Hi! I started a new sister site to one of my high traffic sites and I've seen some nice traffic and good CTR. HOWEVER, somehow my CPC has dropped from around 0.20 to around 0.02(!) overnight. Today I have had about 1000 clicks but i've only made about 20 bucks. What causes this? Is it just a natural fluctuation or is it because of the new site? The nagging feeling of what I could've made today is eating me up! Any ideas?
Adsense qualifies your traffic. If you get junk traffic with high CTR, this happends. From experience, this will take 6 to 12 months to get back to your normal CPC rates (if you stop to sent junk traffic).
By Junk traffic, what do you mean? I get exclusively US, UK and Australian visitors, all viral and social media driven.
Those sources of traffic really suck for those that pay for the advertisements; you are at risk of loosing your account for invalid activity unless you get a lot of organic traffic.
My site is not some low quality crap site, it's a news site with original humor and satire on it that lots of people share. I'm not about to make a thousand small SEO sites and get 3,000 organic pageviews a month when I can get 4 million pageviews a month this way.
Which generally generates poor quality clicks for those that pay for the advertisements! Unless you gets lots of organic search traffic (where intent of the searcher is different to the social share and of more value to the advertiser), then your account is at risk.
By that logic news websites or any site that isn't a sales oriented site is at risk when they have a column or article go viral, and YouTubers with viral videos better watch out! The fact of the matter is that my previous site had much higher CPC and was exactly the same, and my question here is why that is (I'm assuming from other people's answers that it might be to the newness of the site)
Not at all; those sites have a lot of organic traffic, so their accounts are not at risk. You can argue with me as much as you like. I am a TC over at Google's own Adsense help group and we see several sites every day are their complaining that they were banned for invalid activity as all their traffic came from social media. Perhaps you could come over there and tell them that all experts are wrong and that is not why they were banned.
If your traffic is good CPC will be normal again, meanwhile change your ads placements, and try to do proper on seo to your pages