Forum Moderators: martinibuster
-AP
Not an ideal response to your first post so far, but tell us - how has your earnings per click fared since you started in the Adsense program?
Since that is the topic of discussion, as the other bloke so nicely put it. :)
As for your post regarding the CTR dropping - if you have a high volume of 'repeat traffic' then it would explain, the more your audience is familiar with the ads, the less they will click out of "novel interest" as, more than likely, on recurring visits they will have seen similar before, and it will lose it's "newness".
For what it's worth, Tuesday is the best day of the week for my keywords.
I do not see any trend downwards.
My biggest daily fluctuations are in daily impressions
On the demand side of the equation we have advertisers who have set a budget for the amount they will pay per day.
On the supply side we have the number of adsense publishers - which I gather is increasing.
As a result, the high bidders may be reaching their limits and falling off earlier each day, their places taken by lower bidders.
Hopefully advertisers will increase their budgets or, failing that, my users take to visiting between the hours of 1 and 6 am.
Notice that if you refresh the page the 'theme' of the ads can change to a wildly higher or lower CPC ad. I can literally make .05 on a click then the same surfer can come back to my same page, click on an ad, and that click is worth 1.00.
I have large fluctions in payouts but the CTR is holding steady.
I've only been using AdSense since August 1, which is, again, too small a sampling to really find a trend, but my CTR is moving up steadily -- with the exception of last night, where it was lower than it has been since we started. It will probably be down today, too, given the nature of the most trafficked site.
..., I was asking about earnings per click. I believe there are other threads discussing click thru rate.
Please check what we are discussing here before you post your message.
In my case, except the daily fluctuation, the EPC is pretty stable.
so, lets say I'd have 40 clicks for an average of 5c per click, then one or two clicks more could easily turn that into an average of 50c or more, simply because a single click can differ by orders of magnitude.
PS: All numbers exemplary only.
SN
mine are almost 40% down
Mine too :-(
Hopefully advertisers will increase their budgets or, failing that, my users take to visiting between the hours of 1 and 6 am.
Now that's a thought! If the cost per day limit for Adword advertisers is calculated according to the same time frame as AdSense reporting, this should mean Asian and European based sites, with many local visitors, would actually get a higher income from their English pages (as long as they have local Asian or European visitors) than most American sites.
(Sorry for drifting a bit out of focus.)
It is my belief that Adsense EPC will fall as more publishers put the code on their sites. With increased Adsense distribution, publishers will see the ratio of content ads to search ads go up.
I also believe that for the great majority of advertisers that ROI from content ads is significantly lower than from search ads. Consequently, as the ratio of content ads to search ads increases overall ROI will fall.
At some point of increased Adsense distribution advertisers will shout "****!" and make the effort to opt-out of participation in content ads.
At this point in my theory, simple laws of supply and demand explain declining EPC.
I've expoused this theory before without others taking it up, but I'll put it out again.
Why put it out again?
Perhaps the rest of us don't want to 'take up' such a negative view of AdSense just yet?
Hi Figment, not being argumentative but what evidence do you have for this?
And secondly what evidence are these advertisers basing their belief on?
I know some advertisers "assume" ROI is less, and seeing CTR is directly measurable on the adwords panel many will see differences in CTR - e.g. our CTR is sometimes less for content ads, and the cost per click is generally higher..
However, we have been doing some fairlyr egular tests and are finding that in some campaigns, ROI for leads delivered to us from Adsense is better that from search ads, and on other campaigns significantly similar. We find for more "complex" or niche b-b services the ROI/conversion rate is very high from adsense sites. Maybe the same may not be true for consumer items as we do not advertise those.
It does take a lot of effort to run these experiments objectively and i wonder how many other advertisers have carried our similar tests, and how may are simply "guessing" with no proof/ evidence. Again i must reinforce there are some posters who take delight in going to discussion boards and attributing anything from fraudulent clicks, low CTR, low conversions to Adwords without any evidence. Figment88 is not one of those i know, but there are many out there who see Adsense as a major threat to their own businesses.
You perception that the comment is "negative" has no relevance to whether it is accurate or not. It is only a theory and I am more than happy to discuss its validtiy one way or another. Let's leave emotions out of it.
chiyo
You make a good point that ROI might not be lower. I should amend my theory for decling EPC - advertisers only have to perceive lower ROI (whether accurate or not) for them to limit Adsense distribution.
As far as whether or not ROI is actually lower, I think that strays from the current topic. I'll just say I think there are some instances where ROI is not necessarily lower. Your example of complex offers makes sense. I also think that product coupons could do well.
Back on point
There are really only three non-conmpeting classes of explanations for declining EPC's:
1) People are wrong and EPC's aren't really going down. People who observe lower EPC's are just arguing from limited sample or calculating wrong.
2) Google has reduced payout rates.
3) CPC's paid by advertisers have gone down.
I'd be happy to hear a fourth class of explanation, but I think you have to use some combination the three above.
Personally, and again this is just my humble opinion, I think the bulk of the explanation comes from point number 3.
figment88 are you RPC (revenue per click) lower? and can I ask are they lower over the average Google gives for all time or just lower of some of the highs you have had?
Personally for our own sites where we act as publisher we have not seen any significant reduction in CPC for the two months since we started. If anything it has gone up. I do sometimes wonder if this reduction in CPC people are seeing may not be accross the board but may be due to things like available ad inventory, (for example our average cpc has always been fiarly modest - perhaps these reductions are mainly being seen in high value CPC areas?
The only other thing i would like to throw in the mix is that theoretically the more impressions you have may be negatively realted to CPC - for various reasons including the more likely that the same user will click on other ads (2nd, 3rd, or 4th with usually have lower CPC) when they encounter a similar block of ads again on your site -(this assumes that the top position in the block is usually more expensive and has more likelihood of being clicked on) - so if you have a reader profile that is more likely to visit multiple pages in a session or period the subsequent clicks on average will attract a lower CPC. Secondly as you provide more ad space in a site, more ad inventory has to be found to fill it, and supposedly the "best highest value ads" are inserted first, and then those ranking lower start to fill up other pages as highest value ads reach their daily limit, or if google has some sort of algos determining (say for example) the max times a certain ad can appear on one site.
My general feeling is that google will reduce the average "percentage" of click value to publishers over time until they find the most lucrative forumula for all 3 players (adwords, advertisers, publishers), and the amount which still stops publishers dropping adsense for their competitors. Though im absolutely sure it will not be a simple percentage, but more complex in the way it is worked out...
One reason for this is that on the adsense reporting screen, the most obvious column (revenue per click) is left off - maybe so that we cant see the gradual decline over the weeks easily!
