Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1) A new batch of auto-generated MFA/Parked/Thin-Content sites has appeared that aggressively advertises.
2) Targeting problems.
When I noticed the decrease in CTR, I checked for the obvious problem (#1) and found that there is still a boatload of lousy advertisers. I zapped them. But this was not enough to drag the whole account down.
So I looked at the ads that were being displayed on site (rather than with the preview tool). To my horror I realized that (in my country, on my PCs, on my sites) the first page load often shows completely off-topic ads, i.e. on a site about widgets I see ads for RED widgets on a page that deals with GREEN widgets. These ads would be perfect for the red widgets page, but not on the green widgets page. And I see ads for ORANGE widgets where I do not have anything on orange widgets on the site. It's really simple. People who look at green widgets are not interested in red widgets or orange widgets. They want GREEN widgets. It's not that hard to understand, or is it?
What's more, the ads had been right on spot in the past. First page load = wham! 100% on target. Google somehow has lost some of its targeting capabilities (again: on my PCs, on my sites).
Anyone else noticing this?
Back to normal now though.
Friday's CTR, therefore earnings, were way down, Saturday was completely normal for me and then yesterday, Sunday, was my worst day's earnings for over a couple of months with all Google metrics well down whereas my logs tell me I had a much busier than average Sunday.
Logging into AdSense is about normal HOWEVER trying to access stats at times is not just slow, nearly impossible.
Today's metrics look to be back to "normal", whatever that IS now!
YMMV, I'm in the UK.
