Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I don't mean for you to answer all these questions here; this is confidential to your business model of course, but this is the kind of stuff you have to look at.
One of my sites is seasonal and is subject to this yearly affect, though I hate it, it's the reality of this particular industry.
This statement is pretty accurate with my scenario as well, Rock steady CTR with suppressed CPM. One observation though is that I did notice a large office supply chain overtaking some larger traffic ad spots recently, even reducing an ad block that usually had twice the CPM, would love to test that theory but may wait it out before switching that block to text only to see if that may help.
if your site isn't near the top of its field (for good click throughs etc) then you will naturally start attracting a larger proportion of those ads (especially if your traffic has increased).
Frequency capping, which prevents users from repeatedly seeing the same ads on your pages.
Improved attribution, to help advertisers identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity.
Improved ads quality, as we're able to improve ad performance within the Google content network.
Source: [feeds.feedburner.com...]
Now Google bot can identify the best performing sites in the network based on post-impression activity. This is really scary, what if bot algo went wrong and you got badly kicked out...
EPC has been very strong this summer--something that's a bit of a surprise in the current economic climate. (For what it's worth, I've seen several articles lately that have talked about ad budgets being shifted from branding media to more easily measured media such as search ads. Maybe that's the economic cloud's silver lining.)
I check a lot of my pages to see if the ads are different or if I go to a page more then once, I did it 4 times Actually and got the same ads.
Most likely Google is lowering the amount Advertisers are paying per click on my sector. That's the only thing i can think of.
Most likely Google is lowering the amount Advertisers are paying per click on my sector. That's the only thing i can think of.
Or, more likely, advertisers are bidding less per click. That's certainly possible as economies in various parts of the world take a hit.
I did it 4 times Actually and got the same ads.
Yep, but was that using one browser from your location?
To check ads, not very often, I use at least four different bowsers plus a proxy browser. You may be surprised just by using the Opera browser the difference you may see.
And I have this funny feeling that some ad budgets are not being very well controlled at the moment!
Luckily the US dollar seems to be on a very sharp rise, which should give us EUR-based publishers a little boost in the future :D
Maybe there's a relation to the summer season; many people are out enjoying theirselves!
Let's face it: Advertisers and media buyers need time off to take their families to the beach, the mountains, or the lake, just like everyone else!
Take today for example. our traffic is down about 10-15% but our earnings and Ecpm are down about 50%. We've checked everything...There is nothing we can find which accounts for this
We've checked everything...There is nothing we can find which accounts for this
ok, but when it comes down to it, but all you can check are things on your end - there's a thousand other things you can't check or control, not only on the Google end but on the advertiser end, the market end, the user end, and so on.
traffic is down about 10-15% but our earnings and Ecpm are down about 50%.
I'd be looking at which source was sending less traffic. That could easily account for the situation in the quote.
Lose traffic from a source that sends a higher percentage of shoppers (people more likely to click an ad) and your earnings can take a disproportionate dive.
We have taken such a dive over the past 3 weeks it is scary. Since the onset of Aug. we have been kicked down another 30%. This is on top of the 20% we have already lost. Not only that but our traffic has increased! The reporting stats are just erratic.
This makes no sense.
Sorry to hear about your payout reduction. Unfortunately, it is unlikely you will be able to determine the root cause of this payout reduction event. The best advice anybody can give is that you diversify your revenue streams and move on..
[edited by: Edge at 10:07 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2008]
For the past 3 years we have been stable for July and August. This year, no Such luck. So the theory of summer slow down doesn't explain things for us.
Probably most common misconception about web performance regardless of metric. Website businesses don't work that way...the landscape changes so quickly and so discontinuously that the trends from least year or the year before are largely irrelevant, or rather, uninterpretable as applied to today. Very few other businesses are that chaotic and unstable.
SO, it could be Summer. It could be anything. 42.
the landscape changes so quickly and so discontinuously that the trends from least year or the year before are largely irrelevant, or rather, uninterpretable as applied to today.
I think that depends on the topic and/or the site. I've been seeing the same patterns year after year since the 1990s, and I could graph an accurate forecast of month-to-month variations from memory.
(FWIW, I get a monthly report from Hitwise about Web traffic in my vertical, and the vertical as a whole has a seasonal pattern that's extremely close to mine.)
On my site, for example, traffic, impressions, and clicks are very similar to last August, but click value has gone up significantly, and so have my earnings.
