low eCPM

[sixzerofour]

My eCPM has dropped so bad ($0.35, it used to be $3.xx) in the last 3 months, even though the traffic and CTR has increased so much than before (3 times). Do you have any ideas what's going on? does anyone have the same experience?

[edited by: sixzerofour at 5:42 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2007]

[greatstart]

Join the club! Myself and many others are seeing this problem. It may be that smart pricing has kicked in.

I'm not sure what the remedy is for this. Perhaps others on this forum might know.

[jasonnoguchi]

Are you using PPC traffic? Such sudden explosion in traffic usually comes with an eCPM punishment... wonder why... I had the same problem too when I started using PPC traffic. The very day I removed PPC, eCPM went back up to $30.00 again. One thing I noticed though is that you may not want to completely trust the eCPM numbers. Sometimes, my eCPM can be as low as $3.00 but when I divide the money against the clicks, the revenue per click actually comes up bigger than some of my sites with eCPM of over $50.00! :)

[koan]

when I divide the money against the clicks, the revenue per click actually comes up bigger

eCPM doesn't mean EPC, it means revenue per thousand of impressions. 2 clicks at 0.10$ each will make more money than one click at 0.15$ each.

[sixzerofour]

No, I'm not using PPC. I got 16xx clicks, and page impression was over 120000 through the site yesterday, but I only earned $25.88 :(. I usually earn much more than that 3 months ago.

[Jafo]

When you say page impressions, is that stat from Google or your logs? What your logging software reports as impressions mean little to nothing especially if you taste good to the Yahoo Slurp Spider.

Are you getting any traffic from mass mail, pop-ups/unders that include your entire site? If you ever purchase PPC, or popups, make sure they land on a page without any adsense ads.

[creepychris]

After almost three years of fairly steady cpm (ups and downs of course but always seemed to bounce back), my cpm from the beginning of this year seems to have dropped (plummeted in fact) three times and unfortunately the drop seems permanent (there is no bouncing back). I have no idea why, so it’s frustrating to say the least--all whitehat original content. Less than 1% of traffic is derived from PPC. I am now in the process of selectively replacing Adsense ads and if today's cpm holds I'm removing them altogether. Today sadly was yet another drop.

First major crash was January 1st (33% drop)
Then again at the beginning of March. (20% drop)
Then again March 19th (13% drop)
And now again today. (30% drop)

Traffic has increased significantly over the last three months. That's changed. Search engine rankings especially in regards to Google have improved dramatically so that's changed as well. It's a large niche, so I doubt I could personally affect supply and demand. CTR stable. Most of the decline has been through EPC which is now less than 4 cents a click.

Daily/monthly earning seem to be holding steady (suggesting—get out your tinfoil hats—a cap). Historically, increases in traffic have not brought increases in revenue for this site immediately, though it seems that cpm climbs about 1 month after a traffic increase to the pre traffic increase cpm (which in the end results in higher revenue). Traffic has been ever increasing to the site.

The last three months are bucking all historical trends for the site though.

[sixzerofour]

>> When you say page impressions, is that stat from Google or your logs?

The stat is from Google Adsense and analytics.

>> Are you getting any traffic from mass mail, pop-ups/unders that include your entire site?

No, I'm not getting any traffic from mass mail, or pop-ups...

[jomaxx]

Okay, how exactly did you triple your traffic? Is it "organic" search traffic from Google, or does it mostly come from elsewhere? The answer is likely to be in there somewhere.

[sixzerofour]

well, I've upgraded my site with more features, layout....My site is free file hosting, so the traffic is mostly from blogs, forums, youtube, google, yahoo...

[jomaxx]

That helps. My guess is that the problem is relevancy. If AdSense can't show ads relevant to what the surfer is currently interested in, researching, trying to accomplish, then the value to the advertiser of any resulting clicks is going to be extremely low.

[sixzerofour]

That's not true. Viewers have to go to my site in order to download/upload files. My revenue was 3 times of the current income back 3 months ago, even though I got only around 400 clicks a day, and eCPM was $2.8x

[Jafo]

The stat is from Google Adsense and analytics.

Which?

[JBrown]

I wonder how much of it has to do with advertisers complaining about AdSense ROI.

There seems to be a lot of sentiment over on the AdWords forums that not only should you NOT advertise on AdSense, but also avoid the search partners as well.

That might be part of the reason for the roll-out of CPA ads on the content network.

[Scurramunga]

There seems to be a lot of sentiment over on the AdWords forums that not only should you NOT advertise on AdSense, but also avoid the search partners as well.

This probably wouldn't have been such a problem if google had been more selective about quality when accepting new publishers and if they had prevented the proliferation of MFA's.

Now it seems that MFA's will end up being their main advertisers on the content network.

[sailorjwd]

If my cpm drops any further it will be negative.

[Chapman]

If my cpm drops any further it will be negative.

sailorjwd-

I've pondered this recently while charting the logical progression of current eCPM and EPC values. If they go negative... will I have to send Google a check? <g>

Since conversations with Hobbs earlier this month I've initiated some extremely comprehensive charting and find that the same eCPM diminishment scenario, as outlined by creepychris, has indeed affected my account as well. Same dates... pretty much the same value reductions. Depressing!

On a positive note, however, the same charts show a similar eCPM drop last March with a rebound in April and May. Keep a happy thought!

Chapman-

[creepychris]

Chapman,

I agree. Keep happy thoughts. That very first April when smartpricing was introduced, i got hit hard . . . and then I removed adsense from 90% of the pages . . . by May it crept back up and I returned the adsense slots. And then there was three years of relative stability.

One problem I've caused is that the years between then and now I've let my other advertising networks slide because things were stable and as long as adsense was that stable it was so easy to use. That is the brilliance of adsense.

And, I am not saying Adsense should be stable. It's a market. That's a fact. It's just that the smartpricing black box is a lot more frustrating then the ups and downs of a transparent market that I can track. I've just come back from my witch doctor and he gave me a few potions and a couple of dolls to poke so hopefully . . .fingers crossed.

For the moment, I am trying to reactivate accounts on networks that I've long since let slide.

What I am saying to all other publishers is:
DON'T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET. But even I knew that before I went ahead and did it anyway.

Oh and Sailor, thanks for that laugh. I'll bill you for the keyboard.