Working harder, earning less

ctr and ecpm down compared with last year

[cmendla]

I've seen threads here before about declining ecpm and ctr. Our results were in a steady downward spiral until the late may cleanout of the arbitragers. During the summer earnings went back to where they were previously. In other words, it was a pretty good increase.

I looked at october to date and september. In both cases, impressions are up (we have added sites) but CTR and ecpm are lower. CTR is about 2.5% and was about 3% in 06. Ecpm seems to be about half of what it was last year.

I can think of a couple of reasons

1. The Arbitrage/MFA crowd have regrouped after the May cleanup.
2. People are really getting ad blindness with regard to adsense ads.. Probably caused in part by all the MFA garbage in adsense
3. Advertisers are dropping out of the content network
4. Advertisers in the content network are simply going for larger sites or simply don't like my sites as well.

Anyway, here's some things I"m going to try

1. I looked at a site that had the lowest CTR/Ecpm. I had other ads in a rotator that were pretty cheesy looking. The were affilliate ads including amazon. I took them off and substituted some travel affiliate pics and links that have been working well and look less tacky.

2. Everything I read seems to say that the big adsense boxes perform well. I haven't tried them too much yet. I'm using adsense and usually have 2 adsense units in the shared borders. I'm going to take a careful look and try integrating some of the larger adsense units in the text.

3. Take a look at blending vs contrast and see which is performing better.

4. I put a blog on my largest site and it is getting more traffic than some of the smaller sites. I need to get a channel for that to see if the income is worthwhile.

Anyway, I really think that a small publisher can still make money in adsense. I just need to tweak things a bit more.

I'd appreciate any comments, especially on the ctr/ecpm issues.

cg

[europeforvisitors]

Advertisers aren't dropping out of the content network, or--if they are--plenty of new ones are replacing them. (In 3Q 2007, AdSense revenues were up 8% over the previous quarter and 40% over the same quarter in 2006.)

Other reasons why a given publisher's revenues might be down could include:

- More competition (not just more publishers, but also more pages that are constantly being churned out by existing AdSense publishers). If the number of pages for a keyword or keyphrase is growing faster than the number of ad dollars, each publisher's share of the total will get smaller.

- More sophisticated bid management by larger advertisers, who have better tools and more experience than they did a year or two ago. (Those tools include separate bidding for the search and content networks, placement reports, unlimited domain filters, and site targeting for CPM ads and--soon--for contextual ads.)

It's also possible that smaller, less experienced (and more carelessly free-spending) advertisers are being driven out by savvy direct-response marketers, click arbitrageurs, etc. who know how to squeeze the most value out of their AdSense dollars. That seems to be the case for my topic; I rarely see mom-and-pop businesses in my "Ads by Google" these days.