Lost Traffic Caused 90% Income Drop

[Kickedout]

I have serveral sites, 1 year ago my income via adsense was completely different (7 years account) I'm not talking about 4 or 5 years ago, same month compared to past year I'm receiving just a 10% of my old income. I'm reaching the point were I don't know if worths keep paying hosting for some of my sites.

I ignore why and suspect many people would be in a similar position.

Creating more pages didn't help much, and makes no sense investing time in creating new pages as earnings keep dropping so.

Did you find a way to deal with it?

[swa66]

I think the first step is to look a little bit at what's happened.

Cause 1: losing traffic
Cause 2: losing click through rates
Cause 3: losing value of the click

Losing traffic is possible across "several" sites, so I'd look at this first. Easiest to see it in your adsense reports are the impressions: if they drop, there's no way around to a drop in revenue.
-> solution might be to try to recapture the audience.

Losing Click Through Rate (CTR) is mostly due to the look of the ad/site combination or from getting visitors that changed their ways. Should be easy to see in your adsense reports.
-> solution might lie in the layout or design of your website

If the value of the clicks dropped this is where you can do the least. If this dropped by 90%, then I'd suppose I'd be smartpriced - Google thinks their advertisers don't like your site(s). Recovering from this: I guess it's unlikely within the adsense program.

There are other ad networks out there, that might be an option if you still have the traffic and interested audience.

There's one comment of yours:

I'm reaching the point were I don't know if worths keep paying hosting for some of my sites.

which sends some bad vibes. Sure if my income would be slashed by 90%, I'd reconsider some things, but not one of them was made because adsense or any other revenue source existed, so I'd never consider just dropping them either.

[Kickedout]

Cause 1 is the most relevant. Since now the "map" is above, organic results aren't good enough. So I lost big traffic from search engine mainly. As far as I know I can't fix that paying adwords and I can't do much to be in the map, which is for business.

In some sistes I think is cause 3, however those were gradually earning less, and less and less. So can't do much about I guess.

I'll look deeper on cause 2, but I don't think is the main problem.

[greatstart]

I'm in the same situation as you, Kickedout. I'll give it to the end of this year, and if things don't improve, might close all my sites down. I'm not generating enough income to cover my expenses.

The number one issue seems to be loss of search engine traffic. I lost approx. 85% of it between 2008 and this year. I've been noticing a drop every year, especially from March through October. From November through February, seems to run a bit higher.

[jimbeetle]

What steps have you folks taken to increase organic search traffic?

Have you initiated anything to get traffic from other sources?

[explorador]

Kickedout: After reading your first post I wonder, does your site contains content that can be easily obtained elsewhere? one of my sites matches what you describe, it is a good site but recently there are many alternatives and I don't mean competitors: I mean wikis. The wiki sites are invading some niches and appear first on search results. So ask yourself if this is a niche problem invaded by crowds.

Other than that, based on personal experience, I wonder how often you are updating your sites. I've seen that constant updates are more important today, at least that's evident in one niche I'm in.

That's all that makes logic and appears as evident and understandable to me. But... I'm having a similar problem with a weird variant: I have more traffic!. My traffic grows each year and still earnings go down. I receive emails from visitors (I'm being read) but that's all. So [u]in my case[/u] getting more traffic it's not my concern, doesn't seem like the thing to do. Weird. And yes, it's organic traffic.


That's a very complete post swa66.

[moTi]

My traffic grows each year and still earnings go down.

too early to report for a larger period because my site is relatively new, but the game is as follows: every time i get a little traffic boost, my epc (and/or ctr) goes down immediately. in fact it goes down so much, that the traffic increase often can't compensate. it seems as if google decides preemptively that the quality of visitor clicks must be worse in any case if the traffic goes up. very frustrating if you ask me..

[explorador]

I was there too moTi, I had more traffic, slightly higher earnings, then flat average earnings again. Repeat, repeat.

But since March2013 I have more traffic but lower income. Weird.

[jimbeetle]

I don't think we should muddy the waters here, the original post was about decreased traffic, *not* increased traffic and lowered epc, that's an entirely different topic.

[swa66]

Cause 1 ... Did you look at Google Webmaster Tools ?
[google.com...]
It might hold clues to what Google thinks of your site(s).

Also you might want to search out here for "Panda".