Can CTR really become anything worth

Comparing my stats

[jetteroheller]

Let's assume October was the last normal month

I set the October CTR as 1000 as a compare basis

1000 October
863 November
687 Dezember until now
548 last 2 days

[HuskyPup]

So your CTR has dropped to 54.8% of October?

Sounds a lot like many others have been reporting:-(

[zett]

Yep. This is perfectly in line what we are seeing. We consider September to be the last "normal" month, though.

[honestman]

I would have to go back to August for a long-term normal month in terms of CTR, but December is certainly at the nadir and gets worse by the day for some of the likely reasons discussed on other threads in this forum.

[jetteroheller]

Okay, I expand my statistics, October remains the basis with 1000.

1113 August
1079 September

[alephh]

I'm also seeing steady decrease in CTR.

July and August were "normal", after that slow downhill month after month. October was the worst CPC-month.

[alephh]

Comparing my numbers to yours:

________________
1113 vs 1140 Aug
1079 vs 1071 Sep
1000 vs 1000 Oct
0863 vs 0945 Nov
0687 vs 0845 Dec
________________

I did some improvements on my sites late october. It would be interesting to see data from others...

[vordmeister]

My CTR has been dropping in a very straight line since February 2006. Using your October 2008 based scale: Feb 2006 (3000) to now (750).

Haven't noticed any unusual movements recently in CTR. eCPM is another matter for me - faster decline than normal from October. Though my overall traffic has ramped up from then which tends to account for that sort of thing.

Edit> I'm not criticising adsense. Based on Oct 2008 being 1000, traffic was 120 back in Feb 2006. Now it's 1200.

[leadegroot]

My ctr dropped sharply in june (june 9th) and has been sliding ever since

jan 1,505.68
feb 1,501.50
mar 1,832.23
apr 1,812.30
may 2,018.55
jun 1,408.43
jul 1,121.71
aug 1,138.54
sep 1,077.45
oct 1,000.00
nov 647.27
dec 807.32

with October normalised to 1000 and the other months %-wise off that.
The traffic was growing faster than the ctr up to jun, and has continued its growth. I haven't changed the site - I don't know what Google has changed, but I wish they would change it back. Its possible its due to advertiser withdrawal, but I don't see any difference, and, of course, we have no way to fully track advertisers, beyond eyeballing the site regularly.

Someone recently said that soon he'll be paying adsense for the ads. I know the feeling. I'm moving to a membership model.

[Richie0x]

My CTR has dropped around 40% since mid-August.

[alephh]

________________________
1113 vs 1140 vs 1139 Aug
1079 vs 1071 vs 1077 Sep
1000 vs 1000 vs 1000 Oct
0863 vs 0945 vs 0647 Nov
0687 vs 0845 vs 0807 Dec
________________________

[zett]

Here we go:

CTR normalized
October 2008 = 1000

Aug 1433
Sep 1270
Oct 1000
Nov 0974
Dec 0789

[signor_john]

I see the same pattern every fall, so a month-to-month drop in CTR comes as no surprise. For my account, the rate of decline in CTR from September through mid-December is a little higher this year than it was in 2007, but not horrendously so.

The main difference between 2007 and 2008 is that I was starting at a lower baseline in 2008: My September CTR this year was considerably lower than it was last year, mainly because I moved my single AdSense ad unit from near the top of the page to the coldest spot on the AdSense "heat map" because I wanted to give more prominence to display ads (which pay considerably more than AdSense does). On the positive side, my average AdSense EPC is way up from last year, and that's helped to compensate--albeit to a limited degree--for the drop in CTR.

For what it's worth, display ads have been the only really bright spot in my revenue landscape since the Wall Street panic of September. AdSense revenues are down, affiliate revenues are down (even after adjusting for seasonal variations), and traffic is off slightly in my sector as a whole, but display-ad CPMs are extremely strong. In part, this may reflect contracts that were in place before the September panic, but it also may be due to the fact that smart, big-money advertisers use display-ad campaigns to build their brands and provide greater "lift" for their direct-response marketing efforts during times of economic stress when prospects may not be eager to click on CPC ads. We've had many threads about the value of not having all of one's revenue eggs in one basket, and my own experience confirms that diversification is a good form of insurance for publishers who can find alternatives to CPC ads.

[jetteroheller]

Just made stats from my English AdSense sites.

Here normalized to October the stats of my English sites:

1441 July
1223 August
1136 September
1000 October
798 November
644 December

I have 20% more imrpressions in November and December compared with July, but nearly halved income.

For luck, it seems the German area is far less hit by the recession

[johnnie]

Welcome to recession. The sour reality is that people are just a lot less interested in buying stuff (and thus; your advertiser's offerings) than they were pre-september.

[ronburk]

Got just the opposite. Income up about 5-10% every month for last 4 months. Dang site was just left there to rot, too, so I can be sure the change is not due to any content alterations. Maybe there's an industry shift (more folks in my topic shifting to Google from print), or maybe Google has a new quality measure that I'm scoring high for. The possibility of the latter makes me tempted to start banging out some more content. I'll never get rich off of AdSense, but there sure is something appealing about that little check coming in month after month without me lifting a single finger to do any work.

I mean any more work, of course. Creating the content was a chunk of work in the first place.

[annej]

My EPC gradually went down since spring but the CTR stayed steady until the economic mess in September. It probably is partly people just clicking less because they feel broke. But I also seem to be getting a lot more poorly targeted ads so there may have been some sort of shift in ads available about then.

[simstar]

Has your content changed that is close to the adverts?

CTR can only drop so low. Unless you start displaying adverts by google that are completely irrelevant then your CTR should reach a stable rate.

It could just be the economic situation we are in. People are less likely to click on an advert to 'buy a widget' than they were last year.
Lets hope this situation turns around soon.

[jetteroheller]

Let's assume October was the last normal month
I set the October ctr as 1000 as a compare basis

1000 October
863 November
687 Dezember until now
548 last 2 days

Yes it can!

CTR with 1000 as base for October

1000 October
863 November
707 December
667 January
598 February

EPC with 1000 as base for October

1000 October
1012 November
1145 December
961 January
875 February

ECPM with 1000 as base for October

1000 October
857 November
840 December
627 January
497 February

[aleksl]

Hate to post "me too", but our CTR is through the floor.

I don't have normalized CTR numbers, but I can tell that CTR is down big time, and earnings are down 50% in last 5-6 months. Site was upgraded, improved, and traffic went up 30%.

We are looking hard into other alternatives to monetizing.

CTR can only drop so low.

you would be surprised.

[Jaideemaak]

Just to say that everything Adsense-wise peaked for me in May 2007 and it has all been declining ever since (with the very occasional blip). When people talk about September/October 2008 being the last 'normal' month, I'm wondering why I was hit so much earlier?

As far as content is concerned, I have spent a lot of time adding to and improving my pages but to no avail. I have far more and far better content than I did before but earnings are a lot lower.

I also spent a fair amount of time towards the end of last year experimenting with ad formats, colours and positions. Again, that made no difference.

As has been said above, with the world economy in such a mess it seems that people just aren't as ready to buy. It therefore doesn't seem to matter how good your content is or how well your ads are placed, etc.

Incidentally, my Adsense earnings peaked at exactly the same time as my stock market portfolio - May 2007.

Oct/Nov/Dec 2008 really were the pits and the beginning of 2009 has been slightly better than the end of 2008 but my earnings are still a long way from the highs of mid-2007.

[HowYesNo]

mostly same ctr as last year but epc is terrible, 20$ for 1k clicks, i'm i triple-smartpriced or what? any other adsense alternative?

[biscuit]

Bucking the trend here - we are up on impressions, epc is standard for this time of the year, and ctr has not moved more than 2% from average for the past six months.

Probably helps that our advertisers are in a very competitive market and just cannot afford to stop advertising. I expect the recession to bite at some point though.

[Borniet]

I can't but agree on this topic... Impressions are way up (putting some hard work in some of my websites), and CTR and eCPM are waaaay down.
I notice more and more of those 1 or 2 cent worth clicks. The downwards trend also started around september 2008 for me.
On a day to day basis, I also notice that the more stable my nr of impressions is, the higher CTR and eCPM are.
BTW: How do you get the normalised stats?

[netchicken1]

Can I just add that this is a self selected sample and only shows some people on the net are seeing their earnings decline. It means nothing statistically.

But even with that my ctr is not too bad, but my ecpm, is abysmal and down at least 50% to 70% some days on 'normal'