I have one ad block that's intermittently tossing up nothing but blank white space plus a blue arrow. Pretty sure it's a bad image or flash ad. Aggravating.
Ever since they integrated that bozo IBA thing, earnings have declined. But the last few weeks have been utterly weird - like some room temperature IQed hamster has been left loose to play with the controls.
One of my sites got some good press and had a nice increase in traffic, results CTR went to an all time low, about an 80% drop from the already miserable CTR. Today traffic returning to normal but CTR is still in the cellar.
CTR is awfully low today yet impressions increase at a reasonable rate, leading to an abominably low RPM. Does Google segregate and verify each and every click before reporting them, and do they then report them in a series of click dumps which may or may not come? If it's the latter, then I'm looking at another lousy day in a sub-par month.
Bad today here too. Something just does not seem right lately because one day its OK then the next its bad and so on. Impressions are OK its just that ctr is unpredictable.
At this point I need to merge one of my sites or sell one of them.
Is there a place in this forum where we can talk freely and more privately on this subject. I would not mind merging with one of my competitors that use adsense in my niche. It just might make sense and why compete all day long with each other.
Taking two sites in a niche and combining them could make a difference.
..."Does Google segregate and verify each and every click before reporting them, and do they then report them in a series of click dumps which may or may not come?..."
You bet they do! I've noticed that they have made it useless to check stats several times a day. It was certainly something I use to do more of until I noticed the sloooowness of their intra-day reporting a year or more ago. Although I always wake up to a higher earnings day the next morning! While a love the discussions of this thread it does seem to be futile to look at intra-day stats and put any trend of value on it. Of course as most of you would agree, longer term trends matter more.
This month started out gangbusters, but continues to deteriorate. I blame Greece. Or the Mayan Calendar. Or Charlie Sheen. That's it! It's all Sheen's fault.
I started up with AdSense in 2004 and while their reporting was never in real time, updates were frequent enough that checking stats gave you a pretty good idea about how things were going. Nowadays it's more like unreal time - no idea what's going on at all anymore. Very frustrating for those of us habituated to checking stats (and not nearly as fun as in the old days either!)
It stinks when you expect a click dump while you're sleeping and check "yesterdays" stats the following morning and no change. This is how it's been the last two days. DIRE!