August 2012 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[HuskyPup]

Here we go, the traditional European holiday season starts now!

[jmccormac]

Does anyone have a theory as to why we are all seeing such dramatic drops in CTR and revenue?

Yes and none of them are pleasant. It might be that Adsense has integrated that behaviour based advertising to such an extent that it thinks people are on holidays (or weekend break) and therefore it won't serve well targeted ads to sites that have a working week profile. As this is the traditional holiday season in Europe, every day seems like a holiday to them.

Regards...jmcc

[triggeru571]

Yes and none of them are pleasant.

Well if it is just a matter of the Holiday Season and some settings on AdSense to reflect this it's not too bad a news. The fact is, the holiday season will be over in a couple of weeks, so if this theory holds, then things should return to normal then. What worries me is if there is some longer term strange algorithm in effect.

[Play_Bach]

> Does anyone have a theory as to why we are all
> seeing such dramatic drops in CTR and revenue?

Well, not all of us. Somehow netmeg is having her best AdSense year ever. I'm not. My click count is down to 1/15 what it was in 2009, yet the site hasn't changed that much. I attribute the drop to something on the AdSense side of the equation. Beats me what they're doing or not doing to come up with numbers these days. Good luck to you.

[zarathustra2011]

Yesterday saw a slight improvement, though not quite up to average daily earnings. This morning's CTR is starting well, though CPC always gets re-estimated during the course of the day. No idea if things will pick up or continue on a downward trend.
From August 2011 until around March/April 2012, I had a great deal of consistency, and continual improvements with each passing month. July 2012 was good, but otherwise it's just been a rollercoaster ride.

[Mentat]

Saturday was for me a new LOW in terms of traffic and eCPM (clicks OK).

[NomadMan]

Does anyone have a theory as to why we are all seeing such dramatic drops in CTR and revenue?

More and more advertisement space combined with IBA. Dilutes the revenue per site / niche to dramatic lows.

2012 Adsense revenue goes up to record heights....

July is blow average, after-all it's holiday season. CTR dropped to 0.8.

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday earnings back up to the 50% mark. The roller coaster continues.

[HuskyPup]

I'm going for data loss...Absolutely no way was yesterday my second lowest page views ever after Easter Sunday!

They've a leaky bucket and haven't a clue how to repair it.

EPC and CTR 2012 normal.

@triggeru571 - Yep, I have a gorgeous black and white, bi-coloured eye 61/2 year old girl.

[netmeg]

Yesterday was the biggest August day I've ever had. Not in number of clicks, but in EPC and earnings. (Seriously - who's paying for six dollar clicks? Wish I knew)

Google is not going to "sort itself out" or "get back to normal" - people have been wishing for that for YEARS and it hasn't happened. What we have now is the new reality, until the next reality kicks in. So please don't wait for that to happen.

As for why some are down - there are a lot of changes, both internal and external to Google and to online advertising in general (look to reports on effectiveness of other kinds of ads, it's not just Google), I'm sure the rampant click fraud has made Google over cautious (hence all the takebacks for invalid clicks) plus there's the rise of mobile, there's the economy, there's the glut of publishers on almost every topic, there's ad blindness - I know some disagree but I think it's a huge mistake to put it all (or even most of it) on Google. If we're not making money, that means the advertisers aren't making money and Google isn't making money. I'm having the best year I ever had with AdSense three times over, and I'm still spending *most* of my time and energy on developing diverse income streams that I have more control over. Because next year my AdSense could crash big time.

[breeks]

Traffic up, Cost per click up, Click through rate down. The ads that I see are looking crappy, but who knows what the visitor sees.

[triggeru571]

Hey Netmeg, I am sure you are correct on a lot you said, but the point of many posters in this months thread, including mine, is "Why is there such a sudden, dramatic, loss of CTR and EPC?" Yes mobile devices have an impact as do the economy and ad blindness but these would not have such a dramatic drop in CTR and EPC overnight - literally. There has to be something else at play. The most plausible so far is the holiday season which could explain why many publishers have a sudden reduction while some like yourself have an increase. It would depend on one's niche.

I see seasonality with my other income streams as a factor and August for me is the worst month for all the rest too. I was just never expecting AdSense to be so dramatically bad in August as well. It is just worse than everything else which is why I am worried about it.

And yes, I spend most of my time diversifying, but like you, this year until mid July AdSense was the best ever and became 25% of my revenue. This is a very substantial amount for me not to be concerned hence why it's important to try and understand what is going wrong. If it is in my power to change things, then I will, if it is some weird stuff Google has put in place, then there is nothing I can do and I will just have to find a new way to make up for that 25%.

[zarathustra2011]

Sunday saw a rise in clicks slightly more akin to what I'm used to, but EPC plummeted. Just need the two to come together in harmony.

[NomadMan]

They've a leaky bucket and haven't a clue how to repair it.

My thought;

With the huge amount and still growing adspace available to Adsense, delivering relevant ads with strict filtering & ranking.......is out of control due to the continuous tinkering.

Once the site ranking / filtering system starts lagging, Ad delivery goes haywire.

Press reset - recalc ranking, wait 2 weeks to resettle.

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday earnings back down to 30%.

[HuskyPup]

Third-lowest ever click volume day Sunday combined with a CTR of 60% of average, again right at the bottom end of average, fortunately my EPC was good therefore I did not have a total disaster, close but not quite.

My US click volume was its second-lowest ever at 39% of average, these have been truly atrocious days.

[netmeg]

If it is in my power to change things, then I will, if it is some weird stuff Google has put in place, then there is nothing I can do and I will just have to find a new way to make up for that 25%.

You can test different placements and ad styles, you can add more sites (or places to put your ads) and you can add new content (although with IBA the percentage of ads related to your sites's content is probably lower than it was) but that's about it. The rest is pretty much Google's black box.

Other things that could have happened include advertisers that you had previously dropping out, running out of budget, getting kicked out of AdWords, or deciding for whatever reason they didn't want to run ads on your site and blocking it.

You don't say how long your site(s) has been up, but it's also possible that smart pricing has just adjusted itself.

If I were you, I would probably next do some analysis on my traffic - is it pretty stable? Is it coming from the same places it always has, or are there spikes from unlikely referrers or countries? Is your search traffic coming in on the keywords you'd expect them to? I'd go back at least to the beginning of the year, and look for patterns. There *is* a traffic quality element that kicks in, so if anything has changed there, you should be aware.

[zarathustra2011]

After last week's fiasco, today, so far, appears to be back on track.

[explorador]

Stable traffic here, still the best over all the previous years...
Adsense? terrible... terrible weekend.

[HuskyPup]

B&M sites traffic normal, trade directory site seems to have been hit by "another" update...just what the hell is wrong with my Coppermine gallery images Google?

You seem to love the scrapers though, I'm more convinced than ever that someone has a co-operative friend at the plex!

[Play_Bach]

Dead here. Again.

[JCKline]

Dead as a door nail here too.

[tidewatcher]

Half way through the day things look almost average. It has been an odd adsense recent ten days or so, with increased traffic, but not corresponding adsense revenue. Impossible to predict what adsense is going to do from day to day, even if traffic is quite predictable for me. I run a news-based site, and traffic responds quite predictably based on how interesting the stories I run are.

[netmeg]

Picking up a bit today.

[NomadMan]

The weather is hot - clickers & advertisers are outdoors. Slow publisher days on this end.

Adsense hasn't finished load shedding - New publishers keep on coming, Ole time publishers abandon ship. The ones who stay can cope with working in the dark and still make some money.

[Play_Bach]

Thank you NomadMan for that brilliant insight, so helpful, really "warmed the cockles of my heart"
(and here all along I just thought something was messed up with AdSense...)

[HuskyPup]

Did anyone else experience a total AdSense javascript failure about 21.00 GMT / 22.00 BST tonight?

I couldn't load any of my sites past the 728 leaderboard, the sites NOT running AdSense worked perfectly.

As if I'm not already pi$$ed off with their recent debacles.

[triggeru571]

Hey HuskyPup, if there was any JavaScript failure it's not in my error logs and I did not witness any of it 21.00GMT is 4.00 a.m. here so I was busy doing other things.

On another note, yesterday I thought everything was recovering. That lasted 1 hour then CTR and EPC went down the proverbial loo again.

[zarathustra2011]

Monday's seen a return to form - just hope the weirdness of last week doesn't return.

[HuskyPup]

Well, whether it's a Panda or a Penguin there's been some sort of update since Google has just smashed my Coppermine gallery page views again by another 50% over the past 3 days.

That's twice in 18 months they've done this, needless to say earnings are now at their lowest-ever level for that site.

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday earnings back up to 40%. Craziness.