Trying to diagnose falling ecpm

[cattie]

The last three months ecpm has dropped 10%-20% each month for my website. Traffic has slightly increased each month and the quality of traffic appears to be good (bounce rate & time on site are steady). I looked at the top money pages and they are still getting good traffic. I doubt advertisers are bidding less money on Adwords but it is possible. Adblockers are getting better but they've been around a long time so why cause a dramatic drop now?

[ember]

Is your EPC steady? Unless you are being smart priced suddenly, then that should tell you if advertisers are bidding less. If they are, could be that a major advertiser stopped using Adwords display network and competition dropped. Is your CTR steady? If it is dropping, then it could be Adsense being a lot pickier about what it sees as fraudulent or accidental clicks. Clicks that used to count no longer do. This seems to be happening to a lot of people. I know Adsense is being a lot stricter with mobile clicks. Do you have a lot of mobile traffic?

[edited by: ember at 4:54 pm (utc) on Jul 9, 2015]

[avalon37]

It's very likely that it's due to a higher percentage of your clicks happening on mobile devices. Mobile click prices for the majority of industries are much less expensive to the advertiser which in turn means less per click for you. Check your % of clicks by device type and see if the % of mobile increased.

[anefarious1]

Either higher percentage of mobile traffic or higher traffic overall tends to lower RPM, eCPM