Adsense earnings hitting a new low

Over the last few months I've noticed one of my most popular sites has been getting clicks on average as low as .01 per click. It's funny because when I used Adwords last, about the lowest you could pay for a click was roughly .05 and generally most clicks cost in the .10-.40 price range.

Well, Adsense has hit an all time new low for me today. I logged into my account after midnight last night and noticed I had two clicks on the afformentioned site and for a whopping .01 in earnings !!!! WOW, half a cent a click !!! Jeez, even Adbrite, Chitika and Bidvertiser have never turned half cent clicks !!!

Please don't condescend and try to lecture me about "niches", etc... The site in question is a categorized blog directory with over 60 categories, so there's no way that it's a "niche" related problem because the site covers every niche known to bloggers. The problem is Adsense.

WTF is wrong with Adsense ????

 

do you have much content on the site, besides links and descriptions to other peoples blogs ?

 

Looks like Google is giving you 20% of the click revenue!

Revenue has been in the toilet for me too, on niches that easily used to generate $1+ per click. Now, $.10-$.20.

 

If your visitors are from countries other than the U.S. (India, Africa, Asia, South America, Middle East etc) then your clicks will be lower so you need to track in your site's analytics data since even though your site may primarily get U.S. traffic, for example, you could still be getting people in from other parts of the world and their click prices will be dramatically lower, its unlikely that the people getting the 1 cent clicks are in the U.S.

 

Maybe change a few keywords or add some contest to your site.

 

filter out the ads that appear which links to made for adsense sites.

 

@Pablo - Most of the categories (except for the newest few I've just added) have a thorough description at the top of the category that I've wrapped in "Google Adsense Section Targeting" code to get relative ads.

@rickdane - 40% of my overall traffic is US based but I want a "world" based blog directory and bloggers can specify what country and language their blog is in, so you might be right about clicks being devalued based on geocoding of the visitor ;-(

The only other thing I'm doing different on this site is using Adsense "Link units" because they fit in with the site better. Before I switched, I was not only getting better quality ads, I was earning .10 per click on average.

Has anybody experimented with "Link units" vs "Ad units" ??? I'm going to switch my ads back to "Ad units" right now and I'll let you all know if that makes a difference. The site gets hundreds of legit clicks per day so I'll know in a few hours if the "Ad units" are performing better.

 

The last couple day adsense has falling sharply for me as well, seems like something is going on.

 

this is because adsene sucks. I love coming by this forum and seeing all the people complaining about how much they dont make with adsense..... MOVE ON!

 

When the economy sucks, Google is going to screw the publishers so they keep like 95% of the profits. That's just the way it is.

 

Even if Google pay 1 cent / click flat rate they won't lose that much publishers.
So it's out of my mind why they would pay 5-10 cents sometimes

 

Let me know your experiment it seems to me that after adding link units my click had also been lowered...but I want to confirm before removing them because they looks good on the site

 

I used to get $.05 a click with a company called eAds nearly ten years ago. If earnings get too low, some publishers (myself included) will push more affiliate offers.

Despite new content, increased traffic (mainly from the US), revenue has hit the pits. I still get the clicks, just very low paying compared to even two months ago. The problem may be related to a bad economy, but I think a little bit of greed is in the mix too...

 

Yup kutchii, I changed my link units to ad units and all of a sudden I'm getting a much better rate per click.

When I tried the experiement, I put the ad units (on subpages) into a different Adsense channel and left the link units (on my main page) in the original Adsense channel and the ad units are averaging .32 per click whereas the link units are averaging a mere .01 per click. I know it won't stay at .32 per click but even .10 per click will make me happy.

I'm going to leave the setup this way for the next 24 hours and will update the thread with my results. I hope that's the problem because this would mean at least a 10x increase in earnings and the difference between $30-90 per month and $300-900 per month at the click rates I'm getting on this one site. Got my fingers crossed !!!

 

Ok Thanks for reporting ... I will see your next update as well. Link unit occupies so little space and looks like a menu so they get more clicks but rate is really low for me as well also requires total of 2 clicks from user I get first click many time but second one very less(which gives $) . But ad units get too much space so positioning them is the big problem for me.

 

Good that you are getting everything back but for me (keeping other factors constant), the adsense earning is on the decline from last three months... have tried all possibilities but with no positive result...

 

It's possible those clicks were on CPM ads.

 

I noticed a large drop off in earnings about two months ago, but they seemed to return last month. This month my earnings are in line with what they should be.

One way to control the ads that appear on your site is to use SEO tactics to optimize for more expensive keywords. In other words try to use less long tail keywords in your title, body copy, and links pointing to the page. Of course if you are relying on long tail organic traffic this might not be a great idea.

 

sometimes I get decent clicks, but lots of times a couple of cents

 

You need to add more well paid keywords to your site.