Income Rebounding After Site Updates

... and a little help from AdSense support

[incrediBILL]

I knew something was wrong when my AdSense income didn't rebound after Xmas. Every year it takes a big slide starting around Thanksgiving and then plunges into the toilet from a couple of days before Xmas until New Years. Then it rebounds to normal, at least in most years.

In case you missed it, I recently posted about finding lots of alternate ads running, image ads running wildly off topic, and being overrun with educational affiliates.

I did the following in order:

- disabled image ads, no change.
- blocked online education affiliates, slight increase
- sudden decrease for days, turned out to be alternate ads running amok
- fixed alternate ad problem (needed AdSense support for some), small increase
- fixed a few minor SEO issues I found, always tweaking the SEO, always
- waited a few days, CTR started to rise
- re-enabled image ads, CTR improved even more
- enabled IBA's but reports not showing many impressions, clicks pay well (so far)

Now the CTR, eCPM and of course earnings are returning to a post Thanksgiving level.

Had I been paying attention and fixed these things a couple of months ago I'm sure it would've lessened my normal holiday downturn.

The important thing is all negative factors that I could find have been addressed and everything appears to be returning back to normal.

Now it's back to working on traffic again.

[nick28]

That all you mentioned, works only for few days and then goes back to it was, namely LOW.
At least it was for me so.

[incrediBILL]

Yes, but this is different, I never had a holiday slump not recover.

This appears to have been a "perfect storm" of AdSense follies that I overlooked simply because I expected the usual holiday slump so they hid undetected until I expected a recovery which never happened.

Won't be the first time something similar has happened and I'm sure it won't be the last ;)

[Tashi]

So what did you do that caused your earnings to go back to normal?

What influence have alternate ads on your earnings? Aren't alternate ads there for those times that there is no Adsense to show?

Which SEO issues are you talking about? SEO affects traffic, not Adsense. Or did it improve your targetting?

I have a post thaksgiving plunge that doesn't rebound as well. Tried some experiments, but none of them gave persistent results. Since last week it's getting a little better though...

[DaStarBuG]

What was your "alternate Ad Problem" if I may ask?

[netmeg]

The important takeaway here (to me) is that when things went south, Incredibill looked inward (what could HE do with what he had control over) rather than outward (what is Google doing to HIM that he has no control over) and found success.

[jimbeetle]

The important takeaway here (to me) is that when things went south, Incredibill looked inward (what could HE do with what he had control over) rather than outward (what is Google doing to HIM that he has no control over) and found success.

Amen.

[incrediBILL]

What influence have alternate ads on your earnings? Aren't alternate ads there for those times that there is no Adsense to show?

What influence? alternate ads mean AdSense isn't running!

When you're showing alternates, AdSense is dead, zero, nada, and in general purpose cases they don't always pay anything close to AdSense payouts.

Which SEO issues are you talking about? SEO affects traffic, not Adsense. Or did it improve your targeting?

SEO effects both, targeting in the SE and targeting in AdSense, they should be tuned to be on the same page for every page. Also, if you target lesser paying keywords or a lesser paying audience, you'll earn less. Sometimes a few minor adjustments here and there can kick up better paying ads and/or being traffic more inclined to be in a buying mood.

So what did you do that caused your earnings to go back to normal?

See the list in my original post.

Basically fixed a few broken things, like the stop words causing alternate ads, blocked a bunch of junk advertisers wasting space on my site, and tweaked some targeting/SEO.