Forum Moderators: martinibuster
However, yesterday, things nosedived. For the first time in years, I earned only $100+ the whole day. I lost 1/3 of my ad impressions. My CTR decreased by 40%, and my eCPM also decreased by about 30%. Things tanked bigtime, in a way I've never seen before.
I checked with my stat software and found that traffic from Google decreased. I don't think I'm penalized because I am still showing in the serps, albeit now #5 for my main keyword. When I do site:www.domain.com, I still see 22,000 results. My backlicks even increased the past weeks. But I think I lost top ranking in medium to low traffic keywords, accounting for the drastic cut in traffic. Site is totally white hat (I don't even use H1 tags and all), and I don't buy traffic at all.
I lost top ranking before for my main keyword but Adsense earnings did not follow the trend and remained on track. Yesterday and today, things are going downhill with my Adsense metrics going down the toilet. My questions are:
(a) Does Google discount and smart price more significantly non-Google traffic?
(b) Any suggestions on how I can climb back up?
I have a diversified source of income, but Adsense is a big chunk. But now it seems I really need to work harder on improving my non-Adsense revenue.
Thanks for your help.
Many others are seeing similar drops/sites disappearing over the past few days....
To answer your two questions
1. I don't believe there's any evidence that Smartpricing differentiates based on source of traffic. The official line is that it's based on conversions, of course, but that hides a whole multitude of sins and there could be some big discrepancies/errors in allocating smartpricing values to websites/pages. But that's another story.
2. Yes. First, do nothing with the site i.e. make no changes. Take stock, analyse logs, and Adsense stats. Compare before and after. Then analyse it all again. It may be that your problem isn't an Adsense one at all but one of traffic/traffic quality/people entering on different pages.
Also consider there are a lot of people in Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi that probably aren't sitting at computers at the moment, assuming they have electricity in the first place, as they are fleeing or recovering from hurricane damage and the rest of the country may be glued to the tube as Rita rolls in.
Not to mention it's back to school (homework) and the new TV shows have all just started opposed to the summer reruns which is dragging people away from computers as well.
I suspect the next week or two will be a tad slow, just a speculation.
Depending on your niche or sector, that is a huge amount of traffic loss all by itself.
I think that many people also saw a drop in traffic just before and during the Katrina hurricane that hit New Orleans. It is possible that during large news incidents, a lot of typical web surfers have their eyes on the news and other sectors drop temporarily.
Maybe just sit tight and wait to see if traffic goes back to normal soon?
I've been running YPN on smaller sites with higher revenue, but waited to implement it on our larger site. I decided to remove the adsense code today and run YPN. So far so good, income is comparable to a normal Friday when we were top in Google search.
The sad part for Google, in my niche I didn't see any sites listed on page one displaying adsense code. This probably has nothing to do with the search results themselves, but it does mean all the revenue we were generating no longer exhists with this new search algo.
Adsense has been good, and it has been a good source of income, yet like their company, I will search for the most profitable option :)
One other event that just happened is AdWords increased the limit of blocked sites from 25 to 500. Not knowing the quality of your site, any chance advertisers added you to their blocked list?
All discussion about rankings (or lack thereof) in Google should go here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
These bumps happen from time to time. If it's just a few days or even a couple weeks, changing things on the site could really screw you up.
And with the traffic drop it may have nothing to do with Adsense anyway. It could be that the traffic source you lost just generated a higher CTR.
And traffic drops, like Adsense drops, can be temporary. Messing with the site might only make things worse.
I lost about 10% of my traffic, and 30% of my income the first part of February. I did nothing to fix that. March bounced right back up and things have been fine since.
I know it's uncomfortable to see this stuff happen, but rushing into changes could very well hurt in the long run.
I had a decrease in traffic last year as well (though not as severe) but my metrics - ECPM, CTR and revenues -- were on course (revenue even increased). So I am just alarmed that everything this time went down with the traffic.
This is just what I have decided to do until results return, not saying that it would be for eveyone.
