Record Day for traffic

The glass ceiling thing

[Powdork]

Bourbon was pretty good to me. It doubled my daily adsense impressions and for a while my revenue too. Since June 23, however, CTR has taken a nose dive. Here is what I mean. My ctr from 6/6 (Bourbon) to 6/20 was 4.4%. This was similar to my all time average. Then the nose dive began
June 21 4.1
June 22 3.9
June 23 2.2
June 24 3.3
June 25 3.1
June 26 2.8
June 27 2.9
June 28 2.1
June 29 1.2

The ads are the same except for the homepage of the site that has seen the gains. Today, only 2 ads are showing in a 160X600 skyscraper although the normal ads are still showing throughout the rest of the site. The home page is not the recipient of the increased page views due to bourbon so I don't think this is the cause of the drop. I am running out of ideas. At today's epm I would remove adsense altogether if I hadn't gone the channels route (which makes it more work to remove)

[sailorjwd]

Play more with the ads style and position.

Most folks find the 336x2? 4-block ad the best when blended with page, in the hotspot, and in with the text on the page.

Seems like the less ads I have on the site the more I make.

[Atomic]

My feeling would be that perhaps the ad money is running out at month's end. Plus we are moving into a major shut-everything-down holiday in the US. I've cut AdWords spending significantly.

See if it comes back after next week because a lot of people take vacations during that week, too. My experience is that traffic, earnings and everything takes a major hit right about now.

Is your traffic the same? Even if it is I bet the factors I listed could be at least partly to blame.

[Swebbie]

Sailor's right, and I would add that you should track which pages are generating the most traffic. This will fluctuate week-to-week with most sites. It matters because some visitors are more likely to click AS ads than others. The visitors coming into your site from a search for something very specific may be more likely to click AS ads than a more general searcher. That's been my experience, at least.

There are lots of variables that affect CTR. It's hard to know exactly what's going on at any given time, bottom line. Sailor's advice is a great place to start trying to get yours back up there.

[ann]

Yesterday was my highest day yet in both traffic and cpc earnings. Today looks to equal or exceed it.

I am sitting here with a big goofy grin on my face and my oldest son just walked through and gave me the strangest look! LOL

Ann

[europeforvisitors]

Ann, my AdSense revenues are way up, too, even though traffic is starting to taper off a bit as it often does in midsummer. Affiliate bookings are booming, too. I think this just goes to show that different topics have different patterns. (In my case, I'm probably getting clicks and affiliate revenue from people who've put off their travel arrangements until right before their vacations.)

[Powdork]

Yesterday just appears to have been a combination of things.
1. End of the month.
2. A bad day.
3. Google can't find ads for my home page on one site. I have tried changing ad sizes, blocking the two weak ads they were showing, and sending in a note via the interface behind 'Ads by Google'. This was one of my highest performing pages though it doesn't get nearly as much traffic as others.
4. I added adlinks to two poorly performing high traffic pages which have now resulted in no clicks. These extra units were pulling down ctr. I also just added adlinks to the poorly performing home page. They came up with nothing, just a search bar.

[Powdork]

Another cause revealed by delving into the site's logs rather than Google's.
I have good high ranking content about the fireworks shows in our travel destination. I am getting lots of visitors that are only interested in immediate information because they are about to come here and the ads are for lodging and other not so immediate needs. I had wondered why I was having record breaking traffic as the holiday neared and it wasn't converting.
Also, I received an response from G letting me know they had resolved the issue with my home page's targetting and indeed they have.:-) The CTR remains horribly low but the overall revnues aren't too much below what I would expect for a holiday weekend.