Adsense Blindness

Is it setting in?

[acidic]

I put adsense on my site about 2 months ago and I have been cruising along with a decent click through rate. Then suddenly, on Monday September 15 2003, as if every visitor to my site was in unison my CTR more than halved! It is now half way through Wednesday and my CTR is still not back to normal, in fact its dropping even more.

Although the onset should not have been this drastic do you think that “adsense blindness” may be setting in?

I had a look at my site and it’s not like its showing more than the expected number of PSAs. I have not changed my site/ad layout nor have I changed my ad colour.

Is anyone else seeing this drop in click through rate?

[justageek]

There is no doubt that 'AdSense blindness' has set in but the drop off you explained does not indicate it. It happened too fast. There must be another reason but I'm not sure what thay would be.

JAG

[loanuniverse]

Not in my case. My CTR has improved from June to July to August. It has remained at August levels during the first 15 days of September also.

Nothing out of the ordinary in my case. I have been using skyscrapers since the beginning also and not done any major work on my site besides changing my previous ad network skyscraper for Google's and moving in to the top of the right hand navigation menu.

BTW, moving the skyscraper so that it would be displayed in the first screen of my site improved CTR considerably.

[chiyo]

I usually dont contribute to these "trend" threads, - simply because whatever trend seems to be happening on the sites of others in the thread, my stats seems to be the exact opposite! That is about the only highly reliable trend ive seen ;) apart from some days CTR being down or up but RevenuePC being the opposite.

My guess on some of what i think we may be seeing is google experimenting with diff algos to maximize benefit for advertisers, publishers, and google..

[whizkiddo]

hi acidic,

same thing here wanted to c if any1 else posted this first though. my CTR dropped to 1/3rd pof its regular levels and since i havent made any changes i am 100% sure this has something to do with googles algo. my impressions as well as CPC have remained constant on an average. however such a drastic CTR reduction has never happened. hope google solves it ASAP.

[killroy]

Have yo uconsidered the possibility that a higher number of PSAs is geotargeted to other users? So that while you don't see anything different most other visitors would.

Just an idea to check out. It certainly doesn'T seem to be a network wide trend. My stats are stable throughout.

SN

[EliteWeb]

You have to look at your visitors, are they people who come back every day or the person who comes once and wont come back again. If it is the every day crowd who keep coming back like with any advertisement blindness can be caused, that is why it is good to mix it up with other methods of advertisement.

If it is the visitors who come once looking for something and wont come back again I think those CTR should stay the same of course you must figure in if yer traffic has dropped along with it or not.

[tufty]

Hi Acidic,
I have seen exactly the same as you. On Monday my CTR went down by a third I was expecting that it would drop steadily as I went along due to repeat views but nothing seems to explain a drop like this. Not the end of the world but it is annoying. Maybe we are in the same topic and the ads that are being shown aren't as good

Tufty

[peterdaly]

My CTR and CPM is down almost (but not quite) a third since monday as well.

It was a sudden, drastic change, equivilant to the size of clicks/CPM change when I switched to Leaderboard.

I came to this board this morning just to see if other people were experiencing it as well.

-Pete

[acidic]

I emailed Google to ask them if they where in fact experimenting with a new algorithm but the reply I got did not confirm or deny this.

My CRT is up again today but still not back at its usual level.

[cyberprosper]

they have too few advertisers in a number of categories. The adsense supply is too great... more PSA = less clicks...

Is this a real supply/demand issue, or does Google want to keep the click price high? Perhaps they purposely limit the number of ads shown via adsense so they can keep their search engine-based adwords at a high dollar amount?

[dillonstars]

nope, had my best day ever yesterday..

[Jenstar]

I think that Google is aware of the AdSense blindness issue. After all, it is to Google's advantage to makes AdSense "less blind", so to speak, because even though they are spending money by paying us, they are also bringing in at least that same amount into the company.

I think this is why when AdSense began, we got just the two sizes (sky scraper and banner) with the default color and let us run with that for a while. Then we got the new color schemes and DIY color designs. Then we got the two new ad sizes. And I suspect we are about to get some new changes.

And why do they do this? To keep publishers happy by offering little new tidbits here and there so we continue to use AdSense. And more importantly, to combat the entire AdSense blindness issue, to keep visitors clicking on the ads, and keep earning Google money.

On the side note, this thread talks about the recent PSA issue:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[jonknee]

My CTR has been slowly creeping up (about 50% up from launch of AdSense). I've tweaked things (changed to the big square ads for article pages and messed with colors) and right now my CTR for the week is very respectable.

[onfire]

Since Sat 13th i saw my CTR drop more than 70%

But yesterday and so far today things are now climbing back to how they were a couple of weeks ago

Hope it stays that way