October 2007 eCPM changes?

comment on recent CPM drop

[JamesR3]

Several have commented on a possible SmartPricing/CPM glitch/change here: [webmasterworld.com...]

ASA seems to be implying that no glitch exists. But, given that multiple people are are reporting a similar, and substantial, CPM decrease, SOMETHING is going on. How is your CPM this week as compared to last month? If down, does it vary across channels, or it is evenly down?

[HuskyPup]

I have seen a reduction to the extent of Friday's being 50% of the first 15 days of the month.

Actual daily earnings for the past 11 days v 1st-15th have averaged 20% lower with it worsening each day with yesterday being precisely half the earnings of the 1st-15th average.

[martinibuster]

And in comparison with your traffic logs?... What's going on with the number of visitors? Any changes in referrers? Any interesting trends with keywords? What are your most visited pages and what impact could that have on your eCPM (popular pages where nobody clicks will drop your eCPM average, and eCPM is just an average that's all).

[wyweb]

How is your CPM this week as compared to last month?

Perfectly normal, and I am NOT an adsense cheerleader. I call it like I see it.

[dibbern2]

SOMETHING is going on

I don't think so.

[europeforvisitors]

Nothing obvious here. CTR was down for a few days earlier in the week, but EPC was noticeably higher, so the eCPM drop was modest. What's more, eCPM has been up again the last couple of days, which just goes to show that--as usual--AdSense earnings look more like a sine wave than a straight line when graphed.

[JamesR3]

dibbern2, I'm glad you are not affected, but with multiple people reporting a sudden 20-30%+ decrease, I'm pretty sure this is a real change (or bug). We get enough traffic that I know it's statistically significant, and I've never seen this before in the several years I've been using adsense.

[ann]

mine is down by 50% including clicks and money.

Ann

[jomaxx]

Maybe there's something going on with your particular site, I can't comment on that, but I can't remember ANY period in the past few years where there weren't people complaining about their earnings dropping.

It's just human nature that when a given site's revenue is steady or getting better, people don't fret about it much. But when revenue is dropping, everyone posts about it here to see what's going on.

[JamesR3]

Jomaxx, while I agree with you that this is often the case, this is something different. We get a lot of traffic, and can therefore make statistically significant observations quickly (less than a day, if we wanted to bother to account for time of day and day of week). With the amount of data we have now, and the channel analysis we have done, it is obvious that something changed. It's not a fluctuation: It went down to a new, lower, level and then stayed there steadily. It did not affect all our channels, but did affect most. My guess is that it is a smart pricing change, and the reason some sites see it and some do not, and some channels see it and some do not, is that there are different demographics involved, some of which were more affected by the change than others.

[Scurramunga]

mine is down by 50% including clicks and money.

Similar scenario here. Traffic has been healthy and extremely well targeted, yet my October average for Adsense this year is way down. September was looking good and I thought the upward trend would extend well into October, but my predictions couldn't have been any more off the mark.

[edited by: Scurramunga at 10:30 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2007]

[Content_ed]

I just checked, and we're down 33% for the same days compared with last October, but around 13% of that is because we've taken a good number of pages out of Adsense to try to get our eCPM back up. That does seem to be working, slowly. So I can commiserate, but we haven't see anything especially bad the last couple days.

I'm still up in the air on whether the problem for us started with our enthusiastically participating in the referals program, or whether it was our competitive filter filling up, but we fell off a cliff, or a 20% grade, back in June, and can't get up. Better call LifeSign.

[martinibuster]

My networks big decline started near the end of Sept and ongoing thru today. It has been dismal day after day for going on 5-weeks, with only 1 good day vs our average stats over the 3 plus yrs with Adsense.
In fact, our bottom line revenue has hit rock bottom where Oct is the worst month since April 2005. However, the number of websites we have running Adsense is up considerably over the past 1-1/2 years.

This is extremely depressing and we do not look forward to the considerable work involving moving many of the sites to YPN to see if things improve there, or other monetization techniques to replace Adsense on many of our sites.

Things are so negative we are seriously thinking about closing down many (if not most) of our smaller websites (maybe even a few larger ones too) and moving the domains to PPC Parking Pages where the results may be better (unlikely they could be any worse).

...Have many other members seen this distressing decline since the end of Sept thru now?

The above is from an October 2006 AdSense is Down [webmasterworld.com] thread.

Could it be that October is simply a bad sales month? The lull between summer and Christmas?

[zjacob]

I can sympathize with those who have not seen any eCPM changes, because looking at several niches, there are some areas that have not been affected.

However, overall, I've also seen some very wild swings in eCPM to the downside, unexplained by smartpricing (or the changes would have been permanent).

[Fribble]

Count me in with the folks that have seen negative changes. Earnings began to trend downward on the very same day the whole custom channels fiasco began, my traffic levels and sources are right where they have been for the last six months+ but my earnings have dropped over 50% to levels lower than my worst days in the last six months - and are still trending downwards!

I'm going to spit test YPN and see how that converts until (if) Google gets this 'imaginary' bug worked out - at this rate I have a feeling their numbers will be better.

So sad...

[andrewshim]

eCPM for my biggest earning page is down by 50%. It looks "as if" this page has been smartpriced although I know it has never been confirmed if smartpricing can only affect individual pages.

I'm in a niche where folks want answers QUICK and so this particular page has a very high bounce rate where most exit through Adsense ads.

Then again, in August I noticed one particular advertiser hogging this page with CPM ads. I contacted Google to opt out of CPM ads or to stop this guy from hogging that space. Maybe I'm being punished for being a bad boy?

[Content_ed]

Could it be that October is simply a bad sales month? The lull between summer and Christmas?

Not during previous years, October is usually pretty strong for us. But in other "bad sales" sense, you may be right. The US consumer is certainly hurting, confidence is sinking, and the money going on gas and mortgage interest resets isn't available for some non-essential purposes. The old wisdom of advertising was to spend more in slow times to get business, but if people aren't buying because they are tapped out, it could be that advertisers in a number of sectors have simply cut their ad budgets and will live with the lower sales.

[dibbern2]

I think content_ed makes a very valid point.

Many sectors of the US economy are sinking, and a few have tanked, such as real estate and mortgages. Spending for non-essential goods and services has to be slowing, at least in a historical same period 2007 vs 2006 view.

It appears the economic outlook for the next few months is negative, with gas and heating fuel climbing even higher, along with other factors.

Wouldn't this have a depressing effect on those of us whose AS markets sell luxury, entertainment, travel, and the like?

At least in my business, this is exactly what's happening. On the other side, my essential-services websites are actually doing better than they used to.

[europeforvisitors]

The old wisdom of advertising was to spend more in slow times to get business

Unfortunately, not every advertiser honored (or honors ) that old wisdom, and ad agencies tend to have lose billings and dump personnel during recessions.

Sometimes, ad budgets are a percentage of sales. If sales decline, ad spend declines. (Which is more or less what you suggested.)

[Swanny007]

I'm not one to complain or even post how I'm doing each month. Obviously things are normally very stable or showing a bit of growth. However this month has been dramatically different.

Traffic for me is up, AdSense CPM is down big time - this week was 24% lower than last month. I had record setting months recently (earnings and traffic), but things are sliding down. I do not know why.

[edited by: Swanny007 at 3:00 am (utc) on Oct. 28, 2007]

[eeek]

Could it be that October is simply a bad sales month? The lull between summer and Christmas?

It wasn't a couple of years ago. The last week of September was when Christmas sales started and they didn't let up until January.

This October is awful. I haven't seen it this bad since I started.

[HuskyPup]

Could it be that October is simply a bad sales month?

Yeah, right, therefore why did my EPC drop another 15% on Saturday?

Why were Saturday's earning's my lowest day in 21/2 years?

I had 24% more visitors than on New Year's Day yet still earned less! Yesterday was down to 60% of average yet within the usual click range and half the earnings of the previous few Saturdays.

All my logs/stats/metrics/call them whatever you like, show completely normal traffic plus visitors and traffic is GLOBAL, not just focused on the USA.

This thing is either broken or being manipulated because it is plainly obvious by all the posts that something for SOME of us has either changed significantly or that there is something wrong.

[kurzo]

My traffic/CTR/Revenues are all fairly consistent, so I found it strange that my eCPM/Revenue started to drop as soon as the channel reporting started going in the crapper.

My traffic is actually on the increase - approx 10% this month. Here is how my revenue is affected compared to what I would normally expect:
Monday 15 +4%
Tuesday 16 +5%
Wednesday 17 +2%
Thursday 18 -6%
Friday 19 -15%
Saturday 20 -15%
Sunday 21 -20%
Monday 22 -19%
Tuesday 23 -16%
Wednesday 24 -19%
Thursday 25 -15%
Friday 26 -25%
Saturday 27 -19%

I do not doubt that most are not seeing any changes, if everyone experienced this, then there would be a mass revolt. But I can say with absolute certainty that *something* is going on with a few of us...

[europeforvisitors]

My traffic is actually on the increase - approx 10% this month.

Couldn't that be a factor?

Let's say that AdSense has 1,000 clicks available from Widgets, Inc. for the keyphrase "pasteurized widgets." You've been getting 100 of them on a site with 10,000 page views a day.

Your page views increase to 11,000 page views a day, but the pool of available Widgets, Inc. clicks for "pasteurized widgets" hasn't grown any larger, so you're still getting 100 clicks a day (since everybody else who writes about "pasteurized widgets" is still getting the same number of clicks).

Result: More lower-bidding ads get shown on your "pasteurized widgets" pages, and your eCPM for those pages goes down.

[greatstart]

Lowest eCPM in 3 years for me too. I will just have to hang in there to see if it improves in November and December.

Congratulations EFV. I see you've just reached 10000 posts!

[Swanny007]

Yesterday was my worst earnings day since June 16... which is about 1/2 of what my peak day was in the same timeframe. (Does that make sense?)

[jhood]

Budgets tend to run out towards the end of the month. It's not unusual to see dips the last week or so, at least in my experience.

Some of our other ad networks have also been looking fairly anemic the last few days.

[JamesR3]

This isn't an end of the month thing. In fact, it started around the beginning of this month. The timing and exact behavior (e.g., percentage decrease, healthy traffic with awful CPM) that we are seeing is so similar to what HuskyPup, Scurramunga, Swanny007 and others are saying it's scary.

[potentialgeek]

Budgets tend to run out towards the end of the month.

I think most people are comparing stats to comparable time frames in other months if not years. The extreme drop various Adsensers have noticed is inconsistent with the idea of an end-of-month budget bust. The huge drop started over a week ago, which is closer to the middle of the month than the end. This isn't "lack of business as usual."

p/g

[andrewshim]

This isn't an end of the month thing. In fact, it started around the beginning of this month. The timing and exact behavior (e.g., percentage decrease, healthy traffic with awful CPM) that we are seeing is so similar to what HuskyPup, Scurramunga, Swanny007 and others are saying it's scary.

agree. ecpm has been sliding since early october for me.