I started a site in dec 05 and used adsense on it from the very beginning. For the first months I struggled to get more than 100 visitors a day a was earning a couple of dollars a day. my average revenue per click those days were around $0.2 As I continued to optimise my site and my ranking in google became higher I hit 2000 unique visitors a day - my CTR stayed the same, but my average revenue per click dropped to $0.1 Recently, I hit number 1 in google for my main keyword and joy-o-joy I now get 5000 unique visitors a day. Again my CTR stayed the same, but my average revenue per click dropped to $0.03 With the exception of Dec (christmass shopping period) my revenue has stayed the same in the last 6 months at around $30-$50 per day, but my traffic and clicks grew 3 to 4 times. Anybody has similar experiences?
Same here,In the past 6 months my forums have grown over 200%. but the revenue has stayed the same. Number of ads,placement etc. doesn't matter.
perhaps it depends on the traffic. Track your traffic. Where does it come from? it is not only getting clicks. Sometimes it is to get a click from a specific area/ country/ continent. It has no sense to pay the publisher 4$when a chinise is looking for an insurance in the US. Understand. hope that helped.
I've been increasing my traffic for the last couple of months and the amount I get on average for a click has just been sliding down to half of what I was getting 4 months ago. I'm sure there may be valid reasons for this but it still sucks.
I have no idea. Sometimes I got .40 or .37 and sometimes I got .01 and .03 and .07....pretty weird. lol Anyway maybe because of the ads that were clicked were bid less, and so share is less?
Thanks everybody for the comments - seems like a number of us are in the same situation. I'll do some more research and testing to see if Google is up to something sneaky
Where is your new traffic coming from? Is it targeted? This is not a Google problem - it is much more likely a problem with your placement, or that the type of visitors you are getting are not interested in the type of ads that are shown on your site.
It's kind of funny. On one of my sites, I lost my high google ranking and got less visitors. But, almost all of my individual clicks have doubled.
Google wants to make money, so they show ads from advertisers that pay better more often. If you're an AdWords user, you know this. The higher you pay, the more you appear. For some keywords, you won't deliver a single ad impression if your CPC isn't above a certain treshold. As a publisher, when your traffic increases, so does the number of ads displayed. Google now has to serve cheaper ads. It's an inventory problem.
"it is much more likely a problem with your placement, or that the type of visitors you are getting are not interested in the type of ads that are shown on your site." not sure this is related to placement of adds on my site as the clickthrough rate has remained the same. - Have I missed something Tauren? "As a publisher, when your traffic increases, so does the number of ads displayed. Google now has to serve cheaper ads." Inerte, I don't understand your point - could you please expand?
Sure, here's a simplified example. Alice and Bob are AdWords advertisers. Alice bids 0.05 cents per click, Bob bids 0.03. They both set their daily expenses to a maximum of $10 dollars. Someone visits a website and Google has to decide which ad to display, Alice's or Bob's. Interested in maximizing their revenues, Google decides to display Alice's ads first. This continues until all of her ads are displayed, but if the website continues to serve pages, then Google's has to start showing Bob's ads, which pay less. So, if you increase your impressions, Google has to show ads that pay less.
Same problem here, except I spent a lot of time trying to increase my CTR too, since that means more money, right? No. On one site I went from 200 clicks a day to over 1000 a day with 3-4 times the traffic (meaning my CTR went up a little), and my revenue per day went DOWN. Used to get $0.10 a click and now it's $0.03. No matter what I do (filtering, content building, keyword targetting, etc), as I build traffic the revenue slips to $*&%. Really doesn't make sense and makes the whole thing feel a little pointless.
Thanks for this Inerte - Would this mean that my adds early in the day generate more money and they slowly drop off during the day as I get throught the high value adds?
I never had such an experience.But if the traffic is revisiting your site then I think there is a chance for this decrease in income.
No. The higher concept here is that Google must try to maximize its revenue. But it's a complicated and massive system, with many variables. Alice might be paying more per click, but Bob's ads might have a higher CTR, because it's a more desirable product or its text/image generate more clicks. An advertiser can target ads based on geolocation, language, days of the week and hour of the day. An advertiser might set how much money he wants to spend per campaign, day or month. It might also have no limit. So Google has to spread your impressions during a period. When you create an AdWords campaign and choose your keywords, there's a minimum CPC to appear on Google's SERPS and the content network (we, the publishers). If Google tells an advertiser the minimum CPC is 0.10, it will have to show some if these ads even if other advertisers are bidding much more, to please the advertiser. There's also the publisher conversion rates. Some websites (like product reviews), probably attract visitors interested in buying something, so the ads are more effective. Or a publisher could be smart-priced.
I'm not _quite_ convinced that it does although I've held the same belief for a while. Being the statistics nut, I've been doing quite a bit of plotting. Impressions vs CTR Vistors vs CTR Clicks vs eCPM Clicks vs Average Click Value etc etc About the only conclusion I've come to so far is that I need more data There are definite trends but they are obvious ones like Visitors or Impressions vs Clicks. Yeah, that's usually going to be an upward line, but so far the R^2 isn't as high as I would expect. So bottom line, I'm still collecting and still graphing. I only have about 9 months worth of visitor data, but about a year and a half of impression data. And if I do come to any solid conclusions, it's probably going to be applicable only to my site.