Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I don't have any organic traffic to speak of. Never did for the site I'm talking about. The traffic is PPC and bookmarks and its steady, so it isn't that.
The average amount I get per click is within 4% of its historical average over the past three months. So its not lesser amounts per click.
The CTR is half of what it should be. Yesterday and the day before it was half of what it should be.
There is no reason for this I can see, therefore I've concluded that clicks are most likely happenning and not being counted by Adsense.
I'm in the UK. Anyone else?
1. Impressions for today are considerably above average (nearly double this weekend's traffic, and I had a great weekend).
2. Clicks & CTR is exactly average.
3. eCPM is very depressed.
4. Earnings are way below average.
Small tours of my site (a few pages at a time) at various points through the day (which I do on most days) show for today:
1. A considerable amount of ads that are not related to the page that they are on, but the site does contain pages where they'd be a perfect fit. Pages where they'd fit show the same symptom - more ads that are mis-located.
2. Empty ad blocks. No PSA's, no nothing in these locations. Just simply transparent. These emply ad blocks are mostly 468x60 banners, and it is unlikely that there is a shortage of advertisers for this site.
3. Totally off-target ads that have nothing whatsoever to do with any part of the site.
Conclusion: Today is not a pretty day. Actually it is quite sad for a Monday.
Causes: Possibly delayed stats. Poor targeting? Beginning of month? Something broken?
I just hope for a better tomorrow...
Just because only some people are experiencing a problem does NOT mean no problem exists. (I really get aggravated sometimes when people posting here are pounced on because they dare suggest there might be some problem with Google -- for heaven's sake, Google itself freely acknowledges it has problems on occasion!)
I don't think anyone here has suggested that Google doesn't have problems on occasion. But 24 hours (or 48 hours or 72 hours) isn't evidence of a "trend," and it's also a mistake to think that every dip or blip is a universal experience at that point (or maybe even any point) in time.
But 24 hours (or 48 hours or 72 hours) isn't evidence of a "trend,"
You keep beating that dead horse. I have 10 sites, all in different industries and varying levels of SEO and IBL's and rankings, etc. The ad targeting problem I'm seeing is across all of them. Not every single page, but enough to be costing me big time. It's like their ad server is in the ballpark, but not nearly as targeted as it should be. My dog site has tightly focused pages that normally get ads that are amazingly spot-on. Very high CTR. It's all gone to crap since shortly after 12 am (Google time) Oct. 1. I hope it is something they'll fix shortly, but meanwhile I'm down about $150 in 3 days. That's $1500/month. That's nothing to some of you, but it's hugely important to me and my family. So you'll have to pardon me if it's alarming. But go ahead and post something contrarian again. Explain how it's all just "common-sense." ;-)
In every measurable way (impressions, clicks, CTR, earnings), the last seven days have been close to identical to the seven days before them. October 1st was the lowest earning day of them all, but Saturdays are traditionally the lowest earning day for my site, and earnings have been slightly above average since.
A spot check shows fairly relevant advertisements as well.
<edit> note swebbie mentions Oct 1 as well so am hoping its not serious </edit>
Don't be pissed off. I know your feelings.
My AS income is almost ALL what my family have.
In July it was sooo terible so I liked to switched to ANY program in the world. Nothing paid even close compared to AS. I can't switched to Yahoo yet - I'm from Russia.
In August these very f@#%@ing circumstances forced me to make 4 sites oriented completely for another program. And I started to earn more than from AS.
After I was calmed down - I reoptimized my AS sites
again. Most important what I did
was section targeting and September was
2 times better than August.
My advice is to contact Google.
I have feeling that they have some kind of
"Quality Score" for each publishers.
They will review your site again and can rise your score points.
I did that once (8 month ago) when I was completely dumped by smart pricing. After they reviewed my site
indeed my CPC jumped about 50%.
Nobody knows how AS works. Only lot of guesses.
Contact Google - ask them and read WW forum -
if lot of people saying that nothing changed with them
means it is a problem with your account
The problem is CLEARLY ad relevancy and CTR (which go hand-in-hand). You can play the contrarian role ...
Heaven forbid that I agree with EFV :) but he's 100% correct here. It is clearly ad relevancy and CTR when you've excluded Adsentrics like "witholding clicks" to be dumped later. And 2-3 days is no basis for any meaningful long term analysis. One "dead horse" I've been beating is "rolling averages".
I'm having a bumper few days but, as usual, that doesn't say anything except that your problem is not universal. It therefore falls upon you to speculate as to the cause of your earnings drop and take appropriate action. Theorising that Adsense is at fault does, of course, let you off the hook - though, I admit, a faulty Adsense is one possibility. Examining the issue in more depth to identify other possible causes (and taking the necessary action to remedy) is more proactive and definitely has more potential to get you back on the right road.
Suggestions:
1. Did you recently change content, ad position, something else?
2. Are there some recent off-site(s) changes? (Like big IBLs)
3. Did source/s of traffic change in the last few days? Any other metrics change in a close analysis of your logs? (page views, length of stay, etc)
4. Are others with different IPs, in different locations, even in different countries seeing substantially different ads on your sites?
Resist the temptation to shoot me down because those four specific points don't answer your problem. If they don't you find other questions to ask ;)
But I took a look this morning. Overall EPC/CTR/CPM has been reasonably good for the start of the month.
I did notice that a couple of channels though that are dragging my averages down slightly. I took a look at the ads and the 4-ad block has ads all about the same subject but not the subject of the page. For these pages CTR is near zero where it should be in the 20 & 30% range.
I also have one ad in particular that is like a cancer on my site.. it shows up widely and inappropriately. I just blocked them so i'll see what happens.
Visitors are not what they should be but that is my google search problem that began in Feb.
I'm also noticing some very high EPCs across many channels - now if I could only get another visitor to these pages :)
Some are getting almost no visitors. Some are getting absolutely thousands for a week at a time and then nothing. Others are stable as they have been for two years.
Overall income stays the same! The one thats now getting thousands (fromm 100 to 3900 per day)is paying little due to click through.
When it got 100 page views per day for two years click through was say 45%
Now its 4$ so all those google visitors are not well targeted. Even so this one crap site now pays 50 dollars a day! But the rest have all dropped off! I think its a search engine traffic / traffic quality thing. Same overall income though, just from completely the wrong sites!
All I ever wanted was a fair price for my advertising space. Some days I almost get that, but mostly I do not. Google has proven over and over again to be reliable only some of the time.
Who needs these headaches?
Dance with the devil will likely get you burned.
I was hoping that between FastClick, YPN and Google, I'd earn a decent income. Seems Google doesn't want to play nice.
If Google doesn't want to provide fair prices for my adspace, then I will eliminate them.
Just checked my YPN stats for yesterday. I made 1/3 of what I made from Google ads. Google's ads are on about 1500 pages. Yahoo's are on 10, and those 10 are not even high pageview pages.
Try switching the ads around so that Google's ads on the 10 pages and Yahoo's are on the 1,500. Tell us what happens.
Also, nitrous made a perceptive comment about the quality of search-engine traffic. The quality of referrals from different search engines obviously varies (since each SEO will have its own demographics), but there's more to it than that. What the searchers are looking for, and where they're landing on your site, will also affect clickthrough rates, EPC, and conversions for advertisers (which ultimately could affect smart pricing). On my own site, I know that a page view on a travel-planning page about, say, deluxe hotels or luxury cruises will produce more revenue than a page view on a photo-gallery page or a page about student travel or service vacations for volunteers. So, if a search-engine update results in more traffic on an article about service vacations and less on an article about luxury cruises, I can expect AdSense earnings to drop at least slightly.
In the meantime the only thing to do is write genuine original copy thats of interest to your visitors.
I took a look at the ads and the 4-ad block has ads all about the same subject but not the subject of the page. For these pages CTR is near zero where it should be in the 20 & 30% range.
Oddsod, this is PRECISELY what's going on with all 10 of my sites. Not every page, but enough of them to muck things up. I've seen no changes in traffic numbers, etc. It's all about ad relevancy and, therefore, CTR. This is Day 4 and CTR is down almost half - no change (although it's still only 8:20 am Google time). We'll see how it goes. Perhaps others who have commented are correct and this will right itself. I don't like feeling helpless to control things, but that's the nature of AS to a large extent anyway. Just one more day when my brain is screaming "Get me offa this crazy thing! JANE!" (Americans past the age of 35 will get the TV reference).
Seems sort of helpless almost. Patience is a virtue, but what are we patiently waiting for?
Personally, I finally yanked all my AdSense code and put it in YPN. It's been up since 9/2003. I may as well give YPN a shot, as this latest carnage is uncalled for. I figure we're looking at around 2.8 million page views month, so this should give me a good idea in a few days if I can ween myself off AdSense.
The average amount I get per click is within 4% of its historical average over the past three months. So its not lesser amounts per click.The CTR is half of what it should be. Yesterday and the day before it was half of what it should be.
There is no reason for this I can see, therefore I've concluded that clicks are most likely happenning and not being counted by Adsense.
I'm in the UK. Anyone else?
Exactly the same started happening to me this month, except I'm in Argentina.
Today the figures seem better, but far from reaching those ones of September.
The content that I am most proud of, that is researched, and receives tons of SE traffic is paying extremely poorly - but my "crappier" stuff that I made years ago is paying dollars per click. I'm baffled.
Does the age of a page have any baring on EPC?
Does the age of a page have any baring on EPC?
I don't think so in this case: my site is 6 years old.
Here's some food for thought.
I have re-written an old version of one of my sites when converting to php. I rephrased everything to avoid dupe content, and haven't suffered any dupe content penalty to my knowledge. I left the HTML pages in tact, as they receive many visitors from SE's.
The HTML version of this particular section in question pays several times more per click over the course of the last 4 months. Perhaps slight variations in wording/title are to blame. I just thought I would put that out there as well to go along with other strange trends that people are seeing.
I will also say that the HTML version of the section does have good IBL's and is PR3 (the new section is not prominantly linked to yet, and does not yet have PR) - just some more nonsense to throw into the equation.
I got approved for ypn today and put Y ads on those pages - bingo, good ads. I'll wait till tomorrow to see if they pay anything.
I can't afford to sit back and wait with nothing showing on a main staple of mine.
Worked too hard for that.
