Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've had a site that been around for about 6 years. About 3 years ago I put Adsense on the site. I've had very consistent click through rate since then. My traffic has quadrupled since then , yet my earnings are exactly the same. This seems like a con.
The earnings did increase the first year along with the traffic, then it just leveled off and even though traffic is up and I have the same click through rate - earnings remain the same.
How can this be? is it all a con?
no, read some more on smartpricing in this forum, increases in traffic and how they do not necessarily correspond to equivalent jumps in earnings, they might even cause lower earnings if your traffic 'quality deteriorates, and no it is not a con and you are not alone.
[edited by: Hobbs at 2:05 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2007]
+ advertisers running out of money (for your sector/area)
+ poor quality of traffic
+ adsense balancing ("sudden") traffic changes
+ clicks your get are poor, and never lead to sales, so over the months/years advertisers place pay less money per click for your site/your sector.
+ and so on...
As to whether it's a "con" or not, the deal you have with Google is that you show their ads and they send you money, and if you find a better sponsor anywhere then you can remove the ads at any time with no penalty. I don't see where the con in that is.
OK thanks.
Perhaps 'con' was too strong a word. Just a bit frustrating - I might move to another ad agency for a while and see how it goes there.
Thanks for the insight. I used ot be on these forums loads in the past but not had time the last year. However I quit my job at xmas to go 100% on my own projects, so *hopefully* have a bit more time to catch up on everything!
I've had very consistent click through rate since then. My traffic has quadrupled since then , yet my earnings are exactly the same. This seems like a con.
More likely, it simply means that the number of higher-paying ads isn't infinite, and that Google can't supply enough of those ads to accommodate your growth.
Define "traffic is up" - are these are AdSense impressions or just more traffic showing in your stats?
You can have various bots crawling your site, some even use javascript, which artificially inflate even your AdSense stats, that's one possibility.
The other possibility is your increase in traffic isn't relevant to your site, therefore, you get no clicks from that off-topic traffic.
It could even be a combination of both, but you will actually need to analyze your stats to figure out what's going on with your site before crying wolf.
Well the number of visitors online at any one time is up significantly. You can tell this due to the nature of the site (gaming).
Ad impression are up, visitors stats up, server logs up, SQL DB usage up, more players online at the same time, etc.
Yeah I dunno - maybe I just not getting as much for the adverts - they are somewhat different advertisers than they where 3 years ago.
I'm suggesting that some of the same money and people may have been behind your income in the past.
Rgds
Damon
[edited by: DamonHD at 11:26 am (utc) on Feb. 23, 2007]
My total traffic recently went up, but earnings went down. Some sections of the site were just as profitable, however. New internal links may be leading visitors to less profitable clicks. I'm looking into it.
I'm trying to help visitors find valuable related content, and they appear to be following the leads, but it seems some of those pages don't have as valuable ads...
p/g
I have tried to counter that situation by increasing content and optimising pages, to increase ctr. Hopefully the site will grow through this plateau that its stuck on by expanding it. Someone said that the ecpm does increase if the click rate remains high.
I wonder if google is trying to spread around the amount of high paying adverts. So that every site is limited to a certian % good adverts, getting a burst in visitors passess you over the level of hgh paying adverts allowed. If you stay at a higher level of clicks, that level also gives you an inceasing number of high paying clicks over time as the code regains a balance for your site .
So theoretically ...
You get 100 clicks 5% are high paying adverts = 5 adverts
You burst up to 200 clicks, but still only are allowed 5 high paying adverts so your ecpm drops
Eventually you get recalcualted at 200 clicks = 10 high paying adverts.
Just my idea, I would love to know if its correct...
Rgds
Damon
I wonder if google is trying to spread around the amount of high paying adverts. So that every site is limited to a certian % good adverts, getting a burst in visitors passess you over the level of hgh paying adverts allowed.
I suggested this sort of thing in another thread, and it was scoffed at:
[webmasterworld.com...]
but nonetheless, it makes sense for G to spread as equal a distribution of varying levels of ad quality fof the simple reason that if they left ad quality distribution to chance, they would risk damaging a high earning site and possibly rewarding a lower quality, spam blog with the better ads.
[edited by: maxgoldie at 8:33 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2007]
An online gaming site doesn't provide such hot prospects to advertisers anyways, so that is probably part of the problem.
Probably the most important reason for the leveled off earnings.
That's the way it's going for our sector, and there's some positives to be found. Any competitor is going to have to get awfully big very fast to get more than pin money out of adsense. I'm comfortable with that ;)
Hopefully there will be a rush towards other networks as well as affiliate ads, then Google will finally notice and undo the Friday madness they started.
Right now contextual is almost 100% broke on my site, nothing related is showing, I'm daily reducing the inventory given to Google, soon only few Firefox referrals will be running.
Maybe you could look at CJ for some well targeted affiliates? I would try that. Also maybe see how good Kontera or IntelliTXT does. These can be used with adsense. Just be careful you don't over saturate your pages with excessive advertising or you could drive traffic away.
If there are lots of publishers, then ads will eventually show on some sites no matter how low their bid is.
1st day, advertiser bids $0.10, with a budget of $500 he gets 5,000 clicks.
2nd day, advertiser bids $0.05 with a budget of $500 he gets 10,000 clicks.
3rd day, advertiser bigs $0.01 with a budget of $500 he gets 50,000 clicks
His $0.01 bids will still attract visitors because of the huge number of publishers. This is because with lots of publishers, advertisers who bids higher will run out of budget faster, then the next highest bidder's ad will show,.. until his budget runs out, then the next bidder.. until eventually it'll come to the $0.01 bidder's turn. he doesn't have to wait long because there are so many publishers.
Then this $0.01 publisher leaks this info to a friend. That friend then writes a book telling advertisers how to maximise ROI. Then before you know it, every advertiser is bidding as low as possible while maintaining their ads presence.
Get it, the are bidding as low as they can. Not bidding as high as they can afford for their keywords.
Eventually, Google will be earning peanuts as well.
I think 1 way to overcome this is for Google to set a quota on all the keywords.
Example: keyword "buy widget" set at 1,000,000 clicks. They will 1st show the ads of the highest bidder until his budget runs out, then the next highest bidder.. until the 1,000,000 clicks are done for the day. In this way, advertisers who bid too low will run the risk of their ads not being in the 1,000,000 ads shown on that day. So, they'd also bid higher.
[edited by: PowerUp at 4:57 am (utc) on Feb. 24, 2007]
Thats something I would like to do as well.
