A sign of Hope - May 2010 seems to be an excellent month

[zorogat]

Normally I tend to write in this board only when I have problems with my adsense account. And I usually get really good advice.
Today I want to write because, after an awful month of April, May seems to be an excellent month: if things go on like this, it's going to be the best month ever for me.

The positive effect could be caused by a lot of reasons but there are two things that seem quite important to me.
The first thing is that at the end of april I moved my website from a cheap hosting to my dedicated server: the difference in between the two servers is like night and day.

The second reason might be only a coincidence but I have a feeling it's not.For the last two years I've been religiously adding a new page of useful content every day, but from the 15th of april I was busy and didn't update the website. Could this 'lack of updating' have helped, somehow?

Apart from that, yes CTR is tanking, but at the same time the value of every click is increasing.
Google Adwords is all about giving value to clicks, so I can understand why Google wants to see less valid clicks that pay more.

[Rodeo]

On par with April. No significant change here.

[jetteroheller]

Daily earnings more than 10% above April level.

It's a great change.

[AndrejX]

Now it's a full week with disabled "interest based ads" and CTR is about 30% higher than previous month and half. Earnings are also about 15% higher but major problem is significant lack of Google traffic after massive SERP changes last month.

[jmccormac]

Still a junk month. Worse after Google banjaxed the SERPs.

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

Now it's a full week with disabled "interest based ads" and CTR is about 30% higher than previous month and half.

In the first week of this my average daily earnings are just 10+% more with my CTR more or less the same.

Too early to make any conclusion other than yesterday was my best day since mid-March when all this mularky started for me.

[johnnie]

Things are looking bright indeed!

[Lame_Wolf]

Now it's a full week with disabled "interest based ads" and CTR is about 30% higher than previous month and half.

Turning off IBA has nothing to do with you having 30% higher CTR. What makes you think they are connected ? I can show you month after month where the results are 10-30% different to another month. [and no changes were made to the site].

[AndrejX]

Last Monday was awful as usual so on second half of day I've disabled IBA and earnings in following hours make that day one of best in a month or more. And following days looks much better.
Enough evidences for me.

[Lame_Wolf]

Enough evidences for me.

No point in helping you then. Your test was floored, as were your results. But if you think turning off interest based adverts was the result, then you are a long way off the mark.

As Drall correctly mentioned in another thread - and mentioned numerous times in other threads...

"That doesnt turn off interest based ads on your site... just turns of data collecting so the next site your visitors go to Google doesnt use the data. They confirmed this in the adsense help forum"

[vivalasvegas]

the difference in between the two servers is like night and day.

Could you be more specific here please.

[zorogat]

// Could you be more specific here please.

the new dedicated server is much faster than the old cheap one, that was shared with hundreds of other websites
the old one had php4 installed, the new one has php5
the new one has apache2 the old one had apache
the old one had been hacked twice in the last 6 months: I didn't have access to the root account and couldn't check what really happened
quality of hosting is really important and I think Google knows that

[AdSenseAdvisor]

There are number of great case studies which show the correlation between site speed and revenue, one of which is on O'Reilly's blog. The rules prohibit me from linking to it but you could use your favorite search engine to find it.

Revenue benefits aside, I imagine your users also appreciate the improvements.

[benallos]

May 2010 is one of the worse months especially after the Google update in the SERPs...

[jmccormac]

There are number of great case studies which show the correlation between site speed and revenue, one of which is on O'Reilly's blog.

This is the article and it is worth reading as are Steve Souders' books.
[radar.oreilly.com...]

This section from that O'Reilly interview deserves quoting:

James Turner: One place that I see a lot of slowdown in pages has nothing to do with the site I'm actually visiting, but a lot of times, it appears the ads being served on the page. What's the state of that right now? It seems like the people who are doing the least to optimize their performance are the ad servers.

Steve Souders: Yeah. Ads being served, third party ads being served inside of web pages, is becoming more of a problem. It's not that it's getting worse; it's that everything else is getting better. When I started this work about five years ago, the percentage of problems that could be associated with ads was pretty small. Maybe 20 percent of the improvements you could make to a page had to do with ads. That's because most websites weren't focusing on these other best practices of spriting and ETags and caching. Well, in the last five years, we've seen a lot of the major websites adopting these front-end performance best practices. So it's not that ads have gotten worse; it's that the actual website content has gotten so much better. Now, of the bad performance practices that you see inside of popular web pages, a much higher percentage, maybe 40 or 50 percent of the problems are introduced because of third party ads.

On Google webmaster tools, one of the elements that is continually flagged is Google Analytics. It is possible to use the asynch version of GA but it also flags other third party advertising such as Amazon's book and product advertising. In other website speed tests, other advertising such as Google's Adsense would get flagged. If Google's speed test calculations do not take these factors into consideration, then Google is going to have a pretty screwed up view of a website's speed. The other major factor is the geographical spread of a site's main audience. If a site's main audience is, for example in Ireland and the website is in Ireland, then doing a speed calculation based on website access from the West coast of the US is not going to give a reliable result in terms of how users in Ireland would estimate that site's speed. The nearest thing that Google could hope to achieve would be an approximation of a website's speed. And it is this approximation that worries all webmasters - are we being penalised because Google is attempting to breach what is effectively the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the web?

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

Quick, someone tell Brett that AdSenseAdvisor's account has been hacked!

[kd454]

zorogat - yes I have been hitting new records every week. Seems people must be spending much more on ads these days.

[tim222]

US unemployment rates peaked recently in January, held over 10% in February and March, but then dropped over a half percent in April. My theory is that website volume is inversely proportional to the unemployment rate. My traffic always rises as unemployment goes down. More people on the job means more people can goof off and visit my website during working hours! Also, when I look at public stats, most websites in my niche show peak traffic during the week and distinct drops on the weekend, further convincing me that it's related to pepole browsing from work.

[alika]

Our eCPM increased by 11% in May compared to April resulting in a 20% increase in revenue.

The main change we did is to remove all the other ad networks for our medium rectangle, and only leave Adsense and our own advertisers.

This leads me to an interesting conundrum: in an effort not to put all our eggs in the Adsense basket, we try to use other ad networks. But using other ad networks has decreased revenues and revenues only went back up after removing them.

[Go60Guy]

I was running Chitika on some of my sites, but, since they've basically suspended everyone's sites pending review for approval, I decided to dump their ads. I replaced them with AdSense, and lo and behold, my AS revenues jumped by several times what I was seeing with Chitika.

I only ran Chitika for the sake of diversifying. Should never have done it. Smacks head!:)

[sailorjwd]

strange thing happened the last two days... revenue 50% above normal.. two highest days in 5 months. Keep coming baby!

[ember]

On track to be our best month ever (knock on wood)!

[alika]

Go60Guy -- same exact situation here

[onepointone]

My adsense revenue is up approx. 120% this month with no real change in traffic.

But I'm an adsense small-fry, just a little side income. Daily earnings basically = going from a McDonalds meal to a sit down meal in a restaurant.

[RedCardinal]

On Google webmaster tools, one of the elements that is continually flagged is Google Analytics.

This is a know reporting bug John. GA is in fact gzipped, but not to Googlebot. So it appears in the Site Speed report as non-optimal, when in fact it's simply a reporting issue. Google Webmaster Team know about this, and I'm sure a fix of some sort will appear.

[jetteroheller]

Just trying to sort out what happens.

Since Sunday fall back to and below last month.

Just right now, I change back some "improvements" of my site turning out by studying Google Analytics seem to be "worsenings"

[rajivatre]

Yeah, good we have a thread here reporting jump in earnings.
My earnings are also up though I cannot call it a jump.
This in a way prove that google is certainly playing a major role in ups and downs of adsense revenue. Otherwise how you can justify so many people here telling about revenue jump at the same time?
When there is a thread posted about adsense earnings down, most of the senior members here dismiss it as not a universal phenomenon and only related to some specific niche or geography.
IMHO I never thought that explanation was correct, and this thread proves that google is certainly having a major role to play in the ups and downs of the adsense earnings.

PS: I know I know many will jump on me saying that only few webmasters out of millions have posted here, about the jump in revenue so this cannot be taken as a trend.
In that case please those whose earnings are down please post here.
ww may not be representing All the adsense publishers but can we treat it as a sample data of adsense publishers from all over the world?

Thanks
Rajiv

[alika]

Otherwise how you can justify so many people here telling about revenue jump at the same time?

Our jump in revenues has an explanation -- we removed other ad networks in rotation for our medium rectangle above the fold spot and only left Adsense and our own advertisers. By dropping the other ad networks, we were able to show more Adsense ads. More visibility, more income.

It's not like there's no explanation and Google just suddenly decided to be generous with revenues.

I firmly believe that there IS a way you can improve your Adsense revenues. It's just a matter of finding how and being comfortable with the decision.

[Go60Guy]

I firmly believe that there IS a way you can improve your Adsense revenues. It's just a matter of finding how and being comfortable with the decision.

I agree with that. After coming out of "retirement" last fall, I took a look at all of the untended sites I had where I was running AdSense. I decided to throw caution to the wind and to display AS in ways that might shock the sensibilities of some of the purists around here. My AS revenues increased by around five fold as a result.

Recently, in addition seeing an increase by replacing Chitika with AS, as I mentioned above, I switched my hosting (of multiple sites) from shared hosting to a private VPS. This dramatically shortened page load speeds, and there was an immediate bump up, in not only my AS revenues, but other money streams, as well.

You've just gotta remain agile and keep experimenting and tinkering.

But, because I've made these adjustments, I can't tell if Google has made a shift recently toward greater largesse for publishers.

[jmccormac]

Yep Richard.
The GWT data in the recommendations seems to be months old. It would be a good thing if the Google Webmaster Team learned to distinguish between external advertising content served via an IFRAME and local content. The speed graph is showing data from the 12th. It is the kind of thing that has many webmasters scratching their heads in confusion.

Regards...jmcc