Growth in visitors always seems to accompany a decrease in ECPM?

Does this happen to you?

[javahava]

When your sites go up in terms of traffic (e.g., through better organic rankings), does your adsense eCPM go down? I've found to be true almost all of the time, as if continuously smart-priced to death. This strikes me as pretty frustrating, since you work hard at adding content and gaining traffic, but the monetization doesn't go up accordingly. Staying stagnant isn't horrible, but what gives? Seems like there's some sort of ceiling that gets triggered when traffic rises? Any thoughts or similar experiences? Ways for avoiding this?

[Nitrous]

Maybe it depends on the targeting and conversion?

Recently one of my sites went from 2000 to 4000 page views per day for a week, due to a link in a prominent place. Earnings went up only very slightly, clicks increased by 50 percent... Not as well targeted as search engine traffic as this is pre qualified?

After that rediculous bourbon update my traffic fell over half of my 15 sites. But more importantly the remaining traffic has a lower clickthrough rate, as its less well targeted. So lower earnings per 1000 visitors too.

Traffic is no use unless its well targeted traffic!

[MediaSpree]

I have the same effect. When I wake up in the morning I have low x.xx with 4 clicks. When I check my totals for "yesterday" I am lucky to get low xx.xx for the day with 100 clicks or more. Very frustrating!

[universetoday]

I don't think this has anything to do with Smartpricing. I believe that the higher paying advertising is allocated on an account by account basis. If your traffic goes up, you blow throught the higher paying clicks and then move into the people paying the minimum $.05 a click.

To maximize your revenue, I believe you need to diversify the content on your site, or start up new sites the trigger different keywords so that you're drawing from different pools of higher paying campaigns.

Boosting your traffic beyond a certain point gives you a decreasing return on your time spent.

This is just a theory, though, some successful Adsense people here have said I'm on the right track.

To test if this is what's happening to you, find a specific page on your site which is triggering totally different ads from the bulk of your site. Make a channel for that page only and see if it's getting a higher EPC than your average.

[europeforvisitors]

To maximize your revenue, I believe you need to diversify the content on your site, or start up new sites the trigger different keywords so that you're drawing from different pools of higher paying campaigns.

Interesting hypothesis. It might help to explain why I've never seen the "more traffic = lower eCPM" phenomenon on my site (which has hundreds of subtopics and therefore wouldn't be likely to exhaust a daily quota of higher-paying ads for a given keyphrase).

IMHO, diversity is always a good thing; you never know when National Widget Co. might pull its contextual ads or Megaportal.com might start sucking up click inventory for "green widgets."