Changed Site, Adsense and Everything Else Dropped

Adsense Decline Due To New Site

[vegasrick]

I'm hoping someone could help me or give me some advice.

I'll map out the facts.

Site is 13 years old.

Sports related website, up to 40 to 50 updates per day.

We get a lot of traffic, 4 million uniques per month.

We have been on the same old CMS for the last 10 years. Basically it was custom made, created static pages with some minor php inserts (pages were mostly html and tables.

We finally pulled the plug and jumped over to a framework, Laravel.

We made the site very similar looking to the old (some obvious tweaks and made it look a bit more current).

We never had a mobile site, so we created a dynamic mobile output rather than responsive since we never had complaints from tablet users.

Kept the same link structure, etc.

Kept our ads in more or less the same positions.

Within 24 hours of the switch, our adsense plummeted by 40%.

People are just simply not clicking as much. And even those who are clicking, Adsense is paying what some may consider a lot but not what I'm used to getting paid day in and day out.

I thought it might be the mobile, so I turned off dynamic serving. Clicks went up a little (still 35% less from average) and the payout was still far lower from Adsense when compared to average.

Having said that, for unknown reasons our traffic has declined as well within 24 hours of making the switch.

Our other ad networks are down as well, from the traffic decline.

I checked the search engines, no declines in search engines. Google is indexing all pages quickly. Everything showing up quickly to all news feeds, etc.

I'm sure some of you have crossed over to new sites, did redesigns, etc. (likely didnt wait 10 years like I did).

A buddy of mine said "you went from a Pinto to a Ferrari" in terms of the site's backend and that could be causing Google/Adsense to rediscover the site all over again.

Did any of you experience similar issues in the first few days with Adsense and traffic? If so, did any of you bounce back?

[fearlessrick]

Hey vegasrick, how's the weather in LV? I'm in upstate NY (east of Rochester), and it's cool, but not brutal.

Anyhow, I can't offer advice, just a thought. I've often thought of redesigning my site, but haven't because of issues I see here and elsewhere. My thinking is that if I start changing a lot of URLs, people's old bookmarks won't work, so, if you changed URLs to a new format, old visitors may be not getting to your site. Is that possible? If so, it would explain lower traffic.

Additionally, I have a site that is partially sports-focused (football) and while my traffic has remained stable and maybe even increasing a little over last year, Adsense clicks and payouts are off by about 25-30%, and this has been especially pronounced in December.

Maybe it's the weather. It's been very warm in the Northeast, so people aren't all hunkered down with their TVs and computers. Could be the economy too. It's not good for a lot of people. Christmas sales have been no great shakes.

So, just some thoughts from a very non-tech type of guy. I'd just keep tweaking and plugging away, do some creative marketing and move on. BTW: I get ads from three different suppliers, and, have to tell you, the PPV service sometimes outpays Adsense. The competition is gaining on Google.

[netmeg]

How long ago did you flip the switch? I assume if you changed your URLs you 301 redirected everything.

When I move a client to a new platform, I tell them (in advance) to expect an organic search drop for anywhere from three weeks to three months, depending on the complexity of the changes. AdSense (in my experience) doesn't take that long, but it's been a while since I've made such a change on an AdSense site. Two to four weeks to completely recover would not be beyond the realm of possibility in my opinion.

[ember]

This is why I never change anything. If it ain't broke, then don't fix it!

[vegasrick]

@ember, I agree in spirit but the CMS was 10 years old. It was discontinued years ago, maybe back in 2008. I've had coders adding options to it over the years and fixing issues. The code is pretty weak at this point and it got to the point where our site looked as if it was 100 years old. It wouldnt even work properly on the backend with the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. I had to use IE to do updates and even IE 10 and IE 11 started caused backend update issues, so I stuck with IE 10. Even if I didn't do it now, I had to pull the upgrade trigger soon.

[tangor]

The change in "cms" will have an impact. You moved from something you controlled to something many others are using, which puts you in the "everybody is doing it" crowd. I am not speaking ill of popular cms packages or frameworks, only commenting that when you join that crowd instead of doing it yourself you have lost a point of distinction.

Meanwhile, ads are not paying as well as they used to, too much evidence in that regard and MIGHT have happened even if you had not made any changes. It has for me on several sites, loss of conversion/revenue in the last year, particularly in the last quarter.

As mentioned above, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but once you do make a clear and compelling jump to something different go after it hammer and tongs to make it work.

[IanCP]

This is why I never change anything. If it ain't broke, then don't fix it!

Exactly my school of thought as well. As you probably already know.

[vegasrick]

I think my true test of revenue will be when we go live with our mobile site.

In our 13 year existence, we've never had a true mobile website (although our large forum, schedule and related sub-sections are mobile optimized).

Our main page, and everything related to the CMS was a true desktop page.

Can someone explain to me the dynamics of how mobile impressions are counted on a desktop website?

Some people are telling me I'll earn more with mobile as my traffic will likely increase from people who probably don't browse on phone during the day and wait until they get home from school/work to browse on latop, tablet, PC, etc.

Others say the revenue will decline because I can't fit three high paying ads (160, 336, 728) above the fold of a mobile, so now the mobile user will see one ad above the fold instead of three (3>1 logic).

My question is, when a mobile user comes to the site and gets our desktop, do we even get monetary view credit on all three ads? Do I get paid based on them thumbing to whatever area they are trying to enlarge or whichever ad loads first. I already know the clicks are paid as mobile (although clicking on desktop ads). I see our average mobile viewability for the ads is at 52%.

That's going to be my true revenue test, as I said.

Any insight on this?

[RedBar]

I'm sure some of you have crossed over to new sites, did redesigns, etc. (likely didnt wait 10 years like I did).

Heck, my three biggest sites are still running perfectly well on a my 15/16 year old self-designed template and, to be honest, earnings have dropped so much because of Google's actions, I don't know whether I can really be a$$ed to update them to my html5 template.

I have actually started the conversion however since there is no AdSense financial incentive to do it, it's now become a whatever/whenever job.

I do assume your conversion is to a an html5 fully responsive design?

Any insight on this?

My advice will be useless since my responsive sites only run one one ad at the bottom of each article, they look good, serve quickly and have an above average CTR, the only thing I don't have these days are high traffic numbers thanks to G.

Others say the revenue will decline because I can't fit three high paying ads (160, 336, 728) above the fold of a mobile, so now the mobile user will see one ad above the fold instead of three (3>1 logic).

How can a mobile user see 3 ads above the fold other than scrolling all over the place, that's assuming you have a fixed-width site? Using Google's responsive ad will automatically display the correct sized ad depending which device is used i.e. mobile is one size, tablet another, laptop and desktop full sized ... well, that's what mine do.

Get your developers to show you how they will look, it's easy enough and you can do it on the desktop, it doesn't have to be live to the public.

[netmeg]

First of all - do you know how much of your traffic is mobile in the first place? Analytics should tell you that.

Next - if it's a significant percentage, expect some revenue adjustment - probably downwards. You may already be experiencing that. Depending on your niche and the type of advertisers you attract, you might find that you don't have nearly as many advertisers on mobile, or that they just don't pay the same rates as for desktop users. Most of my AdWords clients either don't bid on mobile at all or bid 40% or more less, because at the end of the day, not many of them convert. At least not like desktop or even tablets. Of course that depends on your niche; I know that at peak season up to 80% or more of my traffic is mobile, and that has definitely made a difference to my earnings. Fortunately I have a fairly diverse portfolio, but my mostly-mobile sites are down this year - with up to 40% more traffic than last year.

Advertisers want to pay for ads / sites that drive traffic that converts. And think about it - how many people really do a lot of buying / signing up / whatever on their phones?

Finally, you need to familiarize yourself with a new metric that AdSense confusingly calls "Active View Viewable"

Here's a link to get started on that:

[support.google.com...]

[vegasrick]

@netmeg Our mobile traffic is around 56% I assume that number will rise once we go mobile, but who knows. When we mobilized our forum, the bulk of the registered users (200K users) switched to the desktop mode so go figure.

Our Mobile page RPM is a lot higher than many of my friends and although we get a ton of clicks from those users, we still make more with desktop as the clicks/page RPM is sometimes 4times higher.

[explorador]

You might find some interesting comments here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Within 24 hours of the switch, our adsense plummeted by 40%.
..
People are just simply not clicking as much. And even those who are clicking, Adsense is paying what some may consider a lot but not what I'm used to getting paid day in and day out.
..
I checked the search engines, no declines in search engines. Google is indexing all pages quickly. Everything showing up quickly to all news feeds, etc.
..
I'm sure some of you have crossed over to new sites, did redesigns, etc. (likely didnt wait 10 years like I did).

Several things to talk about. Lots of years as webmaster, seo, adsense, etc. Ok, yes, your change sure has impact:

- Your site can look the same or different
- Your site can be faster or slower
- Ads placement might be the same or different
- Your link structure can also be the same or different

Those points are usually obvious impacting your site performance as a SITE and on ADS, BUT you will have to remember, even if your site changes and looks the same, is faster, ads placed on the same places and link structure is the same, there still are things that won't be the same:

- redirects, even for keeping the url structure: it leaves a footprint
- pretty sure your html & css are not the same: it leaves a footprint
- CMS change, it sure leaves a footprint too
- Content distribution and position: it sure leaves a footprint too

Content distribution? it means how your site content goes to the bot and web browser, whatever way it looks, you can put content first (and actually you should), so, it matters too. A lot of people leave content, then navigation, then the rest (looks ok to me). After posting all of that, specially about footprints now you can understand SEs and Adsense feel that "footprint" as a major change, thus they put a whatever-color-flag on you that will last for whatever-time-they-think-it-should. There are far too many cases with clear clues on this to be solid true (oh, everyone has a voice, but dogmatic stuff invites for checking post history... personal opinions on liking or not don't add any kind of value to any kind of technical affirmation ok? just saying to keep this clear).

Sometimes things never come back to what they were. Oh BTW, I posted SEs and Adsense because they show signs of treating such changes differently, so as you said you can have the same links and traffic but the ad department still doesn't release full trust. Be patient, trace your strategy, some people will only focus on earnings but sometimes it's not the only thing that matters, mobile or not, so at times changing cms as you did sure is the right way.

Been there (OP), and some sites recovered, some didn't, took time, but as for now it's too difficult to measure because we are talking december, end of the year, traffic usually goes low depending on your niche. Me? while my sites recovered quite a bit, the hit of the thread posted here is solid, the curve behavior I say. Good luck and try to document this change as much as you can, it's very useful.

[vegasrick]

@redbar, to avoid confusion on what I meant. Like drudgereport.com for example. If you go there on your mobile, the site is sized down (they have only desktop) and your are thumbing it to make it bigger. But when you see those ads at the start or thumbing up and down, are all of those ads registering views or the first ad viewed, etc?

[vegasrick]

Surprising to me, our site bounced back very strong (a few days ago) after our site earnings dipped for several days. December is usually one of our strongest months and now things are looking a bit normal.

[vegasrick]

How did you guys make any money switching to mobile? I mobilized the site and turned off mobile view 5 hours later.

The payouts are garbage. Maybe I didn't give it enough time, but I just couldn't stands the low payout.

For example, 125 clicks on desktop 300x250 (most clicks are from mobile) = $117
119 clicks on mobile (all mobile clicks) = $13 dollars.

I was blown away by the difference. No wonder so many of my friends were forced to find real work after going responsive.

[LuckyD]

> People are just simply not clicking as much.

What might be the case here (if your positions didn't really change that much), is that the targeting is off, and AdSense needs a bit more time to discover the context. Are you using an ad server for that amount of traffic?

From my experience I can tell you that one day says nothing. Let the current setup run for a week or two. As we all know, "the more you do, the less you earn".

[hannamyluv]

I've been through 3 major redesigns in about 8 years. And will likely continue to do major skin redesigns every few years. It is much easier to maintain a modern looking site when you just get in the habit of doing that. Just food for though moving forward. My personal SEO belief is that Panda, either intentionally or unintentionally, does have an element of eye candy preference to it. I think AdSense also has something like that as well. But that is a discussion for another day.

Most people here have already covered the important stuff, but one thing that has not been mentioned is user testing. It helps to watch people use your site before a redesign, so that you can find out what they like to use and how they use it, then you can make sure to incorporate those elements into the new design. And it REALLY helps to actually watch them do it. Asking is not enough. People are often not even aware of how they use a site. It just happens. And awareness of AdSense can be part of that. I consider it a good redesign when at least one user tester will comment that the ads are just a little distracting. Don't get me wrong, I am not a proponent of in your face ads (I think they do more damage than good), but typically in a group of say 5-10 you should get one person who is plain not a fan of ads on sites for any reason. If that person does not comment that the ads are a little distracting, then your ads are in places that no one will notice them. If mostly everyone comments on that though, your ads are too aggressive and may turn people off.

Also, moving forward, you might want to consider a morphing philosophy to site redesigns. Amazon is a great example of this. As far as most people are concerned Amazon has never done a major redesign. But actually, they are always redesigning and they make only one change at a time so that they slowly morph the site to the new design. That way there is no major surprises for visitors. From your description, it sounds like you may have just caught your regular users off guard. Using your car analogy, they had the Pinto that might have been rough, but they knew where the ignition was and the seats were comfortable. Then *boom* they walked out into the driveway and there was a Ferrari instead. Sure, it looked awesome, but was this their car? It smells a little funny, the seats are different (even if they are more comfortable) and they have no idea where the ignition is. Once they get use to it, they are fine, but you just scared them a little is all. ;)

[netmeg]

When I'm browsing the web on my iPhone, pretty much the last thing I want to do is click on an ad. If I do, it's either an accident, or sheer curiosity. I only ever buy from Amazon (and there's an app for that so I don't need the web) So there's no incentive for advertisers to pay a lot for my potential click.

For all their happy responsive talk, Google hasn't come up with a solution for people like me, and I bet there are a lot of us.

[deuces]

Could it be that since your site wasn't responsive before, people who visited with their mobiles were sent to the desktop version which was more conversion friendly, and now they are going to the mobile version which isn't?

Also if it's only been 24 hours like you say, you should really wait a little while more before deciding on what to do. It could all just be a coincidence.

[vegasrick]

@deuces, that may have been the case. But to make more nearly four times money from a desktop BTF 300x250 with 19 clicks vs. mobile ATF 300x250 with 125 clicks = insanity.

What I believe is happening, IMO, is when I cross over to the mobile Adsense starts serving low paying display campaigns where clicks are irrelevant and desktop continues to serve high paying CPC campaigns.

[isellstuff]

Go to Google Webmaster Tools, Other Resources Section, the "Page Speed Insights" tool, check all the major page components on your website and fix any major issues found, for both mobile and desktop. Poor page speed will affect your Google traffic.

[vegasrick]

Has anyone actually tried this? I saw one site (highly trafficked) that appears to be sizing down their desktop leaderboard to fit on a mobile screen.

From what I can tell, they are not manipulating or altering the Adsense code. They are manipulating a table around it.

Apparently the guy is doing quite well because, as we know, Adsense mobile leaderboard pays crap.

I'm trying to find something in Adsense TOS that would view this as a violation?

[hannamyluv]

Well, you have responsive ads. Depending on how big the div is that you put the code into, the ad changes shape. So you can have a full sized leader board on a desktop and something completely different on a mobile phone.

To be honest, on my site, we see very little difference between desktop and mobile income. Granted, it is not a high paying niche, but we make a pretty good RPM.

[vegasrick]

@hannamyluv. He's not using a responsive code, he's actually sizing down the div area to fit a desktop leaderboard on a mobile screen (instead of using a mobile leaderboard which pays less)

[LuckyD]

@vegasrick I don't believe that's going to work. As far as I know AdSense detects the user agent along with the screen size to determine what ad to serve, so I don't think that putting in a responsive unit would help in this case. If we're talking fixed 728x90 on mobile, that sounds like a policy violation to me. In this case, either the ad is scaled down or not shown completely, both of which can be dangerous.

[SEOPTI]

What about Bing/Yahoo traffic, I'm sure it's still the same.

[vegasrick]

@luckyD Adsense is a weird animal. Two years ago they actually sent me a minor violation that I had three days to change, regarding the positioning of an ad.

One problem, the ad was NOT an adsense ad and it was a location that was specifically requested by the ad network in question (direct seller).

They didn't even explain which ad, what the issue was, nothing. I had to get a rep on the phone, he had to contact the compliance department in order to figure out which ad so we could change it. Although it wasn't their ad, I made a minor adjustment to get them off my back. I just found it odd, because it really shouldnt be their business to police other ad networks.

[Ezoic Support]

Hey VegasRick - sorry to hear about the loss in revenue. I've heard of this happening to a lot of publishers who do a site refresh.

Did you do any testing of the new site before launching it? How have your user experience metrics (time on site, page views per visit, and bounce rate) changed, if at all? User experience is a big part of Google's search algorithm, so if you harmed the UX metrics in any way, it could have affected your traffic and, therefore, your revenue. As @hannamyluv mentioned, user testing is really important, especially when doing a redesign. I highly recommend monitoring the UX metrics, especially bounce rate over the next few weeks. I would also work to improve all UX metrics. You can try moving the ads around, trying different sizes, etc - all these things have an affect user experience and revenue. Balancing the two is really important.

Lastly, if you didn't have a mobile site before and are switching to one, be prepared to see a bit of a decrease in revenue. I've noticed that websites that aren't mobile-friendly sometimes get extra clicks, albeit accidental, when people try to pinch and zoom. This is less common with a mobile-friendly layout. However, having a mobile-friendly layout is a huge plus for a site like yours. Google now uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in their mobile search algorithm, so this could help you win more traffic and thus increase your revenue!

Best of luck!

[vegasrick]

@Ezioc, we actually doubled our clicks with the mobile site but started getting far less revenue. It was a 50% drop when mobile was introduced. In fact, one banner was so poor that it went to .2 cents a click and had at least 600 clicks on that spot per day. I was basically giving it away. I turned off mobile view and revenue shot back up.