Decreasing EPC

[binary1000]

Wow ... our EPCs have gone way down. Our traffic is up and our click-ratio is the same or higher, but our earnings have dropped to 20% of what they were the last few months because the EPC is so low.

Now the question is ....

Is it due to advertisers dropping promotional holiday programs for keywords that were used the past few months and then new advertisers coming in an bidding for the same words at lower prices?

Or is Google paying a lower percentage now, since we never really had a contract that stipulated what percentage we would get anyway. They can get all the sites signed up and excited and then drop the commissions.

How is everyone else doing this month?

[europeforvisitors]

I don't care about page by page stats, but I'd sure like to see separate data for each of my five sites.

I believe that's been promised, or at least hinted at.

[figment88]

I believe the wording in the email I received about 3 weeks ago was "available soon."

[whizkiddo]

so since we are on this topic, those of us who use services of Tribalfusion or Burst or the likes, could they please post on how the effective CPM of Adsense can be compared with the effective CPM offered by these folks? After all they have been in the game longer then Adsense.

[europeforvisitors]

Banner networks and AdSense aren't even in the same ballpark. With AdSense, I'd guess that I'm currently averaging 10 to 15 times what I earned with Tribal Fusion (and TF paid better than FastClick or Burst).

BTW, what I'd really like to see is a hybrid of AdSense and Tribal Fusion: targeted contextual ads on a network of information sites that have been carefully vetted for quality. That's the kind of "content ad" network that would get the attention of mainstream advertisers and media buyers who are used to running ads in editorial media.

[jimh009]

What EFV has been saying is dead on. While many publishers have been complaining about lower EPC and CTR, I've been seeing the opposite. With AdSense, I've found it is nearly impossible to draw "publisher wide" conclusions. I saw a nice increase in EPC by tweaking around the ads on my site. I've also seen a very big increase in EPC over the past couple of months - as people begin to play for the summer. Conversely, I saw my EPC drop in the fall - which was not surprising at all as I suspected many advertisers pulled their ads during the slow season (for my sites main topic).

While things do vary from day to day, over the course of the month, things do seem to even out fairly well.

By and large, I've also been quite happy with the ads Google displays on my site. While a PSA shows up from time to time, by and large, the ads are an excellent match for my sites and various pages topics.

As for reports, I don't think Google will ever tell you how much you made from a particular page. However, it would be nice if Google let us know how many clicks came from a particular page. This way, I could gauge the effectiveness of different ad layouts, ad placements, etc..Still, not holding my breath on this one - suspect it would require a big upgrade in reports and computing power to provide page by page CTR analysis - considering how many sites are part of this and how many pages carry AdSense ads.

Jim