Emailing Google a mistake?

Have I triggered a manual smart pricing review?

[Captain Dodgy]

Hi Everyone,

Hoping to tap the collective wisdom of you guys with regards to a situation that I'm currently experiencing. I'll start out by saying 'no', I haven't been banned (and I certainly wouldn't post in this forum if I had been!).

I fired a quick email off to Adsense support about a week ago when I noticed an unusually high CTR in my stats for a preceeding day (roughly double the norm). I was a little concerned and brought it to their attention as I'm committed to the program and don't want anything to jepordise my participation.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I received a short email back saying that I would be credited for all clicks that showed in my account which put my mind at ease. However, since that day I've noticed a drastic reduction in my CPM - and hence earnings(to the tune of a half to one third of what it was for the 12 weeks prior to my email) with no appreciable difference in traffic before and after the email.

My site is not very busy and I'm a long, long way from UPS club membership but I'm wondering whether my email to Google triggered a 'manual' smart pricing review of my account? I figure that I'd managed to stay 'under the radar' until speaking up. Has anyone heard of this happening before (a manual smart pricing review)? Of course, there's a slim chance that this last week has just been a nasty run of bad luck but I wanted to ask you guys who know 'Oh so much more than I'.

Cheers and thanks in advance

[FromRocky]

I don't know whether a decline in CPM on your account is relating to your E-mail or not, but the eCPM on my account has also been declining for the last 4 days. It started after the account had reached the highest earnings in 2 years. Now the eCPM is about 40% of the normal. Although, this is not the first time of this low, but I never have four days in a row. The max is three days. Hope that today is the last, 31/4 hours to go.

[webnoob]

man, there is a lot of paranoia around here.

like i been saying for a while now, if your account is in good standing there is no reason to even email google.. they already know if something is iffy with ctr, etc..

i do not believe an account in good standing stands a chance in getting terminated because a sudden increase in ctr.

i been with adsense for almost 2 years and you bet i had increase / spikes in ctr, and never emailing google about it. it is their job to detect and solve all this.

anyway, i doubt you emailing them had any affect in your earning decrease. just a coincidence.

[Sobriquet]

I hope it was not due to the email you send them.

I send them a similar email about an hour ago due to CTR being trippled for one of my url in pne day//

:¦

[Captain Dodgy]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the replies.

Webnoob - you're probably right. In future I'll leave it up to the Big 'G' to figure stuff like that out.

8 days now since that email and my average daily earning have dropped by a factor of three. Coincidence? Hard to say but I doubt it.

Oh well, have to get back on the horse and attract new traffic.

Cheers

[jomaxx]

My first thought is that it's probably coincidence, but either way you'll never know the answer. Unless you have some reason to think they would want to downvalue your site, I wouldn't worry about it.

[Frequent]

I hate to fan the flames...but I have had a similar experience. About 3 weeks ago I had a day with a VERY high CTR (greater than 50%!) and dropped the big G an email. They did check into it and responded that everything looked fine. The clicks were valid.

Unfortunately, a couple of days after my email ad targeting went way off-base on my sites. On one site, every ad was targeted on one keyword in my navigation bar. (The only occurance on the page and totally irrelevant to my site topic). The end result has been a 90% drop in revenue.

In all fairness, this targetting change was about the same time the new adsense targeting tags started to hit the streets so it could be something else besides the email.

I did not implement the tags right away so I'm not sure why this would have damaged my targeting. I have since started adding the ignore tags to my nav links and it appears to be helping, but slowly.

Freq---

[jdvjdv]

99% coincidence. It is not uncommon for your earnings to suddenly fall and rise. If this had happened and you had not emailed google, you would have nothing to make a link about.

Surely the google employees get so fed up with the emails about this kind of thing? If this forum alone produces about 5 a day from worried folks then imagine the program at large.

You admit to not being in the 'big leagues' so what motivation does google have for persecuting you individually?

[instinct]

Don't want to add too much fuel to the conspiracy fire but I have to chime in and say I experienced *exactly* the same thing as Captain Dodgy did.

I don't know that my email triggered a 'smart pricing' review but IMHO it definitely triggered *something*. Lets just say I won't be pre-emptively contacting Google about things like this anytime soon.

Best to keep quiet.

[moTi]

i also sent an email to google a few weeks ago because of huge volatility in ctr and earnings.
i received a canned response stating everything is ok.
i have to admit that my action was mostly motivated by these forum members who state "in case of doubt, drop them a mail".
no impact on my stats afterwards though.

[ken_b]

I'd think it was coincidence.

On the general subject of increased, or spikes in, CTR.

I think a little caution is in order, depending on your average CTR, before becoming alarmed.

A couple of great ads running can send CTR rocketing from 5% to 25% when they run, or crashing from 25% to 5% if the ads are pulled.

So maybe before emailing G, check out the ads running on your site. If nothing else being able to say you noticed some new highly targeted ads, or didn't notice any new ads, would give you more information to pass on to G.

[Captain Dodgy]

Thanks again for all your replies

Cheers