I've seen earnings get cut by 2/3 then stay that way for a couple months. Then triple (where they've been the past few days). The fluctuations are mainly on one site and don't seem to be traffic related. Rather it's a combination of CTR and CPC. Just curious if others see the same inconsistency with one or more of their sites? And no offense, but I'm not talking about 10 cents one day and 30 cents another - that would be statistically meaningless. I'm talking about people with a few hundred clicks / day and 50.00+ / day.
jim - I've honestly been there, seen that, fretted over it too ... don't sweat it. I freaked last year when one site went from making $20 a day to over $60, thinking someone was trying to sabotage my account - turns out an eager AdWords advertiser blew his wad being overly ambitious on a few keywords. I still get fluxes, but rarely few that big anymore.
Yes, I have seen very drastic upturns and then downturns in my experience with AdSense. I hear it's to be expected and just about everyone who uses it on a bigger scale sees this at some point. It reminds me of sales work, one day your rolling in the dough from commissions, the next day, zilch maybe. For the most part for me, things have leveled out at a nice level, but I don't get excited about great days nor dissapointed in the rough ones.
Thank you for the replies everyone. I certainly agree that worrying about daily totals is silly. I do think about the daily averages though. If I average over 100/day one month and under 50/day the next with similar traffic than there's obviously something going on... I suppose it's only normal in some content areas though. My education sites are amazingly consistent (though not making me rich ). Vitamin, stock, travel, & dating seem more prone to spikes and drops in revenue.
I don't make a whole lot, but starting last weekend I noticed a drop off in clicks. I did some investigation and learned that now when people are clicking on the ads on my one site, they are taken not to the advertisers site, but to another page by Google that says "Select an ad" and gives them 10 new adwords ads to click on. No wonder the click through rate dropped. Today I seem to finally be on track again...so I am hoping that means they got the ads sorted out.