AdSense EPC over the years

Supply and demand pushing up EPC?

[farmboy]

Recently in another thread I mentioned that I think AdWords has an inventory shortage (or maybe a defacto shortage)

I went back to October 2003 to look at some numbers and then compared each October since to 2003.

In October 2004, my epc was 43% of October 2003
2005 was 44% of 2003
2006 was 38% of 2003
2007 was 45% of 2003 (The rise begins?)
2008 was 51% of 2003
2009 was 113% of 2003
2010 was 103% of 2003
2011 ws 116% of 2003

This is account-wide across a variety of sites.


FarmBoy

[ember]

Our traffic has remained fairly constant over the last couple of years, same amount and same quality, but we are earning more with it. The ctr has stayed about the same, but the earnings per click have increased. But wouldn't that mean more advertisers, not fewer, competing and thereby increasing bids?

[farmboy]

The ctr has stayed about the same, but the earnings per click have increased. But wouldn't that mean more advertisers, not fewer, competing and thereby increasing bids?

Yes. Let me clarify when I wrote of an inventory shortage, I meant a shortage of publisher sites (or pages) on which to display ads.

This could be because AdSense does not have enough. Plus, when advertisers reject certain sites they are defacto limiting the inventory of publisher pages.

I think IBA's address that to some point, even with it's apparent shortcomings. If you have advertisers wanting to advertise widgets and not enough sites about widgets, AdSense can display ads about widgets on a site about rocks to an individual who has been identified as having a recent interest in widgets. Thus the inventory of sites where the ads can be displayed is increased in a sense.

That also seems consistent with all the efforts to recruit new advertisers over the past months and consistent with all the efforts to get publishers to add more ads to their existing pages, even though those efforts have appeared somewhat clumsy.

I think they should put more attention towards making the AdWords side of things much more simple and user-friendly, but they aren't asking for my opinion.

FarmBoy

[ember]

Makes sense. We don't have a lot of competition in our niche, but the competition we do have is pretty spammy so I think advertisers keep their ads off those sites, thereby reducing inventory (which helps us). We never have a shortage of ads, and some of the same advertisers have been on our site for years. Re: Adwords, it is way more complicated than it needs to be.