I'm rather pissed off at Google right now. I don't have the biggest website in the world. I get a few thousand visitors per day. A week and a half ago my RPM plummeted from a number far north of $5 down around 5-10% of that. My site tends to pick up on both traffic as well as ad revenue this time of year, and my traffic has grown exponentially over the last 3 months. Demographics haven't changed. Mobile visitors aren't a factor, as most people visit my website on the desktop. People typically spend a half an hour or more on my site due to the nature of my content. My bounce rate is well under 20%.
About 5 days ago i decided it was time for change. First, I was worried about being smart priced, so I made sure that all of my advertisements were clearly labelled 'advertisement'. My inline content ads (which were already clearly ads) tend to be my highest earning ads, but i added 'Advertisement' to them, and increased the already wide spacing around them even more.
Second, I added media.net back in, despite them having horrific RPM. I figured if i got a good couple weeks in with media.net i could work with the account manager on improving things.
Finally, couple days later i modified my adsense settings. I quickly killed off several advertising bans i had on ads (Google shows contextual ads on my site, but people coming to my site aren't looking for the services they are advertising. Google's automated systems can't figure this out, so my CTR suffers and hence revenue. When i banned the ads several months ago my RPM skyrocketed due to more relevant advertising). It appeared to have worked. For a couple days, the RPM was almost 10 bucks. Magically the clicks were flowing and the CPC was amazing. Then came today. Not a single click all day. Thousands of visitors mind you. Also, no CPM ads means I earned pennies.
Meanwhile, my media.net RPM has been going up significantly. I was worried at first that media.net ads were causing issues with adsense, but media.net has been handily beating the RPM i had from adsense the past week and a half for the past 2-3 days. It's going up every day and It's making me reconsider even continuing to use adsense on my site. The kicker is I only have a single media.net ad on my website. A single ad tucked away in the top right sidebar. That one ad is taking Adsense to school when it comes to revenue.
I'm going to keep adsense on my site another week, but if they continue to get beaten by media.net, I may actually have to say goodbye to the longstanding (I have been using adsense since it was released to the public) relationship I had with Google Adsense.
Note that all numbers in this post were generalized due to Google's ToS. However, you get the gist of things.
