Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Mike
I wonder if you people with a "good month" are peddling swimming pools, beach towels, surf boards, and lemonade. It would help me understand.
I'm having an okay month with my European travel site (AdSense eCPM is up over May and June), but I'm sure my earnings would be better without the current heat wave. Who wants to take a weekend trip to France or Italy if the temperature is over well over 30 C / 90 F?
I wonder if you people with a "good month" are peddling swimming pools, beach towels, surf boards, and lemonade. It would help me understand.
Fireworks displays. It dropped off rather sharply on July 5th.
Who wants to take a weekend trip to France or Italy if the temperature is over well over 30 C / 90 F?
Maybe that's one reason why my site performs well this month - people rather take the 'virtual trip'... ;)
(32.5°C right now in Northern Germany)
Could be advertisers end month budgets, or people are starting to think "Back to School." Schools here start the second week of August.
Bad .... 16
Ok ...... 10
Good.. 10
Mike
I would say that I can attribute the entire increase to adding one row of Link Units at the very tip top of my pages back in the middle of June. I'm still averaging $3.50 to $4.00 a day just from that link unit.
Usually July is a down month for me due to folks on vacations, etc. Maybe it's the economy or high gas prices and people aren't taking vacations. I run a forum and 60% or better of my visits come from folks at work. So, when they go on vacation my visits drop, but not this year.
Now if I could just figure out why some days have a higher eCPM and earnings than others, given similar impressions and clicks.
Now if I could just figure out why some days have a higher eCPM and earnings than others, given similar impressions and clicks.
Most likely, it's just supply and demand. AdSense is an auction-based system where the variables on any given day are likely to include:
- The number of advertisers
- The number of keywords bid on
- The actual bids
- The number of publishers
- The number of publishers' ad impressions
- The keywords that match those ad impressions
- The number of site-targeted CPM ads in the mix
- The number of "image ads" in the mix
...and so on.
It's too bad none of those variables are within our control.
June 2006 was a lot better than June 2005.
According to my current stats I've just passed my earnings from last July (2005).
Your posting got me thinking... what did I do last July. To my surprise, July 1 - 26 this year is a whole 114% higher than July 1 - 26 last year.
Not bad at all. If my daily average holds for the next 4 days I'll top $700 for the month for the first time. My goal by December is to be at $1000 a month.
One of my worst months, due to a number of factors, I moved house and had no connection, was addicted to an online game, put in very little effort and only made about $80 for the month.
Averaging about 4000 visitors per. day.
Highest Click was $1.50.
Lowest $0.00
Between $6.00 and $1.50 per. day.
Most likely, it's just supply and demand.
I think the real answer is... it's the so-called smartpricing algo.
My site is a general reference site, averaging 6-700k pageviews per month (I am speaking of pageviews, not adsense impressions)
Traffic is VERY regular, 20 to 25k pageviews a day on weekdays, 10 to 15k on the weekends, all coming from SEs.
All other things being equal, ECPM changes WILDLY, from 1x to 2.4x from day to day. That's what makes a good or a bad day.
Being a reference site, it's not niche-oriented, so it's unlikely that single advertisers turning on and off their campaign will affect me a lot. And, the numbers are large enough to expect some statistical uniformity (as I have on other values)
Also, I am not filtering any ad on my site, based on the fact that the competitive filter is just a toy Google has given us (no real effect in filtering ads to people in other parts of the world, useless uless you can block by advertiser ID, etc.). So it cannot be large MFAs sneaking back into my ads and changing my stats.
If, as they keep telling us, Smartpricing depended on the advertisers' conversions, why should it change so much, so suddenly?
My conclusion is: the Smartpricing algo is something very different from what they tell us, (see ann's thread about this) and you only jave to sit back, relax and enjoy your roller coaster ride.
But, I feel it's a bit unfair: I am providing G a stable, reliable service, and they are giving me back a roller-coaster. Would Mr Page enjoy a similar reliability in his income?
A side note about conversion tracking, supposedly the base of Smartpricing: I have made a small suvey on about 30 Adwords advertisers in my country. Only 6 knew what conversion tracking was, and only 1 tried to implement it, but later gave up. Is that the sort of data G relies upon to decide how much should I get? Bah!
And, to get to the point fo this thread: "Good Month Or Bad?". Crazy as usual, crazier than ever, with differences even stronger than usual. I am starting to think there is a "smartpricing dance" between data centers, similar in effect to the SERP dances.
Although I can't complain since last month was our best month ever for revenue.
Also as a response the the side note, if you read the court ordered independent report on Google's click fraud efforts, they admit that they have a very low response rate on conversion data from advertisers.
[edited by: Brian123 at 2:05 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]
A side note about conversion tracking, supposedly the base of Smartpricing: I have made a small suvey on about 30 Adwords advertisers in my country. Only 6 knew what conversion tracking was, and only 1 tried to implement it, but later gave up. Is that the sort of data G relies upon to decide how much should I get? Bah!
Google doesn't claim that smart pricing is determined by real-time conversion-tracking data for individual publisher accounts. (Such tracking may be a factor, but--if it is--it's just one factor.)
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, Google's only official published statement of "How smart pricing works" was made when the feature was announced:
[adwords.google.com...]
Also, the idea that the original OP's up-and-down revenues are the result of smart pricing seems pretty farfetched to me, especially if--as we were told by a former moderator here--smart pricing is applied by account, not by page. It's far more likely that factore listed in my earlier post are responsible for the OP's daily variations. After all, AdWords and AdSense are auction-based systems where pricing is constantly in flux.
(A former executive of Sprinks, a PPC network that was later acquired by Google, once told me that Sprinks advertisers were like "day traders" in the stock market. Many--not all--AdWords/AdSense advertisers are likely to fit that description, too, especially in sectors that attract "AdSense arbitrageurs" and other advertisers who make money with MFA sites or affiliate sales.)
1) Drop in search engine ranking (since 6-27-2006).
2) Hot weather, power outages and low summer traffic.
3) Network outage at google.com since last night.
this month i'm about 40% down in revenue, that's huge after being steady for a while. but today a lot of other people are posting their sites have recovered as well. if that's the case and the sites are really back (not another glitch), i should be back on track next month... maybe then I can finally reach my first 4 digit month.
