Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've noticed a couple times that following a news story linking one of our pages, or a mention in a large tagging group like Digg or StumbleUpon bringing in a few thousand casual visitors, the earnings for that entire channel tank, and stay tanked for a while afterwards. When I'm on my toes, I pull the Adsense from any page showing a traffic spike, but if I miss it due to scheduling, it can take a while for the channel eCPM to recover.
I'm just curious if other publishers have gone through this cycle multiple times, or if it's just my 'magination, runnin' away with me...
At least for my site, higher traffic typically means lower eCPM. I wonder if it's Google's way of mitigating suspected fraud or something along those lines.... Kind of like this: you are trusted up to a certain historical level and if you go above it, they suppress the earnings for some time.
Seems completely unfair (and it is!) but hey- what can we do short of pulling AdSense from our sites?
It's a relative measurement. So if you normally have 100 visitors and you make five bucks in that channel, then your eCPM is going to be XX. However if you experience a thousand extra visitors to your site that are not clicking, then your eCPM is going to be x, but you're still earning five bucks from your normal visitors. The eCPM is a relative measure.
if you experience a thousand extra visitors to your site that are not clicking, then your eCPM is going to be x, but you're still earning five bucks from your normal visitors.
Obviously, but that's not what I'm talking about, which is:
Channel X has long term eCPM of $Y
Traffic spike comes along and drives Channel X eCPM down to less than 50% of $Y because the traffic isn't as focused as organic and they aren't "typical" visitors.
Traffic spike ends, and Channel X eCPM remains less than 50% of $Y for days or weeks.
A couple years ago, we had an instance of a popular single page channel that had a steady eCPM of $Y catch a huge and continuing (about a week) traffic spike, like 20 times normal traffic per day. Traffic was legit, page just caught a networking wave, outdrew all the rest of our site on at least one day. It didn't occur to me to pull the Adsense until I noticed our account wide earnings falling after a couple days. The account recovered quickly (who knows if that was the issue) but the Adsense eCPM on that channel NEVER recovered. Tried putting Adsense back on it a few times over following months, probably should have done so without the channel code, but couldn't get that excited over a single page.
BTW, I don't imagine this effect would be visible to anybody running a site with tens of thousands of visitors a day, or thousands or more pages, it would get lost in the noise. For us, the less is more connection has always appeared to be causal and with a fairly short feedback time, but we only show Adsense to a couple thosand visitors a day.
Last month I received a huge increase in visits for a two-word phrase from Google's SERPs. My earnings for the day were up about 50% and the day's EPC and eCPM for that channel were higher than normal. The traffic spurt only lasted for part of a day unfortunately.
