I've noticed that page CTR has been falling. I see a drop around the first of March and another around the first of May. I can explain this, to a limited extent, with the addition of more competing ads and with a relative growth of the number of forum pages in my page inventory. However, the competing ads were added on 31 March and there is no noticeable drop on that date, and the forum growth has been relatively minor during this time period. One theory which I have is that Google has begun to silently ignore clicks which it considers invalid. Other publishers have mentioned that their own accidental clicks have gone silently unpaid. I believe that multiple clicks from the same IP may also be silently ignored. Another good candidate is clicks which result in a page visit of less than one second in length. Thoughts?
i think thats crap personally. i work hard to make my pages and i want every click i deserve. my 2 cents
I've noticed a downward trend in CTR as well. I'd say my drop is about .6 to .7%, across the board, quite significant. I haven't been too concerned, as the drop in clicks has resulted in a rise in sales, which tempts me to remove adsense all together.
depending on your site you may benefit more from other means of advertising anyways. some sites work great and CA or sales while others work great for adsense...
I'm seeing a month-to date drop of just over 3% compared to my February PCTR. Or, expressed another way, that's a drop of about 30%. On a positive note, traffic has been increasing steadily, so revenue has been fairly stable. I'd like to see my new traffic numbers with my old CTR numbers.
is it one of the sites that google took a dump on a few months back? both lowered clicks? while increasing traffic?
These stats are across the board on all of my sites. Google last penalized one of my sites on 26 January and that site is still penalized. That is before the time period of the statistics shown above. Also, I caused another one of my very-minor sites to be penalized last Friday -- but that site is so small that it is effectively irrelevant to these statistics. My traffic increases over the last few months have been almost entirely due to the creation of additional content.
Usually when I see multiple clicks from one IP, they are counted and not payed so I don't think that would hurt CTR. Is 2/14 significant at all? Is that the begining of this site? I would think that CTR would be hiring in the beggining, especially if you have many return visitors as they would be somewhat adblind.
Certainly Google is doing something, and I don't like it. My own earnings are falling, though not so bad that I'll give up on it, but bad enough that I've noticed. I'm going to be experimenting with another CPC program called Revenue Science for a site that doesn't seem to convert at all with Adsense. I like how their ads look. Basically no "ads by Google" like tags.
Other than being Valentine's Day? These stats are from an array of web sites, all of which are older than 2006.
If such thing is going to stop google from banning innocent publishers, I will be okay with the low CTR.
Traffic keeps going up rapidly; revenue keeps going down slowly. I just deleted a 160x600 AdSense unit from one of my major sites. This allowed the 160x600 Chikita unit below it to move to a prime position on the screen. The Chitika ads are prettier anyway.