Forum Moderators: martinibuster
How long does it usually take to turn around?
Thanks
Is the fact our income has dived as a result of there being less pie the fault of publishers? Well, in some cases that's bound to be true. But in many others the reason is bound to be simply that there is a lot less pie per person due to the mushrooming number of publishers - many of them arbitrageurs.
There's one obvious weakness in that argument: The pie has been growing, and by quite a bit. We can know the size of the pie from looking at Google's quarterly earnings statements, but Google doesn't release the number of AdSense publishers, so any guesses about how many slices the pie has been cut into are pure conjecture.
As for the question of whether it's "the publisher's fault" when income drops, that obviously depends on the publisher. Some publishers do bring on their own troubles, but others are simply victims of market forces. When things go bad, it's obviously easier to blame a third party (Satan, Google, or the Rain God) than to accept the fact that #*$! happens and not everything lends itself to a simple explanation.
This is the kind of post that separates the noise-makers from those who have something to contribute. danimal and many others have made some great observations.
I don't know about you but I think this a chilling development. How can you know this won't happen to you?
Where does one begin when diagnosing a 75% drop in AdSense earning?
Anyone else want to add to this list?
No nasty pages that would be against the TOS. All traffic is organic Have adverts on 85% of pages.
AdSense Quality Score?
Hey, here's a chilling thought: Suppose AdSense instituted a "quality check" and as part of it determined that a certain ratio of aff links to content resulted in a low quality score which then turned on Smart Pricing?
I think a lot of people in this forum, have recently become slightly dis-illusioned with the interaction of WebmasterWorld. This is due to an increase in "junior" member posting "I've been banned threads" etc that, when one looks at their domains, and their other postings here (if there are any) they have obviously breached TOS.
The issue here, is affecting many key players in this forum, that have respectable reputations and provide concrete advice. Lets all pool together and see if we can figure this one out.
I was wondering whether any of you guys have PPC campaigns running on MSN or Yahoo. Is Google penalising traffic that is arriving from PPC's on other networks? (Although, my gut says that Google should be plesed to have poached the traffic from a competitor).
How about changes in currency? Does anyone here have any figures based on exchange rates? At the moment any US client is going to be struggling with the US/UK currency rates - and therefore may be lowering their click values to compensate.
And so on.
However yes, macroeconomic factors (how well an economy is doing as a whole) will lead to fluctuations in advertising spend. Due to the size of Adsense though, how it's set up and its international nature things will fluctuate from day to day, month to month etc.
If earnings are going down, it can be fixed. Measures that have been known to improve things are:-
Optimising the ads on the site (blending) and positioning
Running multiple ads where there was just one
Using Adlinks
Using Adsense for Search
Running ads on more pages on the site
Removing ads from poorly performing pages
Increasing traffic to the site
Increasing quality of traffic to the site
Increasing quality of advertisers by onpage factors
However a lot is beyond the publisher's control (or too time consuming to do).
Re the other items you mentioned:
1. Optimising the ads on the site (blending) and positioning - a lot of people that have been hit have already optimized and blended, so I don't think this is the issue here.
2. Running multiple ads where there was just one - in most cases this appears to have the opposite effect, giving you a perhaps watered down selection of advertisers, and not necessarily giving you the most targetted ones.
3. Using Adlinks - I think most would agree, that adlinks work well, and hence have adopted this avenue already.
4. Using Adsense for Search - once again, I think most have already adopted this.
5. Running ads on more pages on the site - this is debatable, as many sites find that having a number of well targetted pages with adverts works better than having adverts on many, if not all pages.
6. Removing ads from poorly performing pages - this one I find interesting, and there have been recent threads indicating that the removal of adverts from poorly performing pages has resuted in increased revenues. Perhaps this need further exploration from everyone out there - a few more figures to work with.
7. Increasing traffic to the site - once again, traffic to the site doesn't seem to be the issue in these cases as most advertisers are reporting that they have had significant increases in traffic - both with seo and PPC.
8. Increasing quality of traffic to the site - qualtiy of traffic could be a big issue.
9. Increasing quality of advertisers by onpage factors - not quite sure what you mean here.
The issue here with this recent decline in revenue per click is that the people affected are people who have been using adsense for many years - they know all about ad placement, page optimization etc, etc. There is obviously something else at play.
Any thoughts guys?
I agree with you that advertisers targeting a foreign country will be affected by the rates of exchange on their imports. However surely this would be sorted out during the planning stages?
If a US advertiser is targetting the uk for customers, and he is getting a poor exchange, then surely he might reduce his monthly advertsing expenditure to compensate for this - or am I off the wall here?
The wording of the ads and how they're targetted would affect their return far more than any exchange rate fluctuations would do so in the short term. Obviously this depends on what their profit margin is. Exchange rate fluctuations within normal bounds are factored into any competent operation of this ilk. The monthly advertising expenditure is dependent on how well the ads are performing for them. If they're getting good results, it'll go up and vice versa. Areas that may have made good money for them in the past because they were one of a few advertisers can end up attracting more competition and therefore their profits would drop as they were outbid.
1) Yes but if this hasn't been done already it can be used to counteract the effect of a drop.
2) Possibly - however it also gives more opportunity to click. I agree though that your overal ad click rate will suffer but the page CTR will go up.
3) Personally I found the opposite regarding Adlinks but of course mileage may vary.
4) Adsense for Search - you are now allowed two search boxes (most sites just have one).
5) Yes, although it can help with the site targetting of ads (as opposed to CPM ads). A lot of ads are targetted to the general theme of the site when the bot has targetting troubles and ads on more pages help the Adsense algorithm determine what that is.
6) The reason for this is that it affects the site-wide statistics. Removing them from poorly performing pages is like the equivalent of improving your traffic. The ads as a whole perform better which can lead to improved CPC, eCPM because of the way the system works.
7) Yes, the relationship between traffic and revenue isn't linear. However it is a factor is site targetted ads and as you pointed out - get too big and you get to the law of diminishing returns as you burn through the daily budgets of the higher paying advertisers.
8) Yes but quality traffic pays off. Untargetted traffic leads to people seeing ads for something they're not there for if they're merely curious about your site. Users already interested in the theme of your site are more likely to click on the ads
9) I meant removing (or rewording) any keywords that result in mistargetted ads. You can also reword the page to more lucrative topics that result in ads with higher CPC bids. There are other things that help too - like section targetting so the ads aren't targetted to your site's navigation bar and instead to the actual content. Tagging the ads with their position on the page can help assess the relative performance too.
The issue here with this recent decline in revenue per click is that the people affected are people who have been using adsense for many years
I fall into the category of using it for many years - 3 years and 4 months.
- they know all about ad placement, page optimization etc, etc
Yes, but even those who think they have the perfect placement still have room for improvement. For instance nobody talks about cycling through different Adsense color palettes anymore to reduce "banner blindness" - or in putting the ads in different places on different places so the user doesn't just ignore them.
There is obviously something else at play.There is it's called smartpricing and Quality Score. The landing page of the advertiser never used to be a factor in their CPC price - just how their ad performed. However you have to keep up with the algorithm changes or risk being left behind.
QS hitting the Content Side now?
It would be interesting if an algo could decide which sites are high quality and which are low. I guess, it will depend upon many multiple factors. I just hope it will be more dynamic and self correcting both upwards and downwords and not totally inflexible like the adWords side of things..
We wait and see..
one was smartpricing (altering the clickprice depending on how qualified the Adsense bot thought the lead was)
two was quality scoring the landing page (this was partly because abitrage was becoming a major problem)
three was allowing the advertisers to specify an action (eg user goes to ordering page or does something) which they want which Adwords/Adsense can track
Overall this leads to higher CTR rates (better relevancy of ads), but lower CPC rates (discounts come into play).
The history as well as action seems to be a major factor now though (both of the publisher's page and the advertiser's). The incorporation of Adwords actions into Google Analytics has helped advertisers to optimise and track their campaigns too. All these extra factors mean that what has worked in the past, suddenly doesn't. The ratio of publisher/advertisers is also not what it once was. Arbitragers are affecting the system in ways it wasn't before.
It seems so. I have been saying this for about 5 weeks!
My income, epc and click through are all rising since start of october and I finished up a third up! Pure real pre google content natural traffic.
It seems that the "better" a site is (the more original, oldest, most linked to, stickiest, best page rank, best qualified traffic who knows what) that the algo sees the better the ads are (improved click through) and the better the epc.
Its as if they match the adwords ads with low quality scores to the asense websites with the lowest percieved quality.
According to Google, "Quality Score is determined by your the AdWords advertiser's keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors."
It's all in the Google Adword's Learning Centre [google.com]
To understand Adsense you need to understand the other half of the coin - Adwords as well as Adsense. Otherwise you don't have the full picture - like missing half the pieces to a jigsaw.
I know that everyone thinks there own site is great, and so one has to take everything with a pinch of salt, but there definately seems to be something else going on. :)
However, that doesn't mean that some kind of QS approach couldn't be used on the publisher side. In fact, it already is, in the form of "smart pricing." From Google's point of view, it might make perfect sense to use "smart pricing" scoring factors to influence the allocation of ads and/or the payout percentage for individual publishers.
Whether this is already happening is anybody's guess, but the idea certainly isn't farfetched, and anyone looking at the matter objectively might find the idea perfectly reasonable. Using smart-pricing data or some other QS mechanism to allocate ads and/or weight payout percentages to favor certain types of content would make it easier for Google to starve out the types of publishers who, in Google's opinion, aren't an asset to the network or the Web.
A number of bods that have been hit obviously have comprehensive and well done sites that I would be surprised if Google gave them a poor QS. If all there traffic is organic, and they have a high position in the serps, then you would expect them to have an increase in dcpm - however, this, apparently is not happening.
Other factors could be at work, too, such as:
- U.S. midterm elections. (Similar to the "World Cup effect" that some of us saw last summer.)
- Increased ad spending in other online media at the expense of AdSense.
- Advertisers feeling an economic pinch since the new landing-page Quality Scores were introduced on the search side. (There seems to be a belief in this forum that all the landing-page QS victims have fled to the content network to buy cheap ads, but it's possible that just as many of those victims have been forced out of advertising altogether or are tightening their ad spends while trying to survive.)
As for AdSense monies being sucked by MySpace, I don't think that's likely, at least not in my sector. I just don't think many MySpace users are even seeing, let alone clicking on, ads for Elbonian luxury cruises or Bad Widgetburg walking tours. If anyone's sucking up inventory in my sector, it's probably TripAdvisor or one of the other keyword-driven, database-generated, users-filling-in-the-blanks "Travel 2.0" megasites.
I think this is a very good point. Do you not think - and indeed, if you read the adwords forum several weeks back, there were a lot of people so disgruntled with Google that they were moving if not all, than a large chunk of their advertising expenditure to other places -MSN, YPN etc.
I also think, that since the last algo change, there will be a number of advertisers who have persisted for a month or so, with their increased CPC to see if the QS changed for their landing pages etc, only to find that it didn't, and have now been forcedout of the arena.
As we know from the adwords forum, there was a lot of money not being spent on adwords that was several months ago. I think that a lot of what we are seeing now, is just the trickle down effect of that last big change in Adwords. Just a thought .....
It takes however long you delay looking for an alternative method to monetize your site.
This statement gets my vote as the best answer to smartpricing. It's taken me 3 years of ups and downs (more downs than ups, especially lately) with Adsense to realize this is the path I should follow, creating a valuable (income producing) service for my users.
First, unless you are getting a significant part of your income from site-targeted ads at a good eCPM, I'd take david_uk's suggestion of switching off site-targeting, and see what happens. Might actually reset your site's "rating," or give the algo. a tweak.
Second, I'd look very carefully at channels and identify the pages that are doing the worst. Switch those over to your successful affiliate programs or to direct advertising. I base that advice on personal experience. I was hit by Smart Pricing after it was introduced in 2004. Over the course of about five months my earnings went down by about half. To help fix it, I followed an idea that was controversial at the time--I took ads off a few pages that got high numbers of impressions, hardly any clicks, and low-value clicks at that. Within a couple of months I was back on track and I have not been noticeably affected by SP ever since.
three was allowing the advertisers to specify an action (eg user goes to ordering page or does something) which they want which Adwords/Adsense can track
This is the one that scares me. I am an AdWords advertiser as well and have been using Analytics. I guess I'm seeing now, that the goals I set up (and presumably others have set up) could be giving Google a warped view of traffic quality across their network.
Analytics is meant to be a tool to fine-tune a site for maximum revenue, but it can just as easily be used as basic stat reporting, and the goals can be set up just to get an idea of how people are ariving at various sections of the site. I've set up goals related to pages that had nothing to do with direct revenue. Am I paying more for traffic that is more likely to hit that goal, or just less for traffic that is less likely? Smart pricing can go either way obviously.
And what about the message I'm sending to Google with all these somewhat arbitrary goals? Am I paying less for your traffic because I've set up a goal that is unrelated to the keywords I'm bidding on? Am I paying more for traffic because I have goals set up in sequence on a multi-page form? By not using Analytics exclusively as Google intended, am I mucking up the waters of what's quality, are others?
It's a thought...
And the blackhats start to wonder, could I abuse Analytics to get cheaper clicks all around?
I still think my particular drop could be directly related to the changes I made to increase CTR. Same ads, same content, same site, same traffic, new position, new dimensions and new color scheme turned into 400% increase in CTR and 66% drop in EPC. Maybe higher CTR means more of the ads in the unit are being clicked, so some are lower value, but that shouldn't account for a drop from .60 to .20 average per click.
Second, I'd look very carefully at channels and identify the pages that are doing the worst. Switch those over to your successful affiliate programs or to direct advertising.
I still haven't figured this one out. How do you know what pages in a channel are performing well. In my case I have broad channels. Example - a channel for news stories. I have over 300 different news stories is this channel. How would I even begin to figure out which pages in this channel are performing well?
Is the fact our income has dived as a result of there being less pie the fault of publishers? Well, in some cases that's bound to be true. But in many others the reason is bound to be simply that there is a lot less pie per person due to the mushrooming number of publishers - many of them arbitrageurs.
There's one obvious weakness in that argument: The pie has been growing, and by quite a bit. We can know the size of the pie from looking at Google's quarterly earnings statements, but Google doesn't release the number of AdSense publishers, so any guesses about how many slices the pie has been cut into are pure conjecture.
Remember that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. I think we are taliking statistics here :)
We know the pie has been growing, I did say this in my earlier post, but what Google don't seem to disclose is how the publisher base is growing. I agree it's going to be pure conjecture, but I think most people would agree that it's likely the arbitrageurs are the biggest growing sector of publishers, and are taking an increasingly bigger slice of the pie. It may well be that many of the threads we see complaining of ever decreasing incomes are as the result of smaller pie to divide amongst an ever increasing publisher base.
As for the question of whether it's "the publisher's fault" when income drops, that obviously depends on the publisher. Some publishers do bring on their own troubles, but others are simply victims of market forces. When things go bad, it's obviously easier to blame a third party (Satan, Google, or the Rain God) than to accept the fact that #*$! happens and not everything lends itself to a simple explanation.
That's my point. A decrease in income may well be because of market forces, including the idea of less pie to share above. The problem is that in this forum there is always the presumption that the woes of a publiser are the publishers fault. There is never the discussion of the fact there is probably less pie to go round after those that can, and do milk the system have taken their cut.
It seems to me that webmasters woes are probably more related to how good they are at gaming the system (or not) than content these days. Sad, but likely to be true.
The problem is that in this forum there is always the presumption that the woes of a publiser are the publishers fault.
Really? I thought the prevailing opinion was that all publisher woes are Google's fault. :-)
It seems to me that webmasters woes are probably more related to how good they are at gaming the system (or not) than content these days.
Or simply being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. #*$! happens, but sometimes Shinola does, too.
Or simply being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. #*$! happens, but sometimes Shinola does, too.
Yes but as webmasters we are responsible for our own luck too. As to blaming Google - people always like to point fingers and not admit that they might be at fault. Google isn't a person - it's a set of algorithms. There may be people running the machine that is Google - but we're all just describing aspects of how the machine goes.
That's why the poster about gaming the system rang true. To some here it is a game as we're so seperated from the advertisers, the visitors etc by distance and a screen. So it becomes like a game (which is probably the best way to view it). Here we're just using the strategy of collaboration, which is the only sane way to play.
The problem is that this is a game with constantly changing rules.
The conditions in which we play the game do change. Baseball or cricket played on a hot July day or a rainy April day is the same game. But the conditions are different, and the players have to adjust. In our case, the "weather" is ad inventory, traffic, seasonal fluctuations, and on and on.
Loose language, sorry. You can't analyze below the channel level. A channel may be a page or a group of pages.
Or part of a page. I sometimes test a single page using a seperate channel for each adblock on the page.
The problem is that in this forum there is always the presumption that the woes of a publisher are the publishers fault.Really? I thought the prevailing opinion was that all publisher woes are Google's fault. :-)
Well, OBVIOUSLY it's Google's fault :), but the problem we have in this forum is that there are those who love google so much they sleep with the accounts under their pillow, and those who loathe it in equal proportions. Neither viewpoint is necessarily that helpful.
To my way of thinking, what we SHOULD be doing is to put the love/hate debate behind us and concentrate our minds on actually trying to improve publishers lot. However, as this is an internet forum instead of an alternative reality that ain't gonna happen I guess.
But seriously, there IS always a presumption that it's either Google's fault or the publishers fault - depending on what side of the fence you stand. Isn't it the case that it's more likely to be a complex mixture of all factors, and it would be more helpful to explore and try and help as opposed to making out of hand presumptions?
It seems to me that webmasters woes are probably more related to how good they are at gaming the system (or not) than content these days.
Or simply being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. #*$! happens, but sometimes Shinola does, too.
What is shinola anyway? Is it some sort of American GM vegetable oil? If it's not in the OED it's not a real word.
But seriously, there IS always a presumption that it's either Google's fault or the publishers fault - depending on what side of the fence you stand. Isn't it the case that it's more likely to be a complex mixture of all factors
Of course it's a complex mixture of many different factors, and that's what people tend to forget. Calling people "Google worshippers" or "Google haters" isn't helpful, and neither is trying to find a single cause for everyone's drop or increase in revenue (a revenue drop being the topic of this thread).
I know, for example, that my own revenue has dropped slightly at least in part because of changes that I've made on my site (i.e., adding a large volume of pages on relatively "non-commercial" topics). Other members may have seen revenue slippage because of smart pricing (caused by overoptimization, for example), because of changes in supply and demand for the keywords that trigger ads on their pages, because of unknown factors that could include how Google allocates ads and distributes compensation, or due to causes that might have nothing to do with AdSense (e.g., real-estate prices, weather, war, or a reduction in airlift capacity to a destination that's the focus of a publisher's mycaribbeanisland.com travel site).
The PPC marketplace is a lot like a stock exchange that deals in volatile stocks. (In fact, an executive of Sprinks--since acquired by Google--once compared Sprinks advertisers to day traders in a meeting that I attended.) Add smart pricing, ad allocation, and other AdSense-specific factors into the picture, and things get even more complicated. It's a wonder that sharp AdSense income spikes and dips aren't more common they are.
