I have had a very consistent CTR over the last 6 months. This is due in part to a wide variety of business and technical sites and niches that receive thousands of page views per day. It is also stable because I get a good amount of traffic from India, Austrailia, the UK, Turkey, and other places so I am less affected by US holidays and business hours. I had a very good Monday and suddenly on Tuesday and continuing today, my CTR dropped in half. Since I get a good amount of traffic from outside the US, I can't attribute this to the US holiday occuring on Thursday. Also the volume of traffic is the same. I didn't do anything to the layout or structure of the site. I understand statistics and the change is not normal variation, there is something significantly different. Anybody else seeing a big drop in CTR?
I'm seeing a drop in CTR and eCPM ... but then that is to be expected on my mainly US targeted sites. However, it is fairly stable on non-US oriented sites. AdSense is a rollercoaster ... just keep adding content and ride it out. I don't know if there is really much more advice anyone can give.
I have looked at my data and sorted out variations for the US holiday but this drop appears to be more general. My rollercoaster varies less than 10% normally so a 50% drop is very significant. One of my guesses is that some advertisers shut off budgets for the holdays and the remaining ones don't do as well on CTR. I need to do some research into that.
Yes my Page eCPM is down 60% last 2-3 days. And my CTR is down too. I looks like some advertiser have put an hold on his spending. I have different low paying ads. My Page CTR and Page eCPM as been wery stable for over 2-3 months.
I looked into some of my stats and I noticed that on last Monday I strarted getting an extra URL parameter from traffic coming from Adwords. The extra parameter caused trouble for Adsense when I had 3 adsense ads (Adlinks, a tower image ad, and a rectangular block). Adsense was loading 2 out of 3 just fine but the third, most valuable rectangle, was not loading and therefore it was suppling no clickthroughs. I removed the image ad and it seems that Adsense is loading both the Adlinks and rectangle ad and my CTR and eCPM is moving back up to weekend/holiday rates. Check your logs or stats program if you are using Google Analytics (parameter is &gclid=... ) and you may see a correlation between the extra URL parameter and a drop in CTR and eCPM.
what do you mean by "traffic coming from adwords"? and how is that related to lower ctr/ecpm numbers as an adsense publisher? perhaps you are using adwords to advertise on your own website?
Yes, I use Adwords to get some of my traffic. The point here is that Adsense has a problem dealing with an extra variable in the URL. It was generating two ad sets but not the third when a URL parameter was added.
i am using google analytics on a site, and i have never seen it fail to display the 3rd ad block... that type of an error would be consistent and reproductible, not intermittent in nature, so it would have been widely reported by now... and since google analytics is based on urchin, which has been around for quite awhile, this shouldn't be anything new. perhaps you have a bug in your html that is causing some wierd problem? what did adsense support say? does it happen on more than one site?
My HTML is fine, I have 10 years of practice. I used Urchin on several sites but it was not remotely hosted and therefore didn't need URL tracking variables. So I am not sure if Urchin had been doing remote stats hosting on a large scale for very long. The problem is repeatable. If I remove the third block, all blocks load, if I add a third block in only 2 out of 3 load. I have repeated the process. My theory is that Adsense sees a slightly different URL and has some extra processing to do (much like the first time a page is loaded). My HTML is simple but its generation is dynamic using SQL server queries, web services calls, and some server side conditional code so there can be a few tenths of a second in page loading. Since the Adsense application is designed to have both performance and scalability, the extra processing for the URL variable and fractions of a second delay in the page rendering may cause Adsense to time out on my page after two ads are loaded. I offer this up as a theory and a fix to those that experienced a sudden XX% drop in CTR since last week.
Arnie, If you are down from 8.3 to .3% then that's amuch bigger problem. If you are down from 0,324 than that is nothing to be concerned about, statistically it's called noise in the data.