alone where impressions & Clicks have been consistent, the difference in earnings for these clicks on each of these five days have been unreal going from one extreme to the other.

One day its a black Monday way way way down, the next day for the same amount of clicks its triple, and then back down to the bottom of the well and then double the next day.

This makes for one hell of a ride, you just cannot judge it as its changing all the time, I think its more now than it did 6 months ago.

For the record the last 3 months have been steady and consistent, but i saw a big change near the start of Jan.

I don't do Adwords, but is it really like this for the pricing, going from a big high to a low from day to day?

Or is it Adsense controlling the % for the clicks we get and making changes daily?

[2oddSox]

I'd actually been contemplating starting such a thread for a few days now but, as TheDave points out, there are so many variables at stake it's hard to determine if this is a trend or a blip.

What I do know however is that for months my average CTR has been constant to within a fraction of a percent. The last few days have seen that CTR fall to just 20% of normal. Same impressions, no PSA's (across a few sites), significantly lower CTR.

Very unusual indeed.

[patoruzu]

On February 5 we had the lowest CTR and absolute number of clicks since we started the program (in Spanish language Adsense was launched in december). The previous lower CTR was on Thursday, too.

[Mario]

Not me. I'm running a directory site so I suppose I'm less vulnerable to niche trends. Everything is running smoothly and we had our second best day ever on Feb 3rd this week.

[CalArch90]

The 5th was horrible in terms of CTR and EPC.

The worst part about it is it was a very expensive day in terms of my CPC campaigns. My only consolation is that the 4th was a particularly strong day.

I guess it's best to forget about the daily ups and downs and just concentrate on the monthly average?

Let's hope today is better.

[whizkiddo]

Amen CalArch90 Amen

Just scratched out my head trying to figure whats going on. But as someone else put it "Its a rollercoaster". Unfortunately we havent had any "strong" days either, so its really hurting the bottomline.

[level80]

For me CPC has been dropping since a peak on the 3rd of this month. However CPC is 5% higher than when I started with Adsense about half a year ago.

[loanuniverse]

Last 6 days clicks up by about 50% with CTR increasing slightly less than that.

The reason: new pages coming in at a second website.

Good news: Higher overall revenue

Bad news: EPC decreased meaning those new pages are not as good as the ones dealing with the other topics.

[europeforvisitors]

No complaints here. February CTRs are within the normal range, EPC is up slightly from last month, and effective CPM (the most important metric) is way up.

(Mind you, this is the time of year when I'd expect the numbers to be up, because my topic's revenues are influenced by "seasonal factors.")

[varya]

I had a record number of alternate ad impressions on February 5th.

Whenever alt ads go up, my ctr and revenue always drop (unsurprisingly).

[401khelp]

CTR is stable and my EPC is up over 20% in the last two weeks.

[triumph]

Well, just an update.. Things appear to be back to normal today. Same amount of impressions, with three times as many clicks, and 3 times the click thru percentage.. Makes no sense. Just makes me wonder.. It's hard because I love adsense.. I've never made money on the internet before adsense came along.. but sometimes that stat tracker causes more confusion than it's worth... maybe I should check once a week?

[whizkiddo]

Loanuniverse, you mentioned new pages led to increase in CTR. how is that possible? Has anyone else had such an experience? Shouldnt new pages just increase the number of impressions , consequently the number of clicks and amount earned but CTR should remain same?

[loanuniverse]

It all depends on whether or not the new pages had the same layout as the old pages. This is just guessing on my part... an educated guess anyway, and could not be sure unless I had more detailed reporting.

[europeforvisitors]

If the new pages are running highly targeted ads that attract more clickthroughs than your existing pages, there should be an increase in overall CTR. (Although it could be a very small increase, depending on the number of high-CTR pages and the total number of pages in the site.)