How to raise your eCPM

My experience

[developerfood]

Here's the answer:

Have an outage. A really good one, like for three to five hours. A good hard outage seems to really work for me.

I've had three in the past four monthes, and after great nashing of teeth and screaming with my ISP, I seem to be stable.

But, during each of those times, I noticed that my eCPM rose by about 50% for a day and a half after the outage, the length of time depending on how late in the month the outage occurred.

What seemed to be happening is that Google has what decided my monthly average eCPM shall be, and, after an outage has lowered my earnings below the monthly average eCPM will allow, they throw higher quality ads and reward me better. Two of my very best AdSense days have occurred on days after a heavy outage.

It stops, and I mean stops cold, when the monthly average eCPM returns to normal. After that, the moment-to-moment eCPM is as it always was.

Nobody will ever convince me that Google hasn't predetermined how much money I'll make in a month.

So, have yourself a good outage, and let the good times roll (until the averages balance again.)

[Author is not responsible for your foolheartedly following his advice...]

[OnlyToday]

That's an interesting observation. And it wouldn't have to be an outage, you could simply remove AdSense for a day. Having just switched all my ads to server side includes it would be very easy for me--in fact inserting a competitor's ads for a day would do the same thing and give a test of the new ad server.

[zett]

You have the wrong nick, dude. It should be developerfoodforthought.

Because your post is excellent food for thought. Now that you mention it, I was in the exact same situation twice this year (once about 15 hours of screamin', once 4 hours of yellin') - the eCPM acted indeed like you described.

[nondescriptive]

My opinion:

Google doesn't reward you, your advertisers freak out. At least if you have a high traffic site. When my site or ad serving goes down for 24 hours or so I notice the same effect. It's good for business, gets AdWords advertisers back up a few increments.

[nrep]

I've had this exact same experience, I suspect it is due to them rationing inventory across sites to get a fair balance. It's not in their best interest to limit high paying ads overall, so I can only assume they balance them out.

[Jane_Doe]

It's not in their best interest to limit high paying ads overall, so I can only assume they balance them out.

I have suspected that they do that as well.

[Leonard0]

I had the opposite result.
After one of my sites was down for two days a few months ago, the eCPM of both my sites fell by 30% and has stayed there ever since.
Though there is always the possibility that the event coincided with a round of Smart Pricing.

[farmboy]

What seemed to be happening is that Google has what decided my monthly average eCPM shall be, and, after an outage has lowered my earnings below the monthly average eCPM will allow, they throw higher quality ads and reward me better.

If an outage results in visitors not being able to visit your site, how could an outage lower your average eCPM?

FarmBoy

[OnlyToday]

...how could an outage lower your average eCPM?

I can't speak for developerfood, but I would guess that he meant average *daily* eCPM, or at least that's how I understood it when I first read the post.