Forum Moderators: martinibuster
And there is no point in talking how many pages you have. It's all about impressions, and clicks.
Mine was Sunday May 3rd. We're talking a dramatic and sudden drop of 66% total revenue. It was incidentally on the same day I launched a new version of my website.
I've got a long climb still ahead, I'm afraid. I'll be very surprised if I have anything resembling an average day in the remaining three hours.
a) I only have two sites.
b) I essentially haven't updated a damn thing [except a few typo corrections] NOR have I added any pages since 2001, correct that's 2001, probably long before AdSense was even thought of let alone invented.
c) I don't "tweak" ads, change positions or colours.
AdSense from day one, was a "manna from heaven" which simply dropped into my lap. For that I'm very grateful. An exceedingly rare "once in a lifetime opportunity".
My sites were never, ever, ever created or attuned with AdSense or other income in mind. They were there to serve a specific international educational purpose and no amount of money was or is going to corrupt that intention.
I only added Amazon affiliate income to defray escalating bandwidth costs biting into my limited retirement income. Became so good we could afford one good "night out" each quarter with the change <G>. True!
Now my AdSense experience after a great many years is that traffic remains essentially the same, EPC remains satisfactory. These are well respected and established sites for my genre.
The only change of significance over the last two years has been a steady continuous downward spiral of CTR. From an average 4% - 5% down to 1% late last year, but very lately down to 0.5%
That's the No. 1 Killer for me. I can only see ads served up in Oz and after filtering stupid dating ads I now see graphic ads for web design, real estate sales etc. etc. all on pages related to design of antennas.
People will not click on irrelevant ads. Now I don't blame anyone because keywords on the page may very well unintentionally trigger those genuine ads appearing.
BUT
What is becoming abundently clear to me is that the ad inventory on the content network for my genre at least, is becoming seriously depleted [or spread far too thin over imitating "johnny come lately's"].
I think much of our problem for many is lesser and lesser ads available. Obviously other people have a different experience.
I think much of our problem for many is lesser and lesser ads available.
I am still seeing a very good quantity and quality of ads for my widgets and my EPC has not reduced whatsoever, like IanCP my CTR has gradually reduced over the years from nearly 6% at the very beginning to 2% at the start of the year, to 1.8% last week to 1.2% in the last few days.
On a very traffic consistent, widget authoratative site, CTR does not drop by 33% over night unless instigated by a program algo update/change or a major malfunction.
I remember 05.05.05 I had a similar occurence when they combined page impression numbers, now it's very strange here we are again in the first week in May and I've been zapped again for some unknown reason.
It took until 9th January 2006 for that "anomally" to be ironed out and that too happened over night. Then we can fast forward to October 2007 when, once again over night, zap...another massive reduction in actual clicks and EPC that continued until January 2008.
These are not normal fluctuations, these are deliberate manipulations by the algo/Plex and they really do not give a damn what happens to us nor anyone else.
Consider this over your coffee/tea/beer!
One programmer syphoning $10-20 per day from 100 accounts...with over 1+ million accounts (I have no idea how many accounts there are but have seen this suggested)...hey, you few are complaining, why is no one else?
Would or could Google even notice it?
Just playing Devil's Advocate but what if?
One programmer syphoning $10-20 per day
In large corporate and public environments things happen since there are some very bright people there and there are also some very stupid people who cannot see, or want to see, what is being done or manipulated.
I am not saying this is happening at Google however sudden, inexplicable occurrences many have been seeing recently suggests to me either a major change in the algo that has hit our CTRs and thereby our eCPMs or that something is "broken" and they are attempting to repair it meanwhile denying all knowledge of such an issue.
Why do I say this? My EPC has been unaffected, if it were purely a dearth of advertisers the EPC would surely go down? Of course one could argue that advertisers are still paying the same and there simply are no clickers...oh, so on one specific day there was a mass movement to stop clicking?
Transparency at the moment would be better rather than idle speculation etc.
A.) Your content - You need to write content geared towards helping Adwords advertisers sell their products. Lets assume that you have a website about hotels in Trinidad. You need to write positive reviews about specific locations, talk about how easy it is to book hotel rooms and the different attractions. This will deliver ads that will help with "a call to action". When I learned about writing sales copy I used the same tactic in keyword research and writing articles.(This helps a lot in staying away from Smart Pricing)
B.)What You Write About: It is logical that not all keywords are created equally. An Adwords Advertiser that sells pins for $2.00 each won't be willing to pay $1.00 per click so a website about pins which might yield only $0.05 per click. So write about topics that have a decent value so you can get a decent return.
C.) Adwords Aggressive Education: Adwords in an effort to keep advertisers must ensure that their advertisers see a profit from using the system. So they educate, educate, educate, teaching about how to lower bid amounts and so on. This means less money for us in the short run. A shrewd move by G that we all here would agree has been working.
D.) Adsense On Page Optimization: Heat maps, use of borders, ad placement rotations, image vs text ads, blending, number of Ad units etc. these are all contributing factors to Adsense success. If you optimize your content and don't have good ad placement then the exercise is futile no matter which ad network you use.
E.) The Black Hat World: MFA's and content scrapers affect us too! So we say that we are able to block all these MFA's through the Ad filter. But have you ever thought that these people go through the Yahoo Ad Network, MSN, Kontera, Chitika and others buying ad traffic elsewhere. Google has no idea immediately of their arbitrage and they soak up a lot of clicks and along with it the advertisers budget. Needless to say that they have such a high CTR that they will carry a pretty impressive conversion rate and in essence leave us the "goody 2 shoes" getting those lower paying ads. Its a fact that we have to accept they will never stop.
I have looked on these factors and realized that as the landscape changes so must our advertising strategy. An adsense publisher is first and foremost a Marketing Channel for advertisers, we must look on that and build our entire business plan around that...
My 2 Sense
An adsense publisher is first and foremost a Marketing Channel for advertisers
I completely agree with this and this has been my strategy from day 1 of AdSense implementation on already very successful, authoratative widget sites:
A. Agree
B. Agree
C. Agree
D. Agree
E. Tend to disagree for my widget sector, sure they exist however since my EPC is fine this does not explain the sudden drop in click volume.
I monitor my metrics very carefully against my own logs and Friday 8th May shows an enormous discrepancy between my page loads and Google Page Impressions.
Are some of us into a lost data scenario again? It certainly would not be the first time.
Interestingly so far today, and yes I know it's very early on in the Google day, my metrics look comnpletely normal again. If this continues, fine, they've "fixed it", we'll see what the next 10 hours brings since this is from where the majority of my AdSense earnings are derived.
There is a formula for successful adsense implementation and other factors that will affect earnings.
On track with the formula, still seeing a continuous downward trend. What is to be noted is also the fact that Internet is full with adsense ads and people are getting used to NOT clicking them
[edited by: Play_Bach at 5:44 am (utc) on May 12, 2009]
