There are a lot of people (including myself) who state things like: this week my sites are doing well or this week adsense is f'ing me over! I want to work out the reasons for these fluctuations. I'm not talking about a little bit of statistical variance, I mean changes in adsense payouts where the traffic is the same and there is enough traffic to make it statistically improbable for the payout to change that much. I'm looking for a list of generic reasons so we can improve our adsense strategies. Here are the ones I can think of: 1. Seasonal advertisers 2. Advertisers run out of budget (unlikely given the no. of advertisers) 3. The same ads get shown for too long in a row and visitors have seen them already 4. People are more likely to click at various times of day/week/month (?) However none of these convince me. The only real explanation is that 5. Google change the % that you get from clicks depending on their mood. (Perhaps Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't get laid last night?) I suspect that it is the last one and there really is nothing we can do about it. Notting
LOL... Google have a "mood" feelings? I don't think so... It's called smartpricing.... Your earnings per click is affected by many factors such as ads type, visitors location, keywords, etc.
hahahha! I've always thought of google as this huge unforgiving robot, but nice to think google might have feelings eh? Anyway I can definately vouch for the seasonal effect. I have a few sites which are much hotter in summer (e.g. fitness and "get in shape") sites while others such as sites for tax tips might get huge returns when tax season comes. The most obvious variations (to me anyway) are weekends. My earnings adsense or otherwise always halves over the weekend.
I can also attest to the seasonal thing, and I think that advertiser budgets can affect your income if you are in a limited niche. If you have a variety of sites, then upswings in one can counter downswings in another, but as someone who focuses on just the one niche I do notice when certain ads get pulled. I don't think google just play with figures because they feel like making changes - they may be huge, but that also means they are in the public eye a lot, and I don't think they would get away with that.
This one is a problem for me. But looks like it's hard to get diff ads unless I move out from this niche
As stated above, i believe SmartPricing is the main reason. If the visitors dont convert for the advertiser, you'll get less money for the same click. However conversion goals vary from advertisers to advertisers and there's no way to reverse engineer the technique. Of course, for the advertiser it's fair play. But for us publishers who spend so much getting the ranking and traffic, the 1 cent click is ridiculous when you use to get 30 cents. If visitors dont convert for the advertiser, then i think they need to work more on their sites to encourage the visitors sent by us to fulfill their goals.
Sometimes its the randomness I guess. The best way to deal with this problem is to analyse dat at month-end.