Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It does make for an easy excuse though.
Why on earth look for things you might have screwed up, or can make better when you can blame every flop on something mostly beyond your control, like the economy.
But...
Sometimes what seem like simple changes on a website/page can have a significant negative effect on earnings.
Sometimes the "best laid plans" simply aren't.
It's entirely possible to block ads from a source that was propping up the EPC on your site/pages.
etc, etc.
1. Part of figuring out what went wrong consists of understanding who your advertisers are and what their financial condition is.
2. Some parts of a website perform better than others. Use channels to track the different areas of your site. Identify the high earning areas and go granular with channels to identify the highest earning pages. Channels provide a good way to track click trends. This way you can quickly identify what part of your site experienced the earnings collapse and diagnose what caused it. This is difficult to do if you don't know what part of your site is ailing.
Now here is where I believe webmasters fail. Before doing anything else, monitor the earnings (not ctr or ecpm) for that channel for at least a week, but two weeks and longer may be better. The longer you monitor the better the chances you will correctly diagnose the problem. Don't get hung up on CTR or EPC. Focus on earnings first, CTR second.
3. Typical causes of collapse include a change in keyword query trends. Compare your day to day trends for keywords used to access your site. Sometimes they are not stable, which can affect the "clickiness" of your visitors.
4. Another cause for earnings collapse are irrelevant ads. Using channels to identify the location of the earnings drop, review the ads and weed out possible culprits. Ask trusted webmaster friends in different states to view your ads and report what they are seeing. They may see ads you do not.
5. Some earning collapses are an illusion. Analyzing your AdSense stats on a day to day basis can be misleading. AdSense earnings can be unstable, rising and falling wildly day to day. Step back and view the weekly and monthly trends. The ups and downs tend to even out.
What are other causes?
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:46 pm (utc) on Feb. 19, 2009]
Some earning collapses are an illusion
He has 3 times better eCPM than I.
His eCPM is like one of my best sites with a very similar theme one year ago.
He reached now first time $18 a day.
He has reached now about 1/6 of my daily earnings average.
So with the right talent and right themes, it's even now possilbe to built up income with AdSense and reach from month to month new record earnings.
On the risk side, there's a slight but real chance that a new url structure could (temporarily) mess up my fantastic search engine position for that site, even though I will have all the redirects in place.
On the positive side, over the long term, it'll be a lot easier to maintain, expand, and market this way.
It could fail miserably, or it take off like crazy. But, no guts, no glory.
US/CA
UK/FR/DE/IT
CH/IN
Or is there something or somewhere I don't know?
when I first heard "it's the economy" I swept it aside.
Then came 2 months of doing what martinibuster just said and more ( *gah*... way more )
and then I had to realize.
Apart of stuff I knew we could do better... ( working on it )
All I see is a drastic decrease in EPC. You know... ad prices. Big guys cutting back on network ads, stop inflating prices and there you have it.
...
After all...
Hey, it just *might* the economy(TM)
( for us at least )
Hey, it just *might* the economy(TM)
Cool, you can have that one. I'll trademark "Hey, it just might *be* the economy"!
*cough* ...now if you'll excuse me, gotta check 2 months worth of reports for the rest of them honest mistakes...
