Today is on track to be my worst day since the beginning days of 3 years ago. Yes there were a few good days but the overall trend is horrible. When you start getting under 5 cents a click when last year you were getting 13 cents it is time for a new game plan. Thank goodness my affiliates (which will now become my primary focus) have paid me $200 dollars this month so far or October would be a complete disaster. My AdSense spaces are slowly being replaced with Affiliate banners which will mean a further decline in over all AdSense earnings, but I have seen the writing on the wall for 6 months now.
I have the same problem.every day less $$$ one year with adsense and this is the worst period. 350 cliks for 9$ smartpricing or the advertisers pay low or ...what? many questions and never a clear answer.
This happened to me on adsence way back but i found out the reason was that one person kept on clicking it 50 times and for the first couple of days it was normal but then it went to 5 dolalrs and the 4th day my acc got suspended
Google needs more money/profit on account less MFAs advertising. remember some MFA owners would spend 10k a month. google would profit the 10k from them..and then also profit from the clicks generated on their sites
The simple answer is that the advertisers are not paying as much as before. Probrably is not permanent but I guess it is annoying.
Before you are too quick to replace your adsense spaces with affiliate banners etc, maybe checking your stats and finding out WHICH adsense units are not converting at all. If you replace the adsense that isn't converting then you lose nothing AND can possibly improve your overall perceived quality and relevance to google algorithm that may help bring your average CPC up again. You can always look at creating a new adsense block in a different location (after replacing the existing adsense location with an affiliate box) - it could just be the positioning of the actual ads has become too familiar with regular users and they keep seeing the same ads (and maybe have already visited the ad before, so are unlikely to visit it again and just ignore it now). In that case, an affiliate box would bring some freshness to your regular visitors and with an adsense unit in a different location - it could also attract their interest as different ads may show. As always though, you can experiment to keep things fresh and appealing to your website visitors. The old saying, "nothing ventured, nothing gained" springs to mind.
well, even me seeing a major dip in earnings for the past 2 weeks. I have mostly non-us traffic. Could that be the reason? Same/better traffic, and CTR.
Same. One of my site from $59 to $16. This is making me turning to affiliate marketing which looks more promising and don't have to suck up to google.
Great information, thanks. Since 75% of my traffic is on my forums my options are limited on placement. I have only found one placement and block style that brings in a decent click through rate. I have tried so many with channels it is unbelievable. The clicks are bringing in 50% less than a year ago no matter what I try. Image ads for me get more clicks but they pay crap so it all evens out. It is like spinning your wheels and after a while it becomes too time consuming to keep messing with it. 6 cents a click to me is just not worth the worry anymore. My thousand dollar months with Adsense are over, even though my traffic is up 30% over last year. It is time to experiment with affiliates which are not doing to bad so far. I think this drop in payment per click is going to be around for a long time. For me after 6 or 7 months of watching things go from 12 to 10 to 8 to 6 cents i get the picture. Part of my problem is that 60% of my visitors are from the Philippines, but that was even the case when I was at $1000 a month and it didn't seem to matter then. Only Google knows what is going on and of course they are not talking.
As adwords has matured, more people have got good at manipulating it and pruning out sites they do not want showing their ads (nothing against the sites, but the traffic itself to the site may not be the target market - so you may be suffering from that, with advertisers who remain advertising on your forum paying much less. Forum traffic has always been a harder type of traffic to convert consistently. Though with repeat visitors, they will not convert more than once for affiliates (so more rotation would be needed - which could be done if affiliates can be found that offer suitably appealing products/services). Another thing to possibly consider is offering direct advertising yourself on the forum - or offering a paid subscription package to forum members where they would automatically be included in banner rotation system as part of their membership package. There are a few things you can try out, but not sure which you should do that would work best for your site audience.
mmmmm.... I am still not sure if this is temporary or if I have been smart priced.... I am also not sure if it is a coincidence that my page rank has just dropped from 5 to 3(approx one month after my eCPM dropped)... ? Just to be on the safe side - I am removing ALL affiliate links and mentions of advertising, and all my link units and some of my adsense units. Will let you all know how I get on!
Over the last month I have paid particular attention to what is happening day to day. My ckick remain the same (give or take), but my earnings have varied wildly over the last month - Best day $48, worst $12! What I have noticed is that on good days the ads are different than on bad days. What it seems is that the "typical inventory" that Google serves my site is quite poor - sub $0.05/click. Now as soon as someone comes along that is targetting what my site offers I see (great) jumps and fluctuations in Revenue. My simple conclusion is that my site revenue is directly affected by how much the various advertisers have to spend day to day. As it nearly at the end of the month there is very little happening and I am getting a heap of low value clicks.
Not sure if this affect could have been some testing related to the post I read here: http://www.googlelady.com/500/google-rumors-google-pagerank-reset/ It may be connected, and if it is the case where an additional confirmation screen is shown to visitors, it will impact on a lot of earnings across the board. Obviously, since I just read this - I am just adding to the rumours as I do not know what people see when they click on google ads.