Hard to cope with EPC fluctuations

[Raymond]

My site serves around 3M page impressions a month. In January and February, I have been getting around 0.22 EPC. Ever since late February, EPC keeps dropping gradually and yesterday it ended with 0.08 EPC. I am not sure if this is a coincidence, but the drop in EPC seems to have started ever since the image ads start appearing constantly on my site.

I find it very hard to coop with the dramatic fluctuations in terms of earnings from Adsense. How can one operate a business effectively with so little control over the earnings? Because of this I had to look into other income sources that offers more steady income. The offers that I've got was around 1.1 to 1.5 CPM. If it is 1.5 CPM, the income from Tribal fusion will already be high enough to drop Adsense all together.

Personally I would like to stay with Adsense, mainly because I don't want to clutter my site with ugly banners, and in a good month with good EPC, I would probably make more with Adsense. But having pure CPM ads let me predict how much I "should" be making in the coming months as the site continues to grow. Even if I make less money, at least I wouldn't have to worry about getting a 50% pay cut while the site traffic remains roughly the same.

So what should I do? Any feedbacks will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Hobbs]

what should I do?

Do as I did:
Give AdSense less love:

See which channel is the worst performer on your site, and remove AdSense and insert another network there, your AdSense metrics will improve with time, and you would have diversified.

One more advice:
Be careful of the "post positive news or die" mob carrying torches.

Finally,
Fluctuations is normal in every business, AdSense or not, the width and breadth of the fluctuation is no indicator, it might just surprise you and stabilize again later on, just don't be emotionally attached to any figure, and don't play the all or nothing game, if you have traffic, you will make money, so don't worry, what changes will be the source of that money, that's all.

[darkmage]

It would seem your CTR is about 1.5-2%. I'm not sure of your topic area, but there is some room for upside there. Look at optimising your ads.

Also, beware of calculating CPM on Tribal, look at CPM per thousand impressions you give, not the CPM they pay (assuming you have removed their rather high 45% cut). I found the unsold inventory with Tribal really drove down the true CPM.

One friend showed me some calculations.
He thought he was getting nearly $2 cpm from Tribal, but after unsold inventory and their cut, he was really earning about $0.75 delivered cpm. Adsense was paying net $1.20 at the time. He lost a lot by not focusing on net earnings.

[Jafo]

Not to be a wise ass here, but if you do contact Google about your displeasure with their system, don't use the word coop, it is spelled cope. Coop is short for cooperation, where cope is short for coping. :)

[incrediBILL]

When it comes to ad revenue the page impressions is a meaningless number unless that's how many are being reported by some tracking service like Google Analytics that filters out page views from bots crawling your site. The real number to worry about is VISITORS, actual humans hitting your site and how many pages do they look at on average.

I tried some other networks for hassle-free income but they didn't pay very well.

If you're getting anywhere near 3M real page views, you can probably sell text link advertising direct without much trouble using Paypal or whatever and make 100% on those ads, which is what I do along side AdSense.

[Raymond]

I did have close to 3M pageviews and around 350k visits last month according to Analytics. My site is merely 5 months old and I am trying to sustain a very high rate of growth through heavy advertising. Last few months I have been spending around $2000 on ads every month, and it has been working out so far. My site grew at a very fast pace and my visitors have relatively high pageviews. I was actually planning on spending a lot more on ads until Adsense cut my earnings of the first 13 days of March in half (while traffic grew 50% over February and CTR remains the same). This really scares me because what if my traffic grows 3 folds and all of a sudden Google thinks my clicks are only worth 1 cent? Well, maybe some of you might say, your traffic sucks and that's why each click only worths a cent. Maybe you are right. And this is the exact reason why I am wondering if the CPM model would work better for me.

[edited by: Raymond at 6:35 pm (utc) on Mar. 13, 2007]

[Hobbs]

3 Million page views in the right topic would easily make you a small fortune with CPM.

only 350k visitors, for that many views, does not sound too good, perhaps a forum or something like that, which are ruored not to do well with PPC, you are right, go for CPM, you have nothing to lose.

[incrediBILL]

This really scares me because what if my traffic grows 3 folds and all of a sudden Google thinks my clicks are only worth 1 cent?

Try YPN and see if you fare better.