Pay per click down by 50% or more this week

[qll]

I hope it is not just about me. Evidence:

1 cross channels, pay per click is down by about 50% or more.

2 even "high paying keywords" are down, some even below those cheap keywords.

3 morning clicks are cheaper too. i often see cheap clicks at night, but in the morning, it is cheap too.

reasons i think:
1 could be happen to me only, as they are reviewing me
2 adwords users are getting smart. bidding low
3 adsense/adword no long work -- proof: they in fact install adword tracking now (google status) to track the whole process, as the idea is getting less effective

i was getting extremely high CTR and Pay per click, now, both are down to very normal rate. That hurts CPM. The adsense centric design drives visitors away, so it hurts traffic. I may have to sell timed ads to cover the decreas from adsense.

Over all, Affiliate dollar is down too. Too much competition now. More are eating smaller pie.

[paradox]

I am also noticing a drop over the past 3 days but that is long enough to know if it is a burp or an overall trend.

[digitalpoint]

Well, unless you are getting more than about 500,000 clicks per day across a wide variety of topics, you really can't tell much from day to day fluctuations.

In the end, it's all about supply and demand. If you generate a lot of clicks, but the AdWords accounts paying for those clicks aren't seeing any return on their investment for those clicks, they will lower their max bid, choose to not run their ads on AdSense pages or selectively choose to not run ads on just your site(s).

You can see patterns like that when you run AdSense long enough. I have a channel that for a 2 week period was getting 10x it's normal payment per click as an example. Most likely it was a specific AdWords advertiser that was bidding high, tested it out for a couple weeks and didn't see a good enough return on his dollars, so changed his setup.

I think people forget that it's not Google giving the money for AdSense, it's AdWords publishers.

[qll]

Well, unless you are getting more than about 500,000 clicks per day across a wide variety of topics, you really can't tell much from day to day fluctuations.

In the end, it's all about supply and demand. If you generate a lot of clicks, but the AdWords accounts paying for those clicks aren't seeing any return on their investment for those clicks, they will lower their max bid, choose to not run their ads on AdSense pages or selectively choose to not run ads on just your site(s).

You can see patterns like that when you run AdSense long enough. I have a channel that for a 2 week period was getting 10x it's normal payment per click as an example. Most likely it was a specific AdWords advertiser that was bidding high, tested it out for a couple weeks and didn't see a good enough return on his dollars, so changed his setup.

I think people forget that it's not Google giving the money for AdSense, it's AdWords publishers.

I think sudden high pay is a one time thing, but sudden drop is not. Sudden increase means this is some big one stepped in, but sudden drop means cross board, it is lower.

Think it is only the middle of the month...

Here is another theory of mine: The Sucking 3 blocks. More blocks will delute the CTR of the high payers and make their CPM down and got kicked out of the first 2 or 4 positions. It could also mean 3 blocks in fact got more hits and more adwords are reaching daily limit sooner. It was 10pm but now 10am.

However, i strongly think they are messing the system now, as there are a lot of beta testing in the last 2 weeks from google.

[digitalpoint]

I think sudden high pay is a one time thing, but sudden drop is not. Sudden increase means this is some big one stepped in, but sudden drop means cross board, it is lower.
So what do you call it then if big AdWords advertisers step out?

[chachi]

I agree with Shawn on this one. You mentioned getting high PPC numbers...sounds like you are just targeting the high dollar keywords. Seems there is a lot of that going on these days (just check some of the forum posts here), so obviously those guys paying $20-$50 a click are going to be lowering their bids as their ROI has probably gone down the tubes recently.

[joeychgo]

I cant really say if mine are lower cause i jsut started paying attention to placement and targeting pages for adsense, so my numbers are increasing across the board. I can tell you that some high paying keywords are paying 1/10th of what they maxed out it on the bidding side of things.

[digitalpoint]

I cant really say if mine are lower cause i jsut started paying attention to placement and targeting pages for adsense, so my numbers are increasing across the board. I can tell you that some high paying keywords are paying 1/10th of what they maxed out it on the bidding side of things.
I think that's pretty normal though because the AdWords advertisers realize they aren't getting enough ROI to run their ads on AdSense pages, so most of the really high paying ads are only running on Google searches.

[a389951l]

I agree with Shawn also. Unless you have large number of impressions, it is pretty tough to track trends.

In any case, my CTR & CPM have been steady to a little better for this month. But then again I am been spending more time adding pages to my site so that might have something to do with it.

[Will.Spencer]

I was wondering why my AdSense CPM jumped by almost 50% over the last few days. :)

[dejaone]

my CPM has been steady after I added the second ad unit. CTR of the second ad unit is about 80% of the first unit CTR. I created a channel for all second unit ads.