Wildly erratic earnings this week

Anyone else?

[androidtech]

It still rotates around about the same mean (average), but this week I have seen the most erratic and extreme up and down days. I'm wondering if this is a weird side effect of the affiliate ads change or just an anomaly.

Thanks.

[ve3cnu]

Crazy fluctuations here.
A couple of really great days followed by pitiful junk clicks :(

[ken_b]

Rock solid stable for me. But that's at a point about 30% lower than before Jan 14th.

I'm still up considerably from before the holidays overall. But that's due more to increased traffic.

I think what I saw during Nov to mid Jan was a holiday related boost added on top of a huge traffic increase. The traffic increase has held, thankfully.

[willybfriendly]

The past four days is the worst I have seen by a couple of orders of magnitude. Good click through, lousy return. Ads being shown are those that are traditionally from lower bidders.

Either monthly budgets have run out, or people in this niche are opting out of content.

I await the beginning of a new month...

WBF

[steve40]

Is it possible that the affs and other advertisers who are not affected by changes earlier this month have had higher number of clicks this month and have depleted monthly budgets significantly early in some sectors

I run some channells on by sector basis and some channels have seen wild fluctuation while others only minor , this may indicate that G has not changed anything as far as smartpricing or percentages re G , just a leveling out , it may take some time to settle down with those advertisers deciding on new budgets and cpc and areas where the changes offer new opportunities for advertisers

Also from my small anecdotal evidence as an advertiser similar fluctuations in adwords positioning and cpc

I suppose we should also place into the equation the fact XMAS selling finished and also January sales at end of cycle , so awaiting spring style promotions to kick in

just my 2 cents
steve

[europeforvisitors]

No dramatic changes here, but CTR has been down just a bit (compared to the month's average) in the last few days, which suggests that there may be fewer ads for certain keywords on my topic at the moment. Not enough to be concerned about, though.

[howiejs]

"Either monthly budgets have run out, or people in this niche are opting out of content."

Monthly budgets = good point, its end of Jan already (flew by . . .)

Things look "ok" in my stats. Always little changes each day - but nothing to crazy this week.

I have also launched a good number of new page - so I don't have a good "control"

[jenkers]

just checked my stats and my eCPM is up 650% today.
Very strange: ctr is up about 30% - I expected ctr to rise due to the fact that I removed adsense from some underperforming pages yesterday in favour of affiliate ads - but these stats?

I have just had a couple of slow(ish) days...

[Hinso]

Quite the oddest month in terms of daily fluctuations and low v. high CTR but it looks like my total earnings are going to hit the mid-point between Nov and Dec levels.

When it comes down to it, earnings seem to be tied to the budgets of Adwords advertisers and they get spent by the end of the month - one way or another.

[diamondgrl]

I just discovered one big reason for my wildly erratic earnings. Others should take heed.

After studying it more closely, I discovered on Jan. 21-23 that someone or some bot was clicking like mad on my ads. So in an overall depressing month of declines, there was a pretty significant spike. The overall numbers were unusually good but not so incredibly crazy at the time that I immediately suspected fraud (although given that this was a Friday through Sunday, I should have been more wary).

However, then I looked at the channel data and discovered that much of this click-through was on a channel representing an ad on the BOTTOM of a certain set of pages on my site. The CTR went from <1% to into the double-digits.

Unfortunately I don't have any kind of Adsense tracker so I don't know any details such as the IP address, the exact page clicked from or clicked to, etc. But I wrote to Google about the problem and hopefully they'll be able to figure out who's doing it.

And sadly, my check next month will be even more depressing than I thought it was going to be once Google eliminates the bad-guy clicks.

It got me thinking a little about motivation and one of several possibilities is someone was trying to get their high PPC competitors out of the way so they could then get their low-PPC ads in more prominent placement.

Anybody else out there find any anomolous spikes in their channel data that might account for big fluctuations?

[Undead Hunter]

Just want to add that ours has been rock solid since the second week of the month... and I was the guy who started a thread earlier this month asking if January is a "down month". (It seems the first week really was "down".)

We have settled in at a lower CPM - and payout - than in previous months, but I've tracked that down to one section that was paying better than expected. They're gone, I assume they turned off their content network or gave up advertising.

No, I could set a watch to our earnings right now. We have a wide spectrum of content under our belts between a number of sites, too.

I am seeing a lower than normal Saturday, but
a) someone reported that there was no AdSense on some pages this afternoon? maybe things were offline for an hour or so?
b) it is Superbowl weekend. Some people will be travelling / planning.

I expect tomorrow to tank, compared to an average day.

Hunter

[AAnnAArchy]

Anyone noticed really really horrible stats today? I'm at more than 50% below average for the past several months.

[androidtech]

re: bad stats today.

ditto.

[Nikke]

Since it's one of these threads, and fluctuations are the everyday life of any AdSense publisher. I'll pitch in, just to add to the confusion.

And actually, the month started out nicely, with even better stats that most of december, but as I started to get somewhat untargeted traffic (due to some timely pages on one or two viral thingies) ctr, ecpm and earnings went down.

Actually Sunday was a little better, but still not on par with the good day in the beginning of the month.

So you see. It's just impossible to compare our stats. They are bound to vary, and even if the more paranoid part of my mind dreams up ideas about an algo that is flatting all curves, I'm trying to live with it.

Then again, the fact that I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me...

[Undead Hunter]

OK.

It's not Superbowl weekend. See how much I love football?

Today is proving to offer its usual precision Swiss timing in terms of revenue. No surprises.

I'm curious as to whether the people seeing big fluctuations have sites on one topic or just a few? I'm under the impression that a few advertisers changing/pulling campaigns could really cause havoc to your earnings.

And while I'm at it - I've noticed in AdWords campaigns for clients that the Content Network can really underperform in some areas, especially on CTR if not conversions to sales. You have to remember if your site isn't closely aligned with the selling process, its a crapshoot to whether you're delivering good traffic. Not good traffic, no reason you should be paid or paid well.

[AAnnAArchy]

Normally, I think nothing of variations, but the first half of today was so far off that it appeared the click-thrus had gotten stuck. Of course, seeing how the day ended up, it certainly looks like that's what may have happened because the clicks ended up being normal...and there's no way that my sites suddenly got 75% of their clicks early this evening.

[seowisdom]

First half of January was best ever for us. But second half is way down, and showing wild fluctuations day by day.

None of us are doing anything wrong. This is Google problem (or intention...)

[flyerguy]

The stats flucuate, sometimes over the course of more than a day. Please don't report what you saw this morning as it will inevitably be changed the next day!

Instead please report the exact reason why traffic is down 60%, with detailed charts and statistics. Send to > [e-mail].

[europeforvisitors]

Somebody made a comparison with the Florida search update. Who knows? Maybe Google is testing different "smart pricing" algorithms, which could affect some types of sites or content more than it affects others.

Of course, that isn't to say that Google might not be testing different compensation algorithms, which wouldn't necessarily involve taking a bigger cut. Google has never claimed that AdSense compensation was a straight percentage split, and the payout formula (like smart pricing) could be based on conversion tracking and assumptions about the value of the content to advertisers. (Remember Google's "smart pricing" example that involved a camera review vs. a page of photo tips?)

Mind you, I'm only thinking out loud. :-) Any speculation is just that. The only thing I can say for certain is that I haven't noticed any wild fluctuations in my own earnings, or even any fluctuations beyond the norm.

[momotan]

Yesterday we did record clicks, on target, US based traffic and we got a lot less per click then earlier in the month. All the ads being clicked on are the same as earlier in the month(we use the adsense tracker). I am chalking it up to google needing to meet certain monetary goals each month and they are skimming from the large pool of small fish which bring in most of their income. If they did this with the premium publishers, those guys would just bolt but the little guy is at their mercy right now. That should change when MSN bring's it's content ads online. You can be sure that MSN would be willing to take massive losses just to gain marketshare and turn Google into Netscape v2 real fast. As for smart pricing, i don't think it has such a huge impact. Most advertisers i see on the adsense panels would have no use for the google roi function. And those that do, generally don't use it for privacy reasons.

[hyperkik]

The notion of Bill Gates, a knight in shining armor on a white stallion, coming to rescue the little guy from Google? And this vision isn't drug-inspired? ;-)

Seriously, there are lots of reasons the return on "the same click" can diminish over a month, including the exhaustion of budgets (resulting in lower smart pricing for the same term), the determination by an industry that certain keywords are worth less than they used to be, and poor conversion by your site's visitors.

[europeforvisitors]

I am chalking it up to google needing to meet certain monetary goals each month and they are skimming from the large pool of small fish which bring in most of their income.

So you're saying that Google is skimming from some "small fish" but not from others?

I assume that you're not an AdSense publisher, by the way. (If you thought you were being robbed, why would you be a willing victim?)

[flyerguy]

I think he's onto something. I personally believe they have this month melded 'smart pricing' into the clickthrough rate, hence the unusually low clickthrough rates and earnings lately.

i.e., if only 1.5% of your 2.5% clickthrough rate is deemed as 'smart' 'quality' clicks by whatever means G uses to determine this, then they would start reporting that you have only a 1.5% CTR.

Why? Perhaps in their own way, to reduce argumentative webmasters who only know they will get 'whatever google decides to give them'. Maybe they figure if the smart pricing is reflected in CTR's that are different than the actual total number of CTR's, they can solve the problem of literal 'unnacountability' in terms of payout rates, by only providing the 'quality CTR' rate.

[Vespasian]

Bill Gates is a lot more likely to come riding in on one of the Ringwraiths out of the Lord of the Rings than on any white stallion...