Do Glass Ceilings Exist in AdSense?

[incrediBILL]

Always reading about the so-called "glass ceiling" where AdSense won't earn any more than that magical amount where earnings are capped.

Are you sure the glass ceiling isn't your imagination and creativity instead?

I almost fell into the glass ceiling mindset trap once, years ago, when I couldn't seem to get the site over the $100/day ceiling, just wouldn't budge. Then I realized I was looking at it all wrong, the site and AdSense units as-is (as-was) caused the cap, so I set about to change things up. Couple of months later I was looking at a theoretical $200/day earnings cap, but having broken the $100/day ceiling I was sure I could bust it and did.

Then of course the economy stumbled and budgets got pulled and everyone took a hit.

However, the point was just adding more traffic to a site as-is may not break a glass ceiling, it could result in simply spreading the same ad budgets thinly over more page views, aka smart pricing.

The trick is to explore how to access more budgets in AdSense, advertisers with bigger budgets, better paying keywords, etc. because the ad budgets and traffic your site currently attracts are what appears to set the ceiling, which would be true no matter what advertising medium you use, be it AdSense, affiliates or direct ads.

Just my $0.02 on the topic, discussion?

[DaStarBuG]

Smartpricing might not be a matter of off/on but rather a matter of degree.

That is acutally the case. Watch this two videos from Google AdSense:

Insight into your earnings Part I: Explaining the ad auction [adsense.blogspot.com...]
Insight into your earnings (Part II): How smart pricing fits in [adsense.blogspot.com...]

If one site is really slow and has bad HTML and suspicious SEO tactics, while another plays by the book, it seems reasonable for Google to send more high quality ads to the second site than the first.

That actually is smart pricing.

Web businesses are WORK, which includes site upkeep and keeping up with the continuous changes in the internet. My opinion is that anyone complaining about a "glass ceiling" isn't doing the work necessary to keep a business growing.

Exactly! Just one more thing to add:

To tap into the full potential of AdSense you constantly need to experiment.
2 years ago I was convinced I found the perfect ad locations on my website and left them for over a year.
Boy was I wrong. When I started to experiment again I was able to increase my eCPM over 400%.
And even though I think it can't get much better I am still doing experiments more or less all the time.

[maximillianos]

Actually Google does not make 50 million in the Travel category and distribute it. The publishers make 50 million and G takes a cut.

The sky is the limit folks. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. We have doubled our Adsense revenue every year without doubling our traffic.

[StoutFiles]

2 years ago I was convinced I found the perfect ad locations on my website and left them for over a year.
Boy was I wrong. When I started to experiment again I was able to increase my eCPM over 400%.

Is there really such a thing as the perfect ad location? Repeat visitors WILL get ad blindness. Wouldn't the best solution be to rotate ad placement every now and then?

[Lame_Wolf]

Wouldn't the best solution be to rotate ad placement every now and then?

That's what I do. And if I do not alter the layout, I'll alter the colors instead.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Stop watching your adsense account 10x a day people! :-)

[indyank]

Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. We have doubled our Adsense revenue every year without doubling our traffic.

what you describe perfectly fits the glass ceiling theory..note that it is not a fixed celing forever.What google probably does is raise your ceiling to accomodate you, based on your age and also your height and the rate at which you grow...

[maximillianos]

Well it is not like we just sit there and our earning grow. We try new ad units and placements. We put ads on new pages. We optimize for optimal targeting. AND our traffic does grow. Just not as fast as we can grow our ad revenues.

I wish G did it all for us via a magical ceiling. :-)

[gmb21]

There has to be a maximum possible earnings because, as others have said, the limit is imposed by how much advertisers are spending.

If there was only one advertiser in my niche, and he was spending $1000 per month – then, if I was the only publisher in that niche, my ceiling would be $1000. If more publishers start up in my niche, but still only one advertiser, then my ceiling is going to be lower than $1000 since we’ll have to share the advertiser’s spend.

The only way around this fact is to get more advertisers in that niche, or to expand to other niches, as incrediBILL said.

[buckworks]

imposed by how much advertisers are spending

And that limit is imposed by how cost-effective it is for the advertisers to have their ads running on your site.

If the ads are producing new profits, most advertisers would raise their budgets.

[MonkeyFace]

If there is indeed a glass ceiling, it seems to be coming down on me right now :) I hope it's only temporary.

[Lame_Wolf]

Stop watching your adsense account 10x a day people! :-)

A day ? Pah, I do that in a hour. :)

[Scurramunga]

Thanks for the links DaStarBuG.

[indyank]

We try new ad units and placements. We put ads on new pages. We optimize for optimal targeting. AND our traffic does grow. Just not as fast as we can grow our ad revenues.

I am assuming that those are stuff that everyone here tries and still find a glass ceiling at a certain point.

Just not as fast as we can grow our ad revenues.

that has always been my experience. This can be experienced more in older and traffic pulling sites.

Logically, ad revenues have to grow yoy as budgets may increase, competition for a spot increase, etc. etc.

[maximillianos]

Well 8 years of Adsense and I guess we just have not hit our ceiling yet thank goodness. :-)

[hal12b]

It's 100% true. When I used adsense, I just couldn't budge it over $100 a day..... more content... more clicks, less per click and who really knows if their stats are true. We just have to believe it.

Quick solution - diversify.... use Chitkita, infolinks, sell directly to advertisers. No point pounding your head on the wall trying to figure out adsense. For all I knew I was making $300 a day and google still only told me $100.

[SEO2Go]

Been a publisher for eight years. There is definitely a glass ceiling. To my horror, I recently discovered there is a glass floor, as well. And it's starting to crack.

[Rockyou]

Definitely there is upper & lower limits in adsense for certain type of traffic otherwise the adsense system would have been abused like anything for example

Case 1 : A person handling adwords accounts of clients, can heavily bid on his own website and make the system fail.

Case 2: why adsense works in almost any website because there is a lower limit or else its impossible for it work for all in general.

How to break ceiling?

Bring more traffic, Google pays highest to search engine traffic in general. Google evaluate site value by type of traffic means they will analysis each type of traffic like direct, refferal, search engine & conversion ratio to set your upper limit & lower limits.

Note: People hitting ceiling means they have perfectly optimized sites. Many people never even go close to it so they will always have something to improve, Further Google can change the upper & lower limit according to market conditions.

Adsense advisor can put more light in this matter.

[hfguide]

I agree with the OP-- there is no "glass ceiling." I say that because having been with Adsense and CJ for years and experienced tons of ups and downs and ups again, I can vouch that I used to make the "glass ceiling" conclusions repeatedly, only to have it broken. I remember thinking, "BAH, CJ is bunk; I could never make $X amount per month with it..." Then suddenly I'd be making 3X the alleged "glass ceiling."

I remember thinking, "BAH, I'll never be able to be one of those people to make the $100 Adsense threshold." Then a year, 2 years later I'd not only be easily making the $100 a month, but double that for a few months.

So IMO the "glass ceiling" is really a frustration at not having reached an arbitrary goal that you set for yourself. You immediately set out to make $10 a day, but because you can never make more than $8-9 a day you go, "Ah ha! Glass ceiling!" You set a goal of making $200 a month, but because you can't seem to make more than $180, you think "glass ceiling." That's when you draw a conclusion that Google or some other company is maliciously "blocking" you from earning more money than a certain amount. That's more a head trip, if anything.

With that being said, does that mean that there's no such thing as reaching a point where no matter how hard you work, you can't seem to improve your revenue past a certain point? Of course there is! But that's not a "glass ceiling"; that's a typical problem of having reached a "plateau", something that happens in every type of activity, whether it's dieting or learning a new skill or what have you. You do all the "seeingly" right things but suddenly all improvement "stops."

There are a lot of reasonable explanations for why that may happen. In my case, the reason why I had such a hard time making it past $100 a month was that it wasn't enough to be ranked highly in search engines; I needed that "X Factor." For me, the X Factor was getting indexed in Google Images. For you or someone else feeling like they've struck a plateau, it might be something else-- maybe tweaking your ads or using Squidoo/ hub pages or getting "Dugg"; I don't know. The point is that sometimes it's just never enough to do "all the right things." When you've hit a plateau, that means that there's something extra you need to do or have happen to break the "ceiling".

[DaStarBuG]

Is there really such a thing as the perfect ad location? Repeat visitors WILL get ad blindness. Wouldn't the best solution be to rotate ad placement every now and then?

96% of my visitors are first time visitors coming from search engines.
They search, they find (or not) and leave. We are a question answering community in the health sector. So I don't really need to worry about ad blindness.

[globaltom]

I'm quite sure the glass ceiling exists, because I ran into it 5 times over the past 3 months.

Check out this image:

www.global-internet-services.net/images/screenshots/google_ceiling.gif

upper image, my weekly income (day-by-day)
lower image, my daily pageviews

As you see over the past 3 months, my traffic surged a 20% but my earnings topped 5 times at exactly the same level.

Coincidence?

[leadegroot]

Adsense income is largely driven by the CPC your advertisers are willing to pay (yes, combined with how clickable your visitors find that same ad - but that is something you can experiment with).
I'm currently having a little windfall - my ECPM is up some 30% and its obvious its because advertisers are bidding more - this is completely beyond my control, and I don't expect it to last (but am jumping up and down excitedly while it does :))

There's no glass ceiling. We're all at the mercy of the advertisers.

[HuskyPup]

Adsense income is largely driven by the CPC your advertisers are willing to pay

The glass ceiling may not exist however Google does throttle a site's earnings with the flick of a switch otherwise why would the first week of February see my average EPC rise 29%, my CTR 8.1% and clicks 14.5%?

This is not adververtisers competing, it happened over night with the flick of a switch or the turn of a dial...just like that I have returned to pre-Thanksgiving Day metrics.

Nothing, absolutely nothing anyone else says will not convince me that this entire supposed "auction process" is not rigged, other than them actually admitting the system is totally out of control!

[leadegroot]

This is not adververtisers competing, it happened over night with the flick of a switch or the turn of a dial...just like that I have returned to pre-Thanksgiving Day metrics.

My problem is more of a lack of advertisers - right now I have at least 2 advertisers who are actually willing to pay a decent amount to be shown on my site. Hurray! Wish I knew who they are... I don't see anything noticeably different myself. :(

I don't see any evidence that the game is rigged, I just think I have an inconsistent niche :(

[Scurramunga]

This is not adververtisers competing

Well it's certainly not an auction in the purest sense of the definition. What auction do you know of is there where there exist mechanisms akin to Smartpricing or bidder CTR having an influence on equilibrium price?

Nothing, absolutely nothing anyone else says will not convince me that this entire supposed "auction process" is not rigged, other than them actually admitting the system is totally out of control!

If not rigged, sometimes definitely flawed. If the history of Google's search and indexing algo is anything to go by then I have no doubt whatsoever that Adsense and Adwords algo stuff ups do affect us.