Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I know these questions are very boring, and can depend on a number of different issues (maybe it's as simple as many of my new users being ad blind), but I'm wondering if anything at Adsense has changes since around the 20th July?
My site has not changed much (if at all) in the last month, it's not a blog or forum, and pretty much runs itself. I've added (literally) a couple of new pages in the last month, but they don't get much traffic yet, and the CTR drop appeared to happen before I added these pages.
Any ideas?
Have you noticed any changes in the ads being displayed? Are they less relevant? Less interesting? That could also decrease CTR.
I haven't noticed ads being especially different recently, although, I have to admit that I can go a week or so without looking at the site myself, so I might not notice if they have changed. However, when I have looked, the ads all look pretty specific. I'm getting about the same (quite high) CPC, albeit with fewer clicks per thousand, so I don't think that it's because I'm being flooded with (cheap) MFA ads or anything. I certainly haven't noticed any.
My site did the exact same thing. Google is simply shooting me cheap ads now I am convinced.
I was hitting on average 105 bucks per day and all the sudden in the first week of August I dropped %50 in one day and have stayed down %50 ever since.
All hits, uniques, click thrus, EVERYTHING except the Cost Per Thousand has remained the same.
CPM went from roughly 15% to 7% - 9% and I have written Google and told them how obvious it is and they wrote back a typical form mail back ie - check our optimization page, ads fluctuate over time, etc.
Fluctuate? %50 in one day? Yea right.
Bottom line all things remained the same except for Cost Per Thousand and my income for this site went from 105 to 50.
Google is now taking a bigger percentage of the take or something and Yahoo looks good now. Less click but they pay 3x the price. It comes out ahead of Google at least.
onedodd, you're talking about earnings per click going down. The OP is talking about CTR going down while EPC stayed the same.
Yes, that's correct. My CTR (and, therefore, eCPM) has gone down significantly. My CPC has stayed about the same, and, in my case, my average earnings per day haven't dropped because I've been getting more traffic (and hence ad impressions). However, had my CTR not dropped, I'd be earning about 50% more than I am at the moment.
I think I'm tempted to put it down to "life". I can't help feeling that it's got something to do with my traffic going up, but I can't really see how that would effect CTR, so I guess I'm just lucky that traffic has, coincidentally, gone up, and so my earnings haven't suffered.
For me, AdSense is just another "life revenue stream", not the be-all and end-all. My site was never conceived or designed with advertising in mind, so anything I do get is just a nice extra... Although it's getting to a stage now where I would most certainly miss it if it stopped tomorrow.
The higher your CTR, the less likely it will maintain over time, all things being equal, which they never are.
This would half your CTR and ecpm.
I guess this is way too obvious but I have to ask. Did you add an additional add unit?
No, I haven't. Althoguh that would only effect eCPM when the report is viewed in "Ad Unit" or "Individual Ad" wouldn't it? - Eg, it wouldn't make a difference when the report is viewed by "Page"?
My traffic (eg, Page impressions) is higher than before, however, the number of sessions is up, but not by so much. Basically it means I’m getting more page views per user (by my calculations, an average of just over 3 page views per visitor on my site. In July it was averaging at 2.3).
CTR is (obviously) based on page views, not sessions. If I calculate my CTR per session (number of sessions / number of clicks * 1000), then although it’s fallen, it hasn’t fallen by much, and is within the historic norm.
As a double check, if I divide my calculated CTR per session by hits per session (just over 3), I get the page CTR as Google displays, so that indicates my logic is correct (I think!).
So basically, my CTR and eCPM have dropped, but only because people are spending more time looking around my site before clicking on an ad (on average).
So that's okay. It's just because my site is too interesting! :-)
