Adsense During The Holidays

Is yours going up or down?

[Rick42]

hey all,

I just wanted to share some thoughts with all the Adsense publishers in WebmasterWorld with regards to my Adsense performance so far for December...because it is by far the worst month for me in a looooooong time.

My CTR has improved and the eCPM is steady but it seems like the small decrease in traffic I am seeing is affecting the revenue significantly, and is more then good cause for me to start worrying.

Is anyone else seeing decreases in traffic or Adsense revenue?

Any thoughts and/or comments are GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks to all in advance and I wish everyone in here a great holiday!

- J.K.

[Pengi]

If the CTR has improved whilst the eCPM has held steady, that implies that what your are earning for an average click on your site must be reducing.

This could be because:
1) your are being affected by smart pricing,
2) your site is attracting lower paying ads,
3) advertisers' bids are reducing.

I have noticed a significant reduction in my earnings per click at weekends and suspect that some advertisers are eaither reducing their bids or stopping their campaigns altogether over the less profitably periods. If this is the case, it doesn't bode well for the holiday period.

[Hobbs]

Seeing higher CTR, eCPM and increase in earnings, but expect lower performance by the end of the month, it should all even out for December.

[jchampliaud]

So far I'm not seeing any down turn due to the holidays. But x-mas isn't here yet and I've added two sites that focus on skiing so I think that is helping me out. I'll see next week. In the past I've had a big fall in income during the few weeks following Christmas and the New Year.

[MThiessen]

December itself is always good, but Christmas day & eve are always the year's record lows. I guess not a lot of folks are surfing on Christmas.

[ElvisFan]

My bottom line has dropped by whopping 75% for December - I can't believe it - I thought everyone would be shopping online

[jema]

Been a pretty bad month here :( but you do need to look at the long view.

[hunderdown]

Start of the month wasn't bad. Starting to slip now, but that's what happened last year.

January should be better, based on past experience.

[europeforvisitors]

December has been fairly quiet in terms of AdSense and affiliate revenue, though traffic has been stronger than usual. (For my topic, this is always the dead time of year, but things pick up sharply after January 1.)

In the words of Ecclesiastes (and Pete Seeger), "To every thing there is a season."

[dollarshort]

Yearly advertising budgets began drying up in Nov, January should be back to normal. Exact thing happend last year and happenig again this year for me. Also more people are preparing for the holidays and spending less time online. Unless your Amazon I would not expect a big jump in holiday shopper traffic.

[chocorol]

So far, looks like december is going to be the best month of the year for me. I think that the variations depend on your niche.

[Huntster]

I can't determine this year. I added a lot of new pages in the last 60 days, so earnings are up for me. Big variation swings the last few days though.

[Lagamorph]

So far today I'm 80% above my next best previous day for earnings :)

That's all in the CPC as my traffic and CTR are the same. Santa likes my niche.

Actually since somewhere in November I've been noticing my CPC climbing above the pennies, dimes and quarters of my old clicks. I still get a few 3 cent clicks but the amount of good ones is going way up. I hope that continues after the holidays.

[calman]

Last year I actually experienced a rather nice uptick in ECPM starting about December 20th and lasting right through until the end of the year. EPC was excellent during this time period. Who knows what the reason may have been. It goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that ad budgets tend to run out at the end of the year and many advertisers (especially smaller ones) tend to lose interest during the holiday season.

On the other hand this good news was largely offset by the drop in traffic which is traditional on a site of my type during the holiday period. Christmas Eve and Christmas will likely be the two worst days of the year. The site is largely used by businesses. Traffic always picks up by January 3rd.

As for this year, I noticed a very small softening in traffic late last week and it is starting to accelerate a bit as this week goes on - to be expected. ECPM and EPC seems to be somewhat weaker this year - this is offset by the fact that page views are much greater this year than last.

[Sweet Cognac]

So far, looks like december is going to be the best month of the year for me.

Same here. This is unusual because July is normally my best month.

[OptiRex]

Yay, yay, yay...it all depends on one's subject matter (niche) and one's country religion (if there is one)!

Bear in mind much of Europe closes down for between 10-17 days this year and if one is not an online seller and relying on trade ads then many of those people ain't going to be at work!

The US is very similar however it does not have the extended holidays (holydays) that the European Christian calendar does.

I am not religious yet I had one of my Indian Directors trying to arrange business appointments for 25/26th December and could not understand why no one was available in Germany!

Bang: bang: bang my head!

My earnings in Dollar terms are up...however they're no different to last year in my currency since the Dollar has nose-dived.

Roll on 26th December and let's get rid of this farcical crap!

YMMV:-)

[alephh]

After rock-solid November, December has been filled with ups and downs... but still earning about the same figures as in November.

List of minor and major "happenings" during december is impressive:
- google altering serps (could explain a lot)
- google updating adsense (with some adsense errors reported)
- advertisers running out of money
- holyyyydays
- america without electricity
- xmas parties
- server down (personal)
- etc

... and xmas and new year hasn't even arrived yet ;-D

[jretzer]

Revenues are up 33% for the month, except for a period of four days at the end of last week when both traffic and revenues inexplicably fell to half their normal levels.

[netmeg]

My typical peak is June/July, but I usually get a nice spike for New Year's Eve, and that seems to be happening again this year. I made a mistake on my site causing some problems with the SERPS, but it seems to have recovered in a matter of days, which is good.

[noodlebox]

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System: The following 2 messages were spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3194956.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 12:02 pm on Dec. 20, 2006 (utc -8)

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Adsense feels hours behind, or it's my poor stats and lower CTR today.

[malachite]

It does seem a bit slow, but loads of people have probably been doing what I've been doing today ...

The dreaded Christmas shopping :(

[OptiRex]

Adsense feels hours behind, or it's my poor stats and lower CTR today.

Mine look about 6 hours behind at the moment, 21.00 GMT, very, very slow updates.

Server logs showing surprising normality.

[OptiRex]

Update Thursday:

Have you been bombed from the SERPs?

One of my core sites has been assassinated by G:-( 10 yrs old, ranked #1 for many keywords and poof...gone from the results. 85% of the pages are still index however they may as well remove them since they are buried so deep they're nearly impossible to find.

AdSense is being removed from that site right now, thank heavens I do not rely on G for my income therefore let this be a salutary lesson for anyone who thinks they can live off AdSense earnings.

[Hobbs]

Sorry to hear it Opti,
But you run tens of sites right?
Hope it wasn't one of your main ones,
Did you check if someone scraped your content?
do tell us more.

[OptiRex]

Hope it wasn't one of your main ones,

Yep, one of the core sites! It's earned USD 0.07 today...woohoo...no beer for me tonight:-(

I'm not the only one in my niche, loads of my competitors are missing and the SERPs are looking very trashy now. We're discussing what's happened over in the Search forum, kinda makes one feel better knowing others have had precisely the same happen.

Thanks heavens for forums:-)

[andrewshim]

I'm not the only one in my niche, loads of my competitors are missing and the SERPs are looking very trashy now. We're discussing what's happened over in the Search forum, kinda makes one feel better knowing others have had precisely the same happen.

Yes. Serps are going through changes. Top sites in my category are going MIA too. It's been happening the last couple of weeks. The good sites seem to come back after a while, but I've noticed that heavy affiliate sites are getting the boot... in my category anyway.

[OptiRex]

Just checked my logs and G did a 100% re-spidering a couple of hours ago.

If it weren't so pathetic it would almost be funny.

What amazes me is that there are supposedly so many brilliant people working at the plex yet they continue to have screw-up after screw-up. If I were to do this in my business...I wouldn't have one!

Do they forget that without all of us they wouldn't have a business? Yep...

[OptiRex]

Woohoo...it gets better, it's now earned USD 0.08...a 0.01 click, excellent G!

[Mr_Fern]

I've had the best month ever this month, including a $1000+ day for the very first time since I've been using Adsense (2 years now technically, effectively 2 years March).

[Hobbs]

> G did a 100% re-spidering

Check the IP in your logs, make sure it was really Google, not a scraper using the same user agent.