Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Google had been offering a program called Site Targeting that allowed advertisers to buy a site on a CPM basis. That program had been generally quite beneficial for publishers, as it would create an artificial CPM floor below which an impression could not fall. In other words, if an advertiser bought your site directly with a $2.00 CPM ad, google would show the $2 CPM ad unless the expected value of the keyword ad exceeded $2, in which case they would show the keyword ad.
Around November 15th, Google changed that policy. Now advertisers could also buy a keyword ad directly on a CPC basis. I believe that has accidentally wreaked havoc on Google's auction system, driving down demand and therefore prices for keywords.
In other word, lets say I am an advertiser looking for the keyword "diabetes". In the old days, to get that keyword, I had to buy the entire google network, including the "made for adsense" sites. Now, I can just buy 50 sites I trust.
What happens is that the revenue for trusted sites remains high, but the overall competition for the word diabetes decreases, and the law of supply and demand drives down the price of the keyword "diabetes".
If enough advertisers shift to a targeted strategy, then eventually the total number of keywords advertised in the marketplace begins to drop, and google's ads become less contextually relevant.
Just a theory -- anyone think there is anything to it?
Around November 15, our revenue dropped from around $350 to $150 a day. That's a monthly revenue drop of around $11,000 to $6000.
And it's dropping even lower this week.
Our CTR is higher than ever, so the drop has to be due to a sudden change in the way advertisers buy our site out. It wasn't a gradual decline - it was a sharp decline that happened virtually over a working week in November.
And yes, it was around the same time the non-clickable area came into play, but also apparantly what KidCroesus pointed out with the way Adwords works now.
Looking at our current crop of regular advertisers, they are a different lot to the advertisers that were spending with our site before the drop. They could easily have been lost when they no longer had auto-access to Content sites. They were then told to pick and choose.
And the current advertisers are obviously paying way less now that these big boys are gone from our site.
