Forum Moderators: martinibuster
AdSense Page Impressions: +7.2%
Daily click average: The same
CTR: -8.95%
eCPM: -21.72%
EPC: -13.97%
Is anyone else who's been having problems seeing similar metrics?
In the UK I am still experiencing slow log-ins and very, very tardy stat updates.
As far as I think.. Google is now reducing publishers earning.. Well thats my thought..
If that were true, why would some publishers be reporting uptrends or record earnings?
People need to get over the idea that AdSense revenue is like a salary or a stipend. It isn't: It's more like freelance earnings or commissions from door-to-door sales.
As far as I think.. Google is now reducing publishers earning.. Well thats my thought..
If that were true, why would some publishers be reporting uptrends or record earnings?
Wow this discussion is really going places ...
1. 55% conversion rate for advertisers using conversion tracking whose ads appear on your site2. 20% amount and uniqueness of content on page/site
3.10% origin of traffic:
a. geographics
b. demographics
c. organic search engine, PPC search engine, backlink, type in, or bookmark etc.4. 3% bounce rate
5. 5% age of site
6. 4% relavent backlinks
7. 7% traffic volume
8.?% purpose of site
well your already at 104% ... so 8. is easy ;)
To look at it another way, if you make it your mission to provide Google with cheap inventory, shouldn't you accept part (or even most) of the blame when you get cheap clicks?
I make it my mission to never provide cheap inventory. My website makes all of it's adsense income on less than a handfull of adblocks. The problem lies with so many naive publishers doing the opposite.
[edited by: Scurramunga at 2:20 am (utc) on Sep. 28, 2007]
My website makes all of it's adsense income on less than a handfull of adblocks. The problem lies with so many naive publishers doing the opposite.
This is very true for me as well and I learned that little bit of information over a year ago.
I think you see what I'm saying though, lots and lots of variables to look at.
It's a sudden much lower CTR. Down 30 - 50% from a standard over mumble, mumble years.
I've given this a lot of thought because I've seen the same thing. I honestly have to say that at this point I believe that there are simply a whole lot of clicks that aren't being counted (apparently being marked invalid for some reason or another) and therefore no longer contribute to your CTR, however at the same time impressions are being reported the same way causing the title of this thread to be accurate "Page Impressions Up, CTR, eCPM, EPC Earnings Down."
I have a friend that has a site and according to his own analytics he's seeing around 1/3 of the total clicks on his ads being reported in adsense. It didn't used to be this way, maybe enough advertisers were begging for refunds claiming they had paid for invalid clicks has caused the adsense team to rethink the system determining valid clicks from invalid ones to give advertisers the benefit of the doubt, after all it's the adwords advertisers that are paying the Plex bills.
I make it my mission to never provide cheap inventory. My website makes all of it's adsense income on less than a handfull of adblocks. The problem lies with so many naive publishers doing the opposite.
uh-huh.
that's where channels come in really handy. I removed all ad blocks from zero-low CTR and eCPM pages and saw my earnings go up. In fact, pages containing quality articles perform really lousy for me and they don't contain Adsense.
But back to topic... ten days ago, metrics all went haywire (in the same boat as HuskyPup). Last 2 days came back to normal and today is utterly hoooooorrrible.
Agree with HuskyPup. Something's wrong. I see empty holes in my pages sporadically the past couple of days (where adsense ads are supposed to appear). Login is taking forever sometimes and navigation is slooooow. Somethings broken at the plex.
Agree with HuskyPup. Something's wrong. I see empty holes in my pages sporadically the past couple of days (where adsense ads are supposed to appear). Login is taking forever sometimes and navigation is slooooow. Somethings broken at the plex.
I see empty holes in my pages sporadically the past couple of days
I do not see a lot of holes, but I noticed a lot of bad targeting lately, i.e. a U.S. visitor sees on a page for Blue Widgets not ads for Blue Widgets Shops in the U.S. but for Green Widgets Shops in Italy. If the visitor does a page refresh, however, the targeting seems to suddenly be OK and ads for Blue Widgets Shops appear. Targeting has been excellent on these pages in the past.
Unfortunately, not too many visitors click on the refresh button because the ads are unrelated. Often, those who are not interested in the content, just click the back button (instead of an ad that sounds interesting).
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Considering my record earnings, if something is actually broken (And you must know how things work there in detail, eh), I hope it's never fixed.
Zett... you must have gotten my clicks. Give them back! ;-)
After my previously mentioned, numerous e-mails informing them of all the things they have broken, this evening I received a notice that one (or possibly?) more of my pages do not conform to their policy. Conveniently they send it on a Friday when they are out all weekend, and thus cannot respond to elaborate, and say I have 3 days to fix it or else.
Anyway, they gave a specific page URL, and none of the violations they note, don't even come close to being an issue on that page! What's even funnier is that we ALWAYS submit a sample page when we change things, to support for approval before making it public and they were approved by their own support staff!
About the only thing that comes remotely close to one of their reasons is the colors of text on our page and the ads matched (not the size, spacing or font, etc), which last time I read was recommended for "blending" ads into the site. In the note they mentioned pictures near ads (which are no closer than a full screen page away and totally unrelated to the ads in either size or orientation). They also mentioned making ads look like something else, which couldn't be futher from the case since they are in their own, differently colored, bold box with an "Advertise here" link right above them and "Ads by google" below that.
I've already removed ALL ads from the page and wrote back for an explanation, but it just goes to show, something is SERIOUSLY broken at the plex. Their own employees can't even be consistant. If they disable the domain (but not the account so they claimed in the note) as they threatened, it'll be no big deal to us as we have already been systematically removing their ads anyway.
The problem is not CTR, so much, as our CTR has actually stayed nearly the same over the period (actually gone up, but only because we have been systematically eliminating the non-clicked ads to replace with other brands), but the PPC and thus eCPM are what are WAY down despite that
If I may deviate slightly with regards to the topic at hand; I would like to share an observation I have just made. This observation won't come as a surprise because it's been made by others here in the past, however it does add some merit to the argument that eCPMs can fall despite ctr.
Lately, I have been experiencing a good EPC. This level of EPC has been consistent for a number of weeks. Recently when checking my stats I see that earnings are on target yet my ctr and (thus) number number of clicks has been considerably higher. So in other words my EPC has dropped suddenly by 50 % as a result of a 35 % ctr increase. Everything else including my traffic trends and advertisers seems unchanged, so why instead of reaping the benifits of the extra clicks am I penalised?
This observation seems consistent with the earnings ceiling theory and other similar theories that espouse diminishing returns with regards to adsense.
[edited by: Scurramunga at 1:40 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2007]
WORST DAY EVER
caps the fouth straight month that's come in 20% below previous year earnings, despite the start of the year being up.
After observing for a number of years, I have noticed their algorithm always attempts to maximize the CPM (not necessarily sure it is PAGE CPM, ad unit CPM or individual ad CPM which is an issue associated with one of their major bugs), by whatever means is necessary. Whether this means accepting more clickthrus at a lower price (i.e. 100 CTs at .25 cents each vs 50 CTs at .40 cents each), they don't care
Why should they care? And why should you? Ultimately, eCPM (for comparison purposes) and earnings (for paying the mortgage and groceries) are what count. EPC is a contributing factor, but I'd rather have ten clicks at 30 cents each than two clicks at a dollar each.
This observation seems consistent with the earnings ceiling theory and other similar theories that espouse diminishing returns with regards to adsense.
My apologies if I misunderstand your earnings ceiling theory. Is it your theory Google intentionally imposes an earnings ceiling on publishers?
Human nature being what it is, wouldn't publishers who experience high earnings be more motivated to produce more pages with AdSense, more traffic, etc. than publishers with lower earnings? And wouldn't that motivation mean more income for Google? Why would Google impose a ceiling?
FarmBoy
My apologies if I misunderstand your earnings ceiling theory. Is it your theory Google intentionally imposes an earnings ceiling on publishers?
I have never subscribed to the earnings cap theory as such. However what I am saying is that others on this board have (in the past) [webmasterworld.com...]
My point was merely that consistent with the earnings cap theory, I had made the observation that Google earnings tend to fizz out for me upon reaching a threshold. Sometimes that threshold might be past x amount of clicks or beyond a particular ctr range. I also note that average EPC (and sometimes total earnings) take a dive when I deploy beyond a certain number of ad units.
This to me may not signal an earnings cap per se, however I do wonder if it is a trigger related in any way to smart pricing. To me there seems to be some sort of dynamic at play here.
Human nature being what it is, wouldn't publishers who experience high earnings be more motivated to produce more pages with AdSense, more traffic, etc. than publishers with lower earnings?
nd wouldn't that motivation mean more income for Google? Why would Google impose a ceiling?Perhaps not a ceiling as such, but rather a bulk discount?
This to me may not signal an earnings cap per se, however I do wonder if it is a trigger related in any way to smart pricing.
If a cap exists, why couldn't it simply be a cap on the number of individual advertisers' ads or clicks that are allocated to a given site? Let's say you've been getting an average of 100 clicks a day from National Widget Corp. Your traffic climbs 50 percent, but you don't get enough impressions to generate 150 clicks a day from National Widget Corp. because that would require pulling inventory from other publishers and increasing National Widget Corp.'s reliance on traffic from your site.
Now, maybe you still get only 100 National Widget Corp. clicks, or maybe you get 10 or 20 percent more NWC clicks with your 50-percent increase in traffic. But you don't get enough NWC impressions to generate a 50 percent increase in clicks, which means that some of the impressions from your increased traffic are being given to lower-paying advertisers.
During times where I have had a number of ads on site (always one per page) I might see the same, or nearly the same ads taking up an entire adblock and repeated on each page. Yet the EPC from page A is higher than the EPC from page B which is higher than the EPC on page C and D.
Not enough inventory I hear someone suggest? Well not actually. I have tested this hypothesis by temporary inserting the maximum number of adblock on a page for a minute, just long enough to gauge which ads are available. In all cases there has been more than enough ad inventory backing up in secondary adblocks that is readily replaced upon refreshes.
