Hi All We have a vbulletin forum that has been around for years and has had very steady traffic and steady adsense earnings. However, in April of this year we focused on optimizing our site for load performance. We did so in stages. First stage - we moved all of our javascript files to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). We noticed that our adsense earnings dropped sharply (25%). At that point we didn't attribute the earnings decrease to the move to CDN. Just a few days ago we implemented stage two - moved all static files (images, css) to CDN as well. And again, our earnings dropped by 25% overnight. So what we are seeing is this: the faster your page loads, the lower your earnings become. This kind of makes sense - visitors see our content before ads grab their attention. Has anyone else experienced this? Any advise for us, other than stop using CDN and make the site slower? Thanks in advance. [Edit] We will try to move away from CDN as a test (easy change) and report the findings.
Have you looked to see if your Ads are the SAME content within the Ads as before. Moving location of ads may be causing the Adsense Bot to crawl your content differently thus displaying different ads. This is very hard to test because the ads you/I see will be different from what visitors see due to Adsense "Following" people from site to site. I have noticed on my own network of sites... and I've been doing this since 2003 with millions of impressions that for some reason the location of the ads within the content will change the ads displayed. This is speculation on my part but worth looking into if your impressions and click throughs are consistent. When I read into what you are suggesting it would require people visiting your site then leaving before it even loads which would suggest two things: 1. They are not seeing content immediately above the fold that matches their intention (Search Keywords) for visiting 2. Your bounce rate is and always has been through the roof.
Thanks for the reply. 1. No way to know which ads are being displayed now vs. before April. We've been just retracing our steps, and the most significant change we made was moving to CDN. 2. The location of the ads haven't changed either. Above the fold, nothing fancy. 3. Impressions are very consistent (to the point of predictable), and click through rate is what went down. Which again, backs up my theory about the site loading faster than the ads. 4. The main revenue generating ad space is above the fold, so if the site loads the main content before the ad loads above the fold, my theory is that visitors will not "see" the ad, since their focus will be on the content. 5. Bounce rate hasn't changed, consistent at around 40% (good? bad?)
i be banking with adsense getting around $12 per click and getting a good ammount of traffic to my site. just keep at it.