Drop in revenue

[ca3le]

I've been making my money off AdSense since before it was really released. But recently I had a pretty major database crash on my largest site. So while I was fixing it I've actually been improving the site, for instance I was running SMF for my forums and have since changed that to IP.Board.

The site is looking better than ever but my revenue has gone down and my traffic has taken a hit. Funny thing is that the CPM is down on all my content not just the pages that were effected by the crash.

Can it at all have to do with Googles Indexing of those changed pages... could that at all effect the ads on other pages?

[iBrian]

Interesting comment, gb - I set up GA over the past few months, but Adsense and GA won't link up properly. This was my second attempt after repeated technical problems with installing GA at the end of last year (zero link up, Ga misreporting big time).

In which case, I'm running redundant tracking codes on sites which aren't delivering the linked data Google promises (the only site that is, is reporting in USD in GA, but in GBP in Adsense), so there's no point keeping it installed in the first place.

Secondly, would be interesting if this is working as a back door to untargeted ads.

Will start removing the GA codes and see what happens.

[glitterball]

I had zero link up between Adsense and Analytics also, hence why I removed the Analytics code from my site. I didn't "unlink" them until today though.

curiouser and curiouser...

[HuskyPup]

Hahahaha...the hamsters have all turned into lemmings today and jumped off the cliff...the metrics, especially page impressions, are a complete joke and bear nothing to the reality of my traffic.

Perhaps if we all contributed to a steam engine fund for Google we may get a little bit more reality since their supposed high-falutin' technology sure as heck doesn't work the way it's supposed to!

[incrediBILL]

the metrics, especially page impressions, are a complete joke and bear nothing to the reality of my traffic

Not all traffic is real traffic.

Are you sure that all that traffic is human?

For instance ASK.COM makes screen shots of pages and it loads images, CSS, everything, might even display AdSense, but it's not going to click.

I could give you a list of hundreds (thousands) of similar programs and things that generate lots of fake traffic.

Even the referrer field is meaningless as a measure now. I used to use referrer as a measure of a potential bot or not and the bot authors got smart and now include it in many of their crawlers.

Unless you can prove a human was at the helm, don't believe it's real.

Google only counts impressions where the page runs javascript and ad blockers don't stop AdSense so the reality here is that reality just sucks these days.

The Adsense Bot has nothing to do with the normal Bot that comes round and caches pages.

Incorrect.

Googlebot, Mediapartners-Google, AdsBot-Google are all interlinked and share a common cache.

Whichever bot loads the pages caches it in Google.

For instance, I had an error that was blocking the AdWords quality bot from a specific page. It was attempting to read a landing page for an old ad campaign I didn't use any more and wasn't getting thru. The AdSense ads went totally off target on just that page and Googlebot didn't try to crawl that page from any other method.

So basically it doesn't matter which of the three user agents that hit your page, it's in Google's crawler cache if not in their index yet.

[netmeg]

(Trust him; IncrediBILL's the biggest bot battler on the planet)

[HuskyPup]

Are you sure that all that traffic is human?

I must admit that today is the 21st and it's usually 20th-24th when I get hit big time by image crawlers going across my Coppermine galleries however I have a substantial increase in uniques today so I don't believe it's that...I'll download my latest logs and we'll see how the day pans out.

[incrediBILL]

however I have a substantial increase in uniques today so I don't believe it's that

Many crawlers appear to be unique.

There is fast flux IP hosting available, botnets being used, huge lists of proxy IPs, so uniques don't really mean uniques either.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but you need a 3rd party tracker that only counts hits with javascript because you can NEVER accept what the raw logs say anymore, they are science fiction.

Going by my raw logs, I'd probably earn 3x what I do per day if that gives you a hint.

[iBrian]

There's an established science fiction/fantasy website I manage - the image ads switch between displaying fantasy books, and local property sales.

#*$! has property sales got to do with science fiction/fantasy?!

I also have interests in the local property market, and regularly check up the various local property listings.

I sincerely hope that doesn't mean to say my own Adsense is being targeted at my own user behaviour.

When I'm on a SFF site, I'm looking for SFF information - when I'm on a property site, I want property information.

Google, please stop trying to second guess our interests - contextual on-page works better as both a publisher and a user, thank you.

[Play_Bach]

> I sincerely hope that doesn't mean to say my own Adsense is being targeted at my own user behaviour.

That's exactly what's happening. I noticed that after searching for something, sure enough I'd see ads for it mixed in with what I'd normally expect to see as on-topic AdSense ads.

Update May have misread your post, sorry. I don't think YOUR user behavior is affecting your AdSense ads for other people, but their search behavior certainly is determining what ads they see.

[ken_b]

#*$! has property sales got to do with science fiction/fantasy?!

I also have interests in the local property market, and regularly check up the various local property listings.

I sincerely hope that doesn't mean to say my own Adense is being targeted at my own user behaviour.

It sounds like you are being served "Interest Based Ads" based on your surfing history. Be sure you are logged out of any Google account, and have deleted any and all cookies, and then take a look.

These are not the same ads your visitors see, because they will have a different surfing history than you.

.

.

[iBrian]

Exactly, though, ken - that would mean publishers with well-performing niches are being served with irrelevant ads for their content.

Google Adsense rep, please stop this nonsense! Or, at least, give us an opt-out!

[HuskyPup]

Google Adsense rep, please stop this nonsense!

You'll be lucky since "it" hasn't posted anything since 5th February!

As is usual with the Gorg when they're $crewing us, silence. This is going to backfire on them spectacularly at some point, how soon I have no idea but nothing is more certain and do you know what, they'll probably not even notice it since their machines won't have told them until it is too late...then again, will there be anyone left at G to care since it's on autopilot now!

[BedSupperclub]

@HuskyPup Google will give birth to Skynet!

Regarding the drop in revenue: I opted out of Interest based ads (you can do so by going in 'My Account', then down the page edit 'Interest-based Ads Preference') but it didn't improve anything...

I complained to my Adsense contact about the drop, I've been told it was due to a new quarter, well that's BS (doesn't fit with previous years' history), I'm pretty sure they tweaked their algo and because of that some of us have been screwed..

[netmeg]

Google's not in it NOT to make money. In case you haven't noticed.

[iBrian]

"I've been told it was due to a new quarter"

How does a new quarter result in poor ad targeting through interest-based advertising vs contextual-based?

That's Google's play area, not the advertisers.

[geekgirl]

I've been told it was due to a new quarter -- How does a new quarter result in poor ad targeting through interest-based advertising vs contextual-based?

The "New quarter" was told to us in relation to direct placement ads. Our rep says the companies haven't figured out where/how much to spend that quarter.

However, in our experience with direct advertisers, they tend spend MORE at the beginning of a quarter when a budget/campaign starts. Then, as they analyze the CTR/return on investment, they adjust as the quarter goes along.

[incrediBILL]

I know people don't want to hear it but AdWords advertisers track conversions.

Google has all the data and they know who's sites are being naughty and gobbling up ad revenue with no value, or nice and driving direct conversions to clients.

It's quite possible all that's happened here is this data was analyzed yet again and another wave of sites that didn't perform to the advertisers (or algorithms) expectations have simply been smart priced.

Other factors can also be at play, but I suspect it's just a new wave of smart pricing implementation based on what I've read so far.

Some evergreen sites have see little impact if any at all and others got hammered.

If those that got hammered feel your site is worth more than Google does then you'll need to go find some direct advertisers, or another ad program that pays better, and prove it.

[HuskyPup]

Google has all the data and they know who's sites are being naughty and gobbling up ad revenue with no value, or nice and driving direct conversions to clients.

There's no doubt about that however is that data correct?

It is impossible for Google to track sales conversions from my sites since no one, and I genuinely mean not one site in my widget trade can sell this way since the products require far more post-query advice and information.

I'm fairly sure there must be more widget trades like this therefore I would like to know that IF my sites have been downgraded then tell me precisely why.

[glitterball]

Well after killing every part of my analytics account, my CTR has doubled and is back to what it was before - Hooray!
It happened more or less instantly after deleting the analytics account, so I'm convinced that was the reason.

If you've experienced a massive CTR drop, then try deleting your Analytics account (it took me a while to kill every last bit of it).

I read about this on another forum and was sceptical, but it looks like there's a bug somewhere - probably a "/2" to remove some data that's being collected twice (except under some circumstance that the programmer didn't consider).

That "Skynet" comment earlier is probably apt - advertisers don't understand the algorithm, publishers don't understand it and I'm starting to think that Google don't even really understand it anymore.

[HuskyPup]

If you've experienced a massive CTR drop, then try deleting your Analytics account (it took me a while to kill every last bit of it).

I was thinking about this yesterday...when you say kill every last bit of it do you mean at the Google end since removing it from sites for me is easy?

[levo]

What do you mean by delete? Remove tracking? Just delete the website profile?

[glitterball]

I was thinking about this yesterday...when you say kill every last bit of it do you mean at the Google end since removing it from sites for me is easy?

I mean delete it to the point where the analytics account doesn't exist anymore.

I should explain that I removed the analytics code from my site after about a month (because it never linked up properly with my Adsense account anyway), but left the account open. My site seemed to be duplicated twice within that account as well (there were 2 sites both "mysite.com") - I didn't do this, so not sure what happened.

Yesterday, I thought that I'd removed it all (perhaps I'd done enough), but I could still logon to the account. Anyway this morning I deleted everything I could and closed the account.

There is this as well:
[google.com...]

[levo]

Thanks!, found it, Analytics Settings > Edit Account Settings > Delete Account

[HuskyPup]

Ok, we'll see what happens now...I've never been a fan of Analytics therefore it won't be missed by me.

[jmccormac]

Could it be that Google Analytics is one of the feedback loops on which Google's Interest Based advertising or at least something from which it derives a considerable amount of its data?

Regards...jmcc

[ken_b]

Does (did) everyone in this thread who had earnings crash and is using Google analytics have analytics "linked" to their Adsense account?

[netmeg]

Too easy and drawing conclusions way before enough time has passed to accurately judge the result.

And yes, as IncrediBILL says, advertisers track clicks and conversions. And smart ones adjust accordingly; they don't wait for Google to do it. Just this morning I put about 2500 sites into my "low bid" campaigns, because their six month performance had tanked. And I'm just one person and that was for just one of my clients.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 6:21 am (utc) on Apr 23, 2010]
[edit reason] thread clean up [/edit]

[BedSupperclub]

I doubt disabling G Analytics has any impact: you can bet the adsense script is already collecting the same kind of data as GA.

Besides I have a few sites, half of them tracked by GA, the other half isn't, and it's the same drop for all of them.

[ElvisFan]

At this stage I will try anything to get my revenue to what it was this time last year. If it means deleting my analytics codes... so be it...

I do believe there is some merit to this theory... as when I changed my ad codes for several pages I had a good day but 24 hours later my stats went south again

[edited by: ElvisFan at 6:39 am (utc) on Apr 23, 2010]

[incrediBILL]

To reiterate the key elements of what Netmeg said, if advertisers don't get the value they expect from advertising on your site they won't pay as a much, or quit advertising altogether. Likewise, Google can't charge as much and has to discount accordingly to meet the advertisers expectations.

Not that this helps people being discounted, but it's the hard cold facts of reality.

I sell direct ads and for some customers those ads work miraculously on my site and for others they perform poorly. Sometimes it's my traffic that dictates which will work better than others and sometimes it's the ad copy that isn't compelling.

When I see poor ad copy I tell my advertiser so they can correct the problem.

Otherwise, if it's just not working, I lose an advertiser, less money, that's just the way it goes.