Huge Drop In CTR! Might Have To Sell The House

[Adsensory]

Hello everyone,

Over the past 2 months I've been steady getting 50k page views a day with a 4% CTR and 15$ RPM. However just over the past couple of days my CTR has decreased to less than 1% over all of my sites at once? I've had one guy say he couldn't load the site on mobile, so I was thinking this was the reason I've been getting thousands of views with barely any clicks. But I've been able to load my site perfectly fine along with many others who I've asked to test it out. All of my traffic comes from twitter and 95% of visitors are mobile users. I have an affiliate system where users can sign up and earn money by promoting my site and track their earnings in a dashboard. So basically promoters use TweetDeck to help them generate thousands of views to earn money. So the only other reasonable explanation I can think of is that people are becoming ad-blind. I thought maybe because all of my promoters are mass promoting the same ads it would probably get old after a while.. but I'm still getting the views, just no clicks! At first I thought the ad code wasn't even on my site because It was resting at 0% for a while. I run my site with WordPress and haven't made any changes to template or ad placement in over 2 months either. If anyone can please help me out with this because Adsense has been my primary source of income for quite some time. (I know it shouldn't be lol)

p.s - I know Adsense revenue cannot be "shared" with affiliates :)

[ember]

Welcome. Sorry to hear about your situation. It does sound as though Google has decided that something is not right with your traffic. Either it is not converting for the advertisers or you've been receiving a lot of invalid clicks, and Google has just caught onto it. I don't think ad blindness would explain such a dramatic drop.

[Adsensory]

hmm but wouldn't they get rid of invalid clicks at the end of the month when finalizing earnings? Rather than instantly blocking clicks

[ember]

They take clicks throughout the day - a lot of people here have been experiencing this - not just at the end of the month.

[eek2121]

There are a couple things I want you to think about.

1) Denying there is a problem (it must be google!) is your problem. Read the steps below to diagnose and also consider the opinions from others. I've seen far too many tin foil hat types these days.

2) Page views are nothing. Look at both your sessions and unique visitors in analytics, or what AdSense says are page views. You can have 50k page views in analytics, but only 25k sessions (or less) and 15k page views in AdSense. AdSense only lists pageviews for pages that actually render an ad.

3) Load up analytics. Look at your bounce rate for mobile. iPhone does not equal mobile. Make sure your website loads properly on every device, the majority of devices out there run android 2.3-5.0. Apple has a sizeable marketshare, but as an advertiser, that matters nothing to you if nobody is running an apple device. You must cater to _ALL_ markets.

4) Watch your traffic quality. Example: twitter is full of bots. Many of those bots will attempt to crawl your website when you tweet. False clicks on ads means your site will receive a lower quality traffic score, which will affect your CPC. Your CTR may also be affected (which is why i bring it up) if bots are merely hitting your landing page and not your content. To diagnose this you can use analytics.

5) WATCH YOUR AD PLACEMENT. I cannot say this enough. If you mess this up, you'll quickly lose ad revenue. If you are cramming ads down your users' throats, they'll accidentally click the ad and then close it. If they do that, you do NOT get credit for the ad (it will appear, and then get taken away, usually before the end of the day, but sometimes before the end of the month) and your reputation WILL take a hit. Many publishers don't understand this and often get burned. AdSense doesn't exist to make you money. It exists to make money for the advertiser. If you attempt to exploit the advertiser (by placing more aggressive ads) then you'll lose in the end. I'm willing to bet that this is likely your issue. If you are throwing ads all over the page and your user can't even navigate your site without clicking an ad (especially on mobile, i see this so much on mobile), you are screwed. Google will return the ad revenue to the publisher and will smart price you. This includes mobile as well as desktop versions of your site. Google does not care how big or small you are. They approach this in the same way.

Just a few thoughts. Take a look at these and post if you have further questions.

Good luck!

[Adsensory]

This was excellent advice! I checked analytics and have notice a very large increase in return visitors over the past few days. Normally I'd see about 1/7 users as return visitors each day over the past 2 months however is has steadily been increasing to 1/6, 1/5, to 1/4 each day. So 25% of visitors are returning to the same articles each day. I haven't been posting new content in a while and with the amount of promoters I have dishing out the same content I believe this might be the solution! Would you say this is a reasonable explanation? I either need new content or a different audience because I guess I have bored up the same twitter users with the same old content.But even with new content, the same users will become ad blind. I'll make more articles and see if I notice a change in CTR. Thanks a lot for the help I totally forgot about using analytics to diagnose a problem. :)

[netmeg]

All of my traffic comes from twitter and 95% of visitors are mobile users. I have an affiliate system where users can sign up and earn money by promoting my site and track their earnings in a dashboard. So basically promoters use TweetDeck to help them generate thousands of views to earn money.

Huge red flag here. Couldn't be bigger.