Ugh... adsense down 50% today! Adsense has got to be the most nervewracking income stream I've ever experienced... love it when it does well, hate it when it goes down the toilet. Anyone else have a love/hate relationship with adsense?
0. above all did you convert ALL the Google recommedations published to increase your Adsense revenue ? 1. did you follow the Google heat map recommendations 2. did you follow Google's request late december for use of medium rectangles "above the fold" ? 3. did you receive the recent - 25 Jan 2007 - eMail form G .. Dear Publisher, After a recent review of your site, ... and follow the instructions ? Also G recommendation to use the newly launched ad placements feature to define your ad slots - i.e. to mage your adsense channels targetable ?? myself - of course having followed immediately G's recommendations and fulfilled G's wishes - I have no a higher than ever before CTR/eCPM/$ since the last weekend. keep in mind that IF Google high paying adword customers who want to use 336x280 or 300x250 for image or movie ads and you offer small banners or leaderboard or other smaller formats then of course G has absolutely no means to fill your adslots with high paying ads because movies simkply fit only in the 2 a.m. formats. 4. are u using strictly the 3 ( three ) successful formats Google publishes ( and updates if needed ) - or - are you using any of the available formats ? Every year around THIS time I use to spend a few weeks full time ( fulltime=200-300 hrs total ) to fully review and reorganize/reoptimze my adsense in color, formats and page-placements according to G's changing requests and G-customers changing needs. the result of this annual work is that each time the adsense-$-revenue goes up anywhere from 30-100% for the remainder of the year. wrong formats/wrong placments vs recommended-successful 3 formats and heatmap palcements may mean a difference of 300$ or 200+ $ or 1-2.5% CTR OR 7-8% CTR sitewide average if you would give full URL it would be possible to give precise recommendation IF you would be willing to sit down for days and make needed corrections. one last possibility for your low$ is that with the G efforts during the last days ( past weekend ) G shifts/directs adword-advertisers into the sites with targetable ad units to offer them better efficiency and higher ad-ROI - with the side effect of having more competition on participating sites and apparently less competition=less$ in NON-participating sites
Yes, it can be very volatile. That is why one should diversify and add other income streams, if they can.
Diversify is a good option to overcome this issue. If the site receiving good web traffic on daily basis, webmaster can sell advertising slots, text links, banner impressions etc.