Forum Moderators: martinibuster
We were looking to move to a CMS to replace our custom PHP website. One of my developers is very familiar with Invision power board, which powers our forums and so we decided to use Invision to power the rest of the website too.
We spent a couple of months porting the pages, ensuring URLs, design and everything else was identical. On May 3rd we switched to using IPB, instantly our revenue dropped 50% which equates to a loss of tens of thousands of pounds a year. Visually btw nobody would ever know the website was powered by Invision.
Looking at the adsense reports from the past year the drop is very apparent. Earnings may have been +/- 20% from day to day but on May 3rd it just dropped on average 50% and earnings were never even half of what they were.
We went over the pages with a fine tooth comb again and again and couldn't find anything visually different. The only differences were the source. Out of desperation we've done everything from remove huge chunks of .JS to removing all references of IPB name but nothing has helped.
I've since had several other outside coders take a look and they cannot find anything either.
To make matters worse, at the start of May, we rebranded the site with a new URL as it was an essential part of our development, traffic hasn't dropped which was nice but once again adsense has dropped, this time to 1/3. Though at least this time it makes more sense, I assume we've lost several main advertisers and will have to wait a while for things to stabilise.
Any ideas? I have a feeling I'm chasing my own tail but it's still difficult to accept.
Thanks :)
I ask because I did that once - the new design was practically identical, and it turned out that all the little imperfections in the earlier design was where the money was.
Also, the order in which the content and ads are displayed in the source code and changes in "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->" tags could make a difference by affecting targeting.
One of the reasons for the switch was to speed things up. Before hand the custom php was hacking in to the invision database to use member base etc. Once we switched it all ran a lot faster than before.
Thanks for the suggestions so far though.
BTW something I missed out was that the main drop was from cost per click. As though something in the new CMS caused a higher level of smart pricing.
Perhaps they are not able to target your ads as well with the new source code layout... and that can easily cause a huge drop in clicks when your ads are off-target.
Do you use Adsense content wrappers in your source code to help Adsense figure out what conent to target? If not, that might be something worth trying.
Whenever I do any major overhauls to a site that is doing well in Adsense and SERPs, I tend to try and keep my changes to the source code (as viewed by bots) to a minimum. I use a lot of javascript includes so that I can make some pretty big changes without changing the footprint of my pages.
But in your case, I would bet it is related to the targeting, especially since the visible source code is probably drastically different than before... Adsense needs to basically start over in trying to figure out what your pages are about...
Hope this helps.
