Anyone Else Seeing Low CTR in January?

January way down for me....

[WolfLover]

I was just wondering if I am alone in this? Januarys earnings are down about 25% from January of last year and from last month.

Impressions are about the same, but the CTR and therefore the ECPM is way down.

This made me think that my ads were not as relevant, but when I look at them, they are relevant for the most part. Always get an ad here and there that could be better.

Why do you think that visitors are not clicking as much as they normally do?

[ruip]

My daily revenue is 2 times December revenue, trafic up only 5%. Is a non-english site with 10000 vis./day.

In 5 sites only one is equal.
I don't understand why, but im happy, very happy.
ALL IS UP, CTR, ECPM, PLACEMENTS.

[greatstart]

Just 2 more days left for this month, but it looks bleak for me, as I see a normal CTR, but a rather dismal eCPM as compared to last January.

[signor_john]

One thing I've noticed this month is that eCPMs on weekends have tended to be quite a bit stronger than on weekdays. Maybe people who worry about losing their jobs are more cautious about surfing the Web for personal reasons at the office?

[ArtistMike]

Actually Dec. 2008 was worse than Jan. 2009. Made more income from the ads in Jan.

[loorpubs]

My Google Adsense and Valueclick earnings for December and January were about 2/3 the usual, but over the past week I have seen earnings begin to climb, especially good the last couple of days.

[andrewshim]

January 2009 still sucked but it turned out to be 25% than December 2008.

[NoPlaceLikeHome]

It's good to find this thread before I post mine about eCPM & CTR down. Anyone use the new Adsense for content code?

[edited by: NoPlaceLikeHome at 1:43 am (utc) on Feb. 3, 2009]

[jmccormac]

January was definitely better than December for me by at least 30%.

Regards...jmcc

[pldaniels]

Utter collapse for me, but it's because there's no adverts to show :( Basically it seems like the money to pay for AdWords has dried up in my market sectors and all I'm getting on my pages are generic charity adverts and "Search for ads:" blocks.

Gone (for now) are the times when I was gauranteed a payment from google every month :\

[dawnstar]

First half of Jan was an improvement, after the xmas hol's I thought things were going back to the new "normal" but then the second half went a bit pear shaped, but still ok considering the #*$! storm we're in!

[frontpage]

We had a long talk about this possibility a while back and it was discounted by some.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[2clean]

All the credit cards are calling in their debts from Xmas. For me it's just the normal annual cycle. Audit your ads according to this trend. :)

[robzilla]

I'm seeing nothing particularly unusual. It is and always has been a bit of a roller coaster ride.

[suchethn]

do you sure

[adamxcl]

As advertisers cut back, shut down or whatever it'll keep getting worse. It may get better to buy ads though. Mine has been steadily going down for a while. I moved the ads up on the page about three lines of text and the CTR jumped up a few percentage points. Maybe time to start more testing for some, shake things up if you can?

[oddsod]

So it's a definite then? Some people are posting decreases and some are posting increases. And people with drops in income are more likely to post than those showing rises.

Also, of those people posting decreases, some have lost more than others. This works both in real money and in percentage terms. Similarly with the increases - not everybody with increases shows the exact same increase.

STOP THE PRESSES! (Or at least put this on the homepage)

[netmeg]

Nothing's definite, and frankly, nothing's much different than any other month. Some people are up, some people are down.

AdSense is what it is. It's passive income, and when it pays the bills, it's great. When it doesn't, you have to diversify.

You're never going to make as much money waiting for it to come to you as you will if you go out and get it.

[signor_john]

To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, "It's the economy, stupid." It would be strange if most AdSense publishers weren't "feeling the pinch" (to echo the headline on WW's front page), although--as others have suggested--some publishers will be up and others will be down at any given point in time.

IMHO, this is a good time to build for the future. When the economy recovers, publishers who have focused on improving and expanding their sites will be in a better position than those who have spent their energies on trying to squeeze every last drop of blood out of a drought-stricken turnip.

[rj87uk]

December my revinue almost halfed (a little less traffic but mostly bad, ctr a little down and ecpm as a result was much lower).

January back to normal.

Normal = good!

[fearlessrick]

The one sector that is alarming is CTR. Mine is down as much as 50-60%, meaning, simply, people are just not clicking on ads as much as they were a month or two ago. It's definitely tied to the struggling economy and a fatal flaw in Google's AdSense model. If nobody clicks, nobody makes any money. At least with CPM ads, we get paid when they just look.

In my instance, since almost all of my ad blocks are for image and/or text ads, I'm seeing more image ads, which undeniably are going to generate fewer clicks. But, all trends trend and end, the key is to make the trend your friend.

[stormshield]

My sites have been breaking records of the lowest CPC and eCPM for a couple of months.

[leapforward]

Our Google CPC was 10% lower in January in a niche that over the past 4 years hasn't seen more than a 5% monthly change in CPC.

Traffic & CTR were up in January, so revenue didn't taken as big a hit.

Other ad networks we use seem to have taken a bigger hit. For example, Kontera's CPC dropped by over 30%, but CTR was slightly up.

[signor_john]

It's definitely tied to the struggling economy and a fatal flaw in Google's AdSense model. If nobody clicks, nobody makes any money. At least with CPM ads, we get paid when they just look.

It all boils down to eCPM. For most (though not all) AdSense publishers, cost-per-click contextual ads will pay better than CPM ads. I keep mentioning the PubMatic Q4 AdPrice Index [pubmatic.com], but I'll mention it again for the benefit of AdSense publishers who think there's a "fatal flaw" in the CPC model and that CPM ads are likely to be their salvation.

[JerryOdom]

First half of January was ridiculously bad then for some reason everything rebounded to improved metrics for late January. It ended up being a good January.

February is turning out to be great on eCPM so far.

I've decided not to worry about it win or lose and just continue to play the game.

[whatson]

My CPM is down 1/5th from this time last year, and I have twice the ads on now too.

[Musicarl]

Our ads are starting to pay so low that we're considering pulling them. What's interesting is that the ads themselves have better creative lately, and are more aggressive. Usually when I see catchy, clever stuff, there's a nice bump in revenue, but in this case the attention-grabbing ads are paying squat.

[maximillianos]

January was our best Adsense month in 5 years. However we have been working towards getting more pageviews out of our visitors by making the site navigation as functional as possible.

In the past we tended to focus on trying to integrate the ads with the content. We thought to make the big bucks we had to chase our visitors away by giving them ads to click.

We have since changed our tune. Now we focus on increasing pageviews per visit. Making our site more useful and helping folks find what they are looking for in the cases where they may land on the wrong page.

From our new efforts we have pushed our pageviews up 50%, which in turn has driven revenues up as well.

Plus we are much happier with the direction of the site now focusing on user experience. Makes for a better long term plan.

[piatkow]

CTR slightly up on this time last year but CPC 50% down.

I also link to specialist publications on Amazon. That used to pay slightly better than Adsense but have had zero sales since Christmas.

[Jay7]

My site is in a niche that has been hit by the downturn. There used to be up to 10 strong advertisers but just one of them seems to advertise now. Other Adsense links are kind of distantly related and by far not as attractive to the users of the site.

Having said that, the number of visitors has increased so earnings went up as well. I am concerned though.

[explorador]

As mentioned on another thread: I have more sites and more traffic than before, still, slightly less income via adsense. It seems we have to work more and more for the same $$.

I'm seeing the "normal" daily income I used to have, only on weekends. Weekends are my highest days now.

My best site has great traffic these days, still don't seems quite good to me as ROI performance.