Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Has anyone else noticed a steady decline in eCPM over the last week or so. No amendments have been made to the Adsense ads on my site, and the site itself has not been modified, but I have suffered a 35% drop in eCPM starting around 1st Feb
Thanks
On the other side of things, prices of clicks from adwords has not gone down, so there's a nice chunk in the middle for somebody.
Earnings down 50%
Targeting terrible
Some Channels even stopped serving ads
Bilingual site, no change in traffic.
OTOH, display-ad sales have been a little sluggish, too (compared to 3Q and 4Q 2006), so maybe it's just taking a while for 2007 ad budgets to get approved and spent. Affiliate bookings are extremely strong, so consumer demand isn't lacking.
I do think the "dilution effect" of a growing network (and exponential growth in computer-generated, keyword-driven pages that run AdSense ads) may be putting pressure on average EPCs and eCPMs.
I would say over the last year or so. I have removed AdSense from our main website because the eCPM declined to about 20% from what it used to be. This website is a niche site where we have about 20 regular advertisers. The eCPM got low even though we have 90% same advertisers as a year ago. Yes, same advertisers, same ads, same CTR just the pay for click and eCPM about 20% from a year ago.
I would be OK with this if the price to advertise for our niche would got cheaper. The reality is that it will cost you more than double to advertise for this niche compare to last year.
The math is simple. Example: Let’s say last year you paid $1 per click to advertise on AdWords for this niche. Let’s say we earned on average $0.60 per click. Year later it will cost you 100% more per click on AdWords (lets say $2 per click) and our average earnings dropped to about 20% compare to last year (Lets say $0.12). So if it cost double to advertise why we do not earn double compare to last year? Based on the example numbers we should be earning $1.20 per click in stead we were earning $0.12 per click.
I wasn’t naive and expected the payouts will go down over the time but I did not expect them to get this low this quickly. The bright site about this is that we are able to offer direct advertising to some of the advertisers. We doubled our earnings and they save more than 50% compare to AdWords. So no complains on my side. :-)
if it cost double to advertise why we do not earn double compare to last year?
You can only say that if you are the only web site in the niche, it could be that your niche got diluted with other web sites.
[edited by: Hobbs at 4:51 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2007]
smart pricing could be a factor.
It is a smart pricing! Very smart pricing! What can be smarter than keeping 90% of the click price :-)
About the website: Out since 1999, PR6, No 1 on Google, Yahoo, MSN for the niche. About 120K uniques per month. 1.5M page views per month. It is a local real estate related website. Something like www.CityNameHomes.com. I personaly know most of the advertisers so I know what they pay to Google or to us.
I personaly know most of the advertisers
If know the advertisers why did you decide to give google a piece of the pie in the first place?
If know the advertisers why did you decide to give google a piece of the pie in the first place?
Why? Because we did not have our own PPC system in place. There was no need for that. We decide it to make one after AdSense took a dive. Now we have our own tracking system for clicks and banners and we are able to offer Pay Per Click text ads and CPM banners directly to our advertisers.
Frustrating indeed.
We're doing alright shifting to direct leaderboard sales on a CPM basis which we're slowly replacing Adsense with, but it's a shame as the Adsense listings are generally well targetted and offer more options to our readers than a limited range of banners.
<begin ramble>
I understand why Google feels they need to be secretive to a degree, but it would really be useful to have some kind of generic "website-topic centric" regular report from Adsense suggesting why a publisher is seeing the ups and downs -- at least then we'd know if the rise/fall is due to issues within/outside our control.
For instance if I received a report from Google on 1Feb saying someting like the following, I'd feel a lot more comfortable about sitting tight and waiting things out.
"In general, travel websites are seeing a 15% drop in eCPM as Advertising budgets get over their Xmas madness. We expect to see this pick up over the next month or so. Meanwhile we continue to see blended adverts outperforming non-blended ones and travel remains one of the most popular niches for site-targetting."
But as it stands, I don't know if I'm seeing the fall because:
a) It's just an industry trend
b) I have too many adsense listings
c) I have too few adsense listings
d) My listings are too well blended
e) My listings are not well blended enough
f) I have too many affiliate links
g) I don't have enough copy
h) I have too much copy
i) My site was down for 12 hours two weeks ago
j) I own a cat and not a dog...
Webmasterworld is indeed a great resource to try and figure out what is behind some of the rises and falls, but a tad more info from Google would be grand.
<end ramble>
Many others have been complaining about it as well.
Its not isolated. Looks like Google is scraping back its money somehow.
Too many people milking the same cow--and more doing it all the time.
Maybe Google keeps some sort of a cyclical up and down for all sites ..so that no one gets complacent..
They may call it smart pricing/editorial review ..whatever..
Too many people milking the same cow--and more doing it all the time.
Moo-hoo-hoo...Ouch...ouch...ouch... I feel for the cow! Can you guys like, get your hands out from under the cow... the cow's mine.... alllll mine!
Bwah-ha-ha-ha (evil laughter)
;)
You know, I wonder if it has anything to do with their change in TOS (allowing other contextual ads like Kontera on the same page with Adsense).
Maybe they were offering their publishers a lifeline by allowing this because they knew they were going to cut eCPM?
Maybe they were offering their publishers a lifeline by allowing this because they knew they were going to cut eCPM?
They can't "cut eCPM," because eCPM is the result of two factors: EPC (earnings per click) and CTR (clickthrough rate).
Also, ePCM (or EPC, for that matter) goes up and down from day to day for most publishers, so if you assume that Google cuts your EPC/eCPM on a bad day, logic would suggest that you also credit Google with increasing EPC/eCPM on a good day. To make that scenario even more farfetched, some publishers are reporting increases, so logic would suggest that Google likes those publishers better than it likes you. To me, it makes far more sense to accept the obvious: that AdSense is an auction-based system that responds to supply and demand. (Not just across-the-board supply and demand, but supply and demand for specific keywords in specific geotargeted locations, with smart pricing tossed in as an additional complicating factor.)
People always prefer simple explanations, which is why we're always seeing claims of "Google has cut the payout" in this forum or, in the Google News Forum: "Google is penalizing sites that [use AdSense] [don't use AdSense] [have affiliate links] [have reciprocal links] [use content management systeme] [use HTML flat files] [use CSS] [don't use CSS] [have coding errors] [were created in Microsoft FrontPage] [etc.]"
People always prefer simple explanations
yeah. I'm a simple guy... I like things simple! Understanding the complexities of Adsense makes my brain hurt.
I keep thinking eCPM stands for extra Cash Plenty Money!
Excuse me while I go play with my (cash) cow...
;)
People always prefer simple explanations
Here's a simple explanation, I can directly and without doubt attribute the continued drop in my earnings and clicks and loss of targeting and even no ads suddenly appearing in one of my channels after years of being the best performer.. tie it all to the last unannounced Friday maintenance.
A change in code is what did my earnings in, flat simple and has nothing to do with Google liking my site or hating it, the quality of my content or traffic going up or down, not even smartpricing, Google simply forgot what my site is about and is suddenly serving ads not related, Google's new code ruined of my major channels and lost themselves clicks and earnings too.
You pay peanuts... you get monkeys.
