Big Traffic Increase, What To Do?

[FourDegreez]

For people who have gotten rather sudden, big increases in traffic to your site, what do you do if anything in relation to AdSense?

This has happened to me recently. Several pages on one of my sites have gotten a lot of attention this past week, leading to a dramatic increase in traffic. The sad part of this story is that on these particular pages, Google isn't showing well-targeted ads. This has caused my site's CTR and eCPM numbers to drop for the last several days (although total earnings is way up, due to the higher traffic).

I imagine one response that people might take is to simply do nothing. That's fair. But I've also read that some people take the ads off these kinds of pages. I wonder what is the reasoning behind that.

What did I do?

First, I tried to change some of the text on the page to get better targeted ads to show. I think those changes might be taking effect today, as my numbers are going back up. I also tried displaying Firefox referral ads on these pages instead. I've earned exactly $1 on over 200,000 impressions. Lesson learned. One other thing I tried was using the ad space to display additional in-site navigation links, to divert some of this traffic to other pages on my site. That's worked pretty well, actually. I would recommend that to other people who find themselves in this situation.

So what do other people do? And finally, does anyone think these traffic spikes can raise red flags or something? Does it look suspicious to Google? In my case, everything is completely honest. It caught me by surprise, actually.

[ronburk]

I looked at the traffic spike, studied all the SE search terms that my logs could reveal went to that page, created new pages to better target the one or more specific needs I inferred led to the traffic spike, and then replaced one of the AdSense units on the "hot" page with in-house ads leading to the new content (which displayed AdSense ads more targetted to what these folks were searching for).

[Lagamorph]

But I've also read that some people take the ads off these kinds of pages. I wonder what is the reasoning behind that.

Fear and a lack of math skills.

When I get spikes it's usually from a "look at the funny movie" website and the traffic is therefore not as qualified as my usual viewer. My usual response is do nothing and enjoy the extra click and inbound links.

I have been toying with the idea of reading the referrer and adding an extra ad block or some trashy CPM ads for these "junk" viewers. That might be a TOS issue so I'd have to check first.

[edited by: Lagamorph at 2:21 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]

[incrediBILL]

big increases in traffic to your site, what do you do if anything in relation to AdSense?

I find laughing all the way to the bank to be quite enjoyable myself.