Over the course of a few days last week, I made (too) many changes to my website to increase earnings. This somehow caused my normal daily earnings of £10-20/day to increase to £40 but for just 1 day -- but I'm not sure what particular change made this happen. The skyscraper I changed usually makes around £10/day, but spiked to £30. Here's what I can remember doing: Moved the skyscraper from the right to the left Changed the skyscraper to a wide skyscraper Unblocked all "sensitive cateogories" Unblocked all previously blocked domains Here's the chart showing the old and new skyscrapers: It might be worth mentioning that: The spike happened on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 (is this significant at all?) The CPC was unusually high that day (40% more than the last few days) I have a few theories, but not enough experience to tell which is most likely. It spiked because I changed the position of the ad, so there were a lot of curiosity clicks. Now that people are familiar with the new layout, they've stopped clicking. I think I started unblocking stuff on day 2, so this could have caused the income to go back down to "normal", but this sounds like coincidence! Perhaps this caused the CPC to drop? It could be for another reason of course, but I'm so desperate to get the earnings back up to £40 after this small glimpse of potential.
It could be that on that day there were some new ads that an advertiser added that were really appealing and so the CTR was good, but the adverstiser stopped running the ad after that day.
Yeah I agree this is possible -- but it is very coincidental that this could end on the exact day that my ad starts showing. Would you suggest blocking sites/categories to see if that improves the CPC? The number of clicks was also higher for that day, 30% higher in fact. So if I can't affect the CPC, at least I can try to affect the number of visitors clicking? Perhaps they're not clicking because they are being shown ads that are not relevant to the visitors. For example, Google was showing our users car insurance ads which could not be used in that country (Google was confusing the territory with a neighbouring territory). Since the site is very niche to that territory, many ads are just not relevant to them.
Sounds like a good idea. Would you suggest waiting a month so that the "% earnings (last 30 days)" column is accurate? Maybe there's a quicker way for me to find out? That said, it is the holiday season, so maybe it's not the best time to be tinkering?
I want to agree as the wide-ss banner works out better on the left side than the right size of the page.
You shouldn't need to wait. You should get an idea pretty quickly on whether or not the changes are improving your CTR (usually a day or two).
Should I block both low performing sensitive categories and low performing general categories? Blocking sensitive categories looks simple, but general looks more complex since there are many levels... Should I block only top level general categories, or block only the low performing sub-categories?
You can block them by general categories, as that would be much easier, however, there may be sub-categories that may be there that are getting clicks.