Major downtrend this week!

losing hopes

[Sobriquet]

this week was the worse in last two years! ( august overall was good - except after last sunday)

Earnings and CPM dropping and i am today at only 76 cents in total of all my sites!

This is sure a drowning feeling.

[Sobriquet]

So the traffic level of unique visitors is unchanged?

Yes it has changed / reduced dramatically for one site,which is largly US based. Both unque visitors and epc is very low.

Almost same for second site which has mor einternationaal appeal, but cpm vey low.

I am investigating each of my steps in last two weeks are and will post a report soon. I think I am closing down on my culprit step, but only can say after next week to see if it (earning) rises to normal.

[cyanweb]

it's a big shock for us too.. when things were going so well - then G changes everything and big fallout.. its happened before with every "new feature" - but never this bad...

we have roughly 1200 targeted categories for our ads - and we used to get good traffic with average of .05 a visitor... no ads were "on hold" and we had a good balance...

now the minimum across the board is mostly .10 - but with the important high traffic keywords now costing minimum .20-.50 / visitor it's just not possible to continue advertising... so it averages out to .15 to .20 / visitor = a drop in AdWords traffic of 75%...

because we are getting less traffic = less revenue = less we can spend on the ads = less of everything = downward spiral... we are just waiting to hit rock bottom and see where thing's level out...

lucky we have web design skills to fall back on - but now I'm working double shifts to make up the money and trying to find clients...

but that's the big G for ya - no stability - lots of changes - they never said they were waving the flag for the little guys... and I assume there are a lot of small businesses out there (not just AdSense folks) who are now without traffic due to rate hikes on AdWords...

That's a lot of bad karma building up for G i guess... I mean - loosing 75% of ones traffic for same expense is pretty rough...

[greenway]

Just a heads up guys.

I have noticed a lot of sites have lost around 50% of inbound links over the last 2 weeks.

check your link numbers?

[con771]

Yeah my site is earning abour 50% lower since sept. This is just nuts. What the heck is gong on?

[Erku]

OK, so it would mean that the traffic may be low for all of us (including me) due to three reasons.

1. August Vacation / Labor Day.
2. Katrina related (not many online in the region and the most watching news but not surfing?).
3. Loosing 50 percent of inbound links.

If these three hold true we should see some improvements later this week and next week.

However, why do we have now at once 50% of the inbound links?

[RS_200_gto]

We have lost around 20 % of our traffic flow over the last month and an additional 30% over the last 10 days.

[europeforvisitors]

However, why do we have now at once 50% of the inbound links?

Google's inbound link numbers have never been accurate, and just because a link doesn't show in a "link:" search doesn't mean Google is unaware of it.

As for very recent drops in traffic and EPC, those could very well be related to the vacation season and U.S. Labor Day. In fact, they probably are in most cases.

[FromRocky]

Just 2 more days!

[greenway]

its not just google though.
in the last 10 days my sites have lost around 50% of links from google msn and yahoo

[greenway]

what about you guys with sites from the uk and australia?

[StreetSurfer]

we run a predominantly australian portal network and have seen a 20% drop in traffic and 30% drop in revenue over last 10 days

i removed all our "blocked sites" = 200 of them - and eCPM jumped back up last 8 hours - though traffic is still down and earnings look to be 20% down still from August earnings - which was our biggest month to date though last week of August was down big time.

it looks like all the experimental changes G has been making is not doing well for sites like ours... or it could just be the weather getting better and less people spending time online.

nervous - but will have to see what thing's are like come Friday to be sure this isn't just temporary...

[jomaxx]

Greenaway, how could your sites actually lose 50% of their inbound links in a short time? It's impossible, if they're natural links.

If you're buying links or using mass linking from one site to another, then it IS possible that the links disappeared or that Google is filtering them.

[aquila99]

I have a number of websites about Italy, main language English, and the "widgets" dealt with in these websites have as their privileged visitors US residents, who account for over 70% of my audience. I compared by disappointing adsense earnings of this past week to the visitors count from my website statistics program, and the visits have dropped of about 40% - though I also have Italian and European visitors, I am sure the loss is almost totally in the US section, caused by the long weekend and the catastrophic events. So my position - and my advise - is not to worry and wait for bad times to go... there are people who have lost much much more in Lousiana

[andrea99]

My traffic is mostly US, some UK, Australia, Canada, and other English spkg. Saturday was very good, Sunday quite bad... it IS Labor Day wknd.

[dibbern2]

Time to take a deep breath.

I'm 'way down also, but won't seriously worry until the world's a little more settled. At least a week, probably 10 days.

[spaceylacie]

I'm just writing it off as a typical holiday weekend/week before the holiday. My visitors are mainly from the US and my numbers are down too.

[europeforvisitors]

My traffic and AdSense revenues were down only about 10% yesterday (Saturday of Labor Day Weekend), which surprised me a bit. Affiliate bookings were also down slightly.

I probably escaped a bigger drop because many of my readers are from outside the U.S., and because traffic from students at universities (many of are now back in session) may have helped to compensate for the holiday-weekend doldrums.

[Sobriquet]

you are right - even my links are down by about 40% .

also, my serps have gone down a lot in last one week. I am studying all changes i did . I think i did something suicidal which has caused this. Once i am sure, i shall post it . Just analyzing.

[StreetSurfer]

in last 4 hours we've seen our eCPM go up by 60% -!

due to the downtrend in last 72 hours we:
1) added some more quality content
2) implimented the www .htaccess redirect to fix any possibility of duplicant content penalties as per this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
3) put out 100 printed flyers around our neighborhood to raise more local awareness to see if that would help
4) removed 190 blocked competitor / crap ad URLS

the jump is mainly in our Australian sites... all looks better than before the drop now! I hope this lasts! anyone else that was down picking up on positive changes like this?

i think it may be because of the unblocked ads - though we did this over 48 hours ago... because we did quite a few things it's difficult to say what has impacted...

[con771]

So far today I'm on good a pace. The first 5 days of sept have been down about 50%. Thats enough to give someone a heart attack. I was preying it was due to the holiday and the weather in the US. Hopefully things are starting to get back on track. I stil feel queasy though!

[NoLimits]

I saw a huge jump in traffic in the late hours of Monday, and today seems to be off to a much more normal start than what I have been waking up to.

[StreetSurfer]

smart pricing is kicking in and things are slowly dropping back down to "normal"

[europeforvisitors]

Monday, which was Labor Day in the U.S., turned out to be a good day for traffic (just about normal) and a great day for AdSense revenues. Go figure.

[makes a little sense]

I'm noticing that the CTR is determining how much you receive in revenue. I'm still confused a little on this, but on 2 occasions now, I've seen much better figures since 9-1 if I had a CTR of 2% or higher. I just checked this morning and I'm at 4% CTR, which is the highest CTR I've ever had. Of course this will probably change over the course of the day.

So, I wonder if Google is concentrating on CTR "tier results" rather than what they used to do.

[rfontaine]

Yeah, but what is "a huge increase in traffic"? If you are getting 10 visits a day and it ups to 20-visits for a few days, that is a huge increase but quite meaningless.

If you were getting 100,000 visits a day and then suddenly are getting 200,000 visits for no apparent reason, now that is something to ponder. I've seen this happen on our news website when a story is posted that gets linked on popular websites.

Likewise, making $1.25 a day and it ups to $3.75 or falls to $0.50 for awhile means nothing.

[hunderdown]

makes a little sense: CTR does seem to be factored into "smart pricing." There have been discussions about this in the past.

[imjustagirl]

I guess I got lucky I had my best weekend sofar.
Even with the lower trafic.

[bbunlock]

well it has been a bad week/10 days for me also, my sites traffic if from all over the place but most of them are from the us (even though its a .co.uk site)

I have been panicking since the decline becuase I changed a section of my site to make it search engine friendly urls and thought it must have been that.

well im sure things will get back to normal sooner or later so just gonna ride it out and see what happens, im new to this adsense (started late july) so wasnt sure what to expect, was getting an average of $60 a day until the slump not getting around $40.

regards

[desi_curry]

I am seeing a huge downtrend too. For August my average price per click was $0.11 and for September its $0.08. That makes it down by around 20%. But yesterday it was $.06 and today its just 0.04. I started Adsense in June 2005. Can anybody tell if this is normal that the price per click decreases as your site gets 3-4 months older?

[rfontaine]

I still think alot of you guys are getting so little traffic and so few clicks that of course your numbers are going to wildly swing, there just is not a large enough sample.