AdSense Site Losing Money, Same Traffic

[freelanceit]

Like quite a few people on this forum I too have been losing adsense revenue over the last three or four months. To be honest I haven't got a clue why i'm losing money - my sites have the same amount of visitors. I could understand it if my vistitors had dropped, but even then the revenue I am currently recieving would mean I would have to have had a massice drop in visitors. However, my philosophy is 'if i'm losing money from my site, so too is Google.' After all if ym visitors are not clicking on the ads then I'm not getting paid for the click and Google aren't getting paid by the advertiser for that click.

Imagine my surprise today when visiting my Google Adsense account to find an 'optimisation' message telling me 'i'm missing out on extra adsense earnings.' Trust Google to state the obvious. I've known this for months, pity Google didn't twig:-)

Anyway the content of the optimisation email was that, according to Google, they had looked at one of my sites and noticed that I had two ad blocks on each page and that 'they' felt that I should increase them to three ad blocks.

Here comes my point of confusion. The web site in question has an 160x600 ad on the left, a 720x90 ad on the bottom and a 125x125 link unit on the top right of the page.

Now I've counted on all of my fingers and even used my toes to check my calculations and I make the ad units to be three, not two but three. If I add another ad unit, as Google suggest, surely I will be breaking Google Terms and Conditions?

My web sites have always had these three ad units. The same site template is used for each site with only the masthead name changed and different content. With this layout I have always been more than happy with the revenue received from Adsense. I have read somewhere on the Google forums that Google are not paying as much to their publishers - well that would explain a reduction in revenue but does it explain an 80% drop in revenue consistently for the last 4 months? I don't think it does. So if it is not Google 'starving' publishers out of the system, then what in God's name is causing the catestophic drop in revenue? Thins are so bad now that I don't bother looking at Google adsense for days at a time. I know in advance that the revenue figures are laughable. The problem is i'm not in a humourous mood!

[maximillianos]

I've found that Google's optimization recommendations are often not very helpful. We as webmasters know our site, our visitors and our layouts better than anyone. We know what works from testing. They are just making educated guesses based on data from general sets of sites.

While I appreciate their attempts to help, their advice has never really panned out for us.

As for why your revenues are tanking. Do you happen to notice if your ad targeting has changed? Are your ads targeting fine? Or are you seeing some non-targeted ads sprinkled in?

Years ago we had a problem with our site getting targeted by advertising who would just flood spammy type of ads to any sites in our category. Since they were bidding high, they took over most of the ad slots on our ad units. But the catch was no one was clicking them. So our earnings tanked.

I talked to Google and they said they could turn off the site-targeting on their end, but it was a all or nothing setting. No advertiser could target my site at any time. I said go ahead and turn it off. Our revenue went back up and has been normal since.

Might be something to investigate.

Good luck!

[explorador]

I understand what you say, I'm experiencing exactly the same. Same traffic, less earnings, serious websites, original content, you know the rest. Even so daily earnings are at 50% of what they used to be. I've been browsing my sites from diff ips and isps to see if there is some weird ad taking over my sites but nothing, still the clicks are seriusly less of what they used to be.

I find a slight relation of this with the change G did with their algo and results, so I think I might be getting the same traffic numbers but DIFF traffic quality, interests... also, the adsense problems match the absense of ASA.

visiting my Google Adsense account to find an 'optimisation' message telling me 'i'm missing out on extra adsense earnings.'

I also received that message and honestly I pay no attention to it, I have lower earnings on other site but Adsense insisted on another one to increase ad size. In fact it advises me to put a big ad on my most visited page, almost my gold landing page.

I will not do that.

I know what pages receive the most traffic but putting bigger ads there means giving visitors a click out of my site. I began this journey doing what I love to do, not only for the adsense check. I think we should not look for over google optimization or you will eventually loose more than you think.

I'm not fighting against G, I just know things are not quite the same and I will try my best to keep my traffic up for my sites, not exclusively for the ads, any ad.

Do check on maximillianos advise, some advertiser are very hard to avoid and some are using several domains to overcome adsense block lists.

Good luck.

[Rodeo]

Now I've counted on all of my fingers and even used my toes to check my calculations and I make the ad units to be three, not two but three. If I add another ad unit, as Google suggest, surely I will be breaking Google Terms and Conditions?

No you won't. You are allowed to use 3 Ad Units, 3 link units and 2 adsense for search boxes on any page.
Ad units and link units are different.

[martinibuster]

Someone reported to me that their adsense earnings dropped to zero. I took a look at the source code and found that a WordPress plugin their webmaster installed for them was inserting an ad unit with someone else's publisher ID in it. The person that installed the plugin did it wrong. :(

[HuskyPup]

The web site in question has an 160x600 ad on the left, a 720x90 ad on the bottom and a 125x125 link unit on the top right of the page.

I haven't seen your site however this does not seem to be the best layout to attract the most users.

Have you, or can you, try alternative positions for the ads?

[londrum]

i think half of it has got to do with the economy (still). everyone says we're coming out of recession, but they're still talking about a lousy 2010 and 2011 in the UK.
if companies haven't got as much money and people aren't buying as much, then they're not going to spend as much on advertising.

we can tweak our sites all we want, but if we already had it pretty good before then it's not going to make a big difference until everyone ups their ad budget again.

the other half is google's mayday update. your traffic might be the same as before, but it seems that the traffic isn't as well targetted as it was. it doesn't convert as well. all the longtail stuff is worse than it was. i reckon they are sending us much more general stuff based on the subject of your site.

eg. if you sell tickets then you might be getting more traffic from people searching for a general term like 'buy tickets', but you're losing all the specific ones like 'buy tickets for bob dylan concert'. and they are the ones that are more likely to result in ad clicks and sales.

you should have a look at your search terms and see if they have changed.

[freelanceit]

Thanks Maximillianos and explorador I will take a closer look at what advertisers are on my site. All my sites are computer help and support orientated and when I have opened a page the ads do seem relavant to my users. I did see an 02 mobile phone ad on one of my site which I don't find particularly relevant but, obvioulsy, Google think different.

@martinbuster.
Fortunately (or unfortunately depending upon your outlook) my sites are not created using Wordpress. My site have been designed and coded by myself so no extranuous code has been added.

@ HuskyPup
I could post the URL of my site but I am sure it would quickly be removed. However, regarding my layout. The left 160x600 ad has always done well that is why I have never moved or replaced it. Let me just say that I don't make a fortune. However I am grateful for what I do get, even though more would be welcome:-)

The bottom 720x90 ad is and always has been hit and miss and I have considered removing it.

The 125x125 ad link on the right sometimes does better than the 160x600 skyscraper which, considering its postion, has suprised even me.

As well as Google I have a Microsoft banner ad just beneath my masthead. That is 'slow' but it does bring in revenue. I also have a Unible affilate ad just below the page title and a Uniblue ad on my right margin just beneath the Google link ad. Currently the Uniblue affiliate is outperforming every ad company on my website. Contextual text ads are powered by Kontera which is also doing far better than Google on my sites.

Maybe I already have too many ads on my page? It doesn't look that way to me, but others may think so.

One strange thing that did puzzle me was that a few weeks ago I noticed a Google ad for Uniblue on my site. I notified Uniblue asking if it was possible, through Google, to get my affilaite number allocated to any Google/Uniblue orders that come from my site. Uniblue said they didn't know how it could be done (Commission Junction do do this, I believe). They suggested blocking all Google/Uniblue ads. This I did and revenue dropped. A few days ago I re-enabled the Google/Uniblue ads and revenue increased slightly.

HuskyPup if you want to take a look at my website then just let me know how I can forward the URL without infringing Webmaster terms and conditions and you can take a look for yourself.

[leadegroot]

Yes, my ecpm has dropped the last few days - particularly frustrating when I can see that I have new advertisers (we are in the middle of an election campaign, and the parties have discovered Adwords this year! Hurray! Not)
How i can have new advertisers and my ecpm go down (click rate unchanged) I do not know.

I got that same email from adsense. Didn't feel very targeted, didn't show any special understanding of my site :(

[netmeg]

It's auto generated. I did actually get an email from AdSense last year offering to work up a layout they thought would do better than the one I had; I ended up using part of theirs and part of the one I had, and blew the roof off. But it was an actual person who sent email, not a message in my account.

[Scurramunga]

Anyway the content of the optimisation email was that, according to Google, they had looked at one of my sites and noticed that I had two ad blocks on each page and that 'they' felt that I should increase them to three ad blocks.

I received a similar message, but I now better than to follow the advice. I know that when I ad more than one Adsense block to the small number of pages I have running it always spells disaster.

The other issue is that my earnings are about 30-40% down (on a monthly basis) on what I used to earn years ago. So now I have Google telling me that I need to increase the amount of Adsense blocks on my site to make up for that lost revenue? It won't happen.

[nirok]

Just let people know last month I doubled my earnings and this month they have dropped 50%... this month I have more clicks and also the best CTR I have ever had. The number of page view are the same as last month. The reason? Less people are bidding for ads therefore amount paid for click through is less. Seems to be August... Not much you can do about it if there is less demand for adwords money made per click will drop...

[SEOPTI]

It's not possible to know if your ads are targeted or not, their preview tool has been broken for years and nobody can fix it, is it really so hard to fix some code?

My friends from India will fix it for $5/hour.