CPM fallling...

My CPM was rock steady from January of 2004 through March of 2007.

In April of 2007, it started sliding... and it kept sliding... and sliding... and sliding...

It's finally fallen more than 50% from where it started.

Don't feel too bad for me. I did what any respectable webmaster would do -- I doubled traffic. That was hard, but it's done. Revenue is now just exactly where it was in March. Half the CPM and twice the traffic equals the same revenue.

I am worried that the slide hasn't stopped. I am seeing new record lows even this morning.

I've written adsense-support@google com twice.

The first time, I received this reply:

Please keep in mind that it's not uncommon for earnings to fluctuate significantly over time. Since a number of factors influence earnings, it's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly why your earnings might have declined. Other factors may include changes in ad inventory, fluctuations in the cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand-impressions of the ads appearing on your site, and your users' clickthrough selections.
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The second time, I received this reply:

Please know that It's not uncommon for earnings to fluctuate significantly over time. Since a number of factors influence earnings, it's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly why your earnings might have declined. These factors include, for instance, changes in ad inventory, fluctuations in the cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand-impressions of the ads appearing on your site, and your users' clickthrough selections.
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Spookily similar, but not exactly the same.

Has anyone experienced this phenomena over this scale of time on a publisher account that is generating 100k AdSense impressions a day?

Has anyone found a solution for this?

YPN is starting to look inviting again...

 

ive been a long time adsense publisher (late 2004) and member here like yourself [spotted your posts a few times ]

i have 3 very large sites sites in very different areas (working on 4th) and 3 accounts (a mix of personal and business accounts, i got an ok from google as its ok to have business accounts, the "per entity" rule)

anyways according to analytics them 3 sites have just inder 18.5million page views in last 30days with an adsense combined income of 5figures monthly (my server fees for a dozen servers is astronomical tho)

the sites have grown very steadily over last 2 years, i ploted the ecpm against the number of visitors and they dont grow at same rate, twice the traffic unfortunately is not twice the income (nowhere near)

i have a large enough dataset to deduct this is not a fluke and google are trully screwing around

i recently did a test:
*the new 3rd business account had 0 balance as it was completely new
*on one of the big sites i replaced the codes belonging to the old adsense account with to the codes on the new account,
*24 hours later i couldnt belive what i saw,
*the new account had twice the earnings for the same amount of traffic as the old one did the previous day!!!
*i presume the new account hasnt been smartpriced yet

 

oh btw i have a theory about adsense support

most emails are not answered by people!

i did AI in last year and it would not be too hard to write an "AI" system in prolog that would do a sort of pattern matching on incoming emails and reply from a pool of templates

 

Are you seeing traffic suddenly from other parts of the world other then English speaking countries? I have noticied a change in CPM since a lot of foreign traffic started coming to my main site.

What about referrals? Do you see a lot more traffic coming from stumble, digg and other sites that sometimes convert ok, but generally not? Maybe compare stats on just search engine traffic and see if CPM has changed over time. It could be just different traffic coming to your site(s).

I wonder if it's time to start tweaking your ads a little to see if you can boost that up a bit more. I am sure doubling your traffic was cool Now imagine getting the CPM back to where it should be

 

This is true!

I did a similar test a few months ago, and I just ran it again over the last 36 hours.

Unfortunately, my results were different. My CPM remained the same with both accounts.

However, both tests were conducted with my old personal account. Years ago, this account was tied to this domain. Therefore, Google may have tied my two accounts together or may have both accounts tied to this domain.

I also tested by changing using a 301 redirect to move my test site to a new domain name. Same CPM on both domain names.

I get a lot of foreign traffic, but it didn't increase suddenly the first week of April.

I can confirm that foreign traffic does deliver a much lower CPM.

This was true for August, but was not true for April-July. In August, I did really well with StumbleUpon.

I never stop tweaking.

 

What about your earnings per click? Are they the same? I am just wondering if it's the number of clicks that have dropped, or the earnings per click that have halved over the last few months.

 

My bad... I'm talking in terms of CPM, but it's CPC which is the real issue.

There has also been a moderate decrease in CTR. That doesn't bother me, as I understand why that happens. That's just me messing with the template.

The CPC drop worries me, as it seems to be completely out of my control. I'm wondering when the trend will stop.

 

I would think it's either advertisers paying less (maybe the summer months) although you say it didnt effect you the previous years. Or that smart pricing thing. One thing I have seen a few people try is using CSS to switch around which ads load first and get the higher paying clicks on the add with the highest CTR.

It sounds like you have tried everything though so maybe it is just a time to hope the CPM doesnt continue to slide.

 

I think so. It's either advertisers paying less or Google keeping a larger share of ad revenue.

That is definitely me.

Unfortunately, that's where I am. I am also experimenting more with non-AdSense revenue sources. AdSense has been my bread-and-butter since I started in this business, but the future of that strategy looks dismally uncertain.

 

The good side of things is you have lots of traffic (I need to read up some stuff on how you do that ) and you know how to generate it (double it) etc... So you are in a good position there. Hopefully some other sources will work well for you. Does YPN work ok for you? Maybe using openads you could build your own contextual replacement by pulling in affiliate links in that are on topic to the page content (but automated so you dont need to edit each page).

 

That's easy:

1. Build content
2. Build links

Unfortunately, content and links cost time and/or money. If I can't find a way to maintain a good ROI on my investments of time and money, I'm going to have to find a new business to build.

 

Yep, you have to chase constantly to build links for your new content, which generate revenue but takes lots of valuable time, which pays.

What are you planning at though just kidding.

 

I have actually noticed the same thing in the last few weeks. Early July for me was reasonable enough but things started slipping in late July and there were further slight drops in August but for no apparent reason the CPC seems to have dropped quite significantly so far in September, like 20% within a week, making it maybe 30% over the last 2 months.

I originally thought it might just be some fluctuations due to a couple of advertisers in my industry dropping out or even the result of some international currency fluctuations but I can't help but feel with the latest results from September that Google may also be messing around a bit, either smartpricing me or changing the revenue split.

I have seriously considered emailing and potentially calling Google to see if a private deal can be struck. I attended a conference where local Australian Google AdSense reps were personally working with medium-big Australian websites and had private deals but I heard the figures and they were pulling and many of those parties were earning less than I am now. It would be really interesting to see if Google is willing to give private deals to publishers with smaller impressions but high revenues to keep them from going to competitors. From memory to be classed as a premium publisher you needed 20 million impressions a month, but I wonder just how much a publisher needs to be earning for Google to actually be willing to make an effort to keep them and work with them.