I get on average 70,000 or so impressions per day with lately a 0.70% CTR but my eCPM was only $0.30 yesterday and only $0.16 today. Today, for some reason, earnings have been horrible so far I doubt I'll make more than 10 bucks. I use adsense on two sites. One of them is a fairly popular blog and the other is a forum with about 1100 members (couple hundred active ones). Placement I don't think is an issue. I've placed them where people can easily see and click them.
According to my calculations, you're getting an average of around $0.02-$0.04 per click. This is of course very low, but it is possible. You're either stuck in a very low-paying niche, or you're not targeting the high-paying keywords in your niche aggressively enough!
i have a similiar situation with my sites too. adsense really sucks the last few days. i hope that the things going better in the next time.
my situation is exactly like you huge drop in ecpm around 0.30 with a blog and forum I think it is the global economic crises
Run the Google Keyword Tool using either your site, your biggest competitor's site, or just some keywords as input. Then choose to show the "Estimated Avg CPC" column, and then sort the results descending by this column to see the highest-paying keywords in your niche. Look to see which ones of these also have a large search volume. Then you will know high-paying keywords in your niche that a lot of people are also searching for. Write content on your site based on those hot keywords! Good luck with it all.
I tried that out but found I probably am already using most of the keywords that are relevant to my site.
eCPM is more related to the ads display. I not sure what you mean by using most of the keyword, it doesnt matter. You shall increase the density of those keyword with better pay.
If you're stuck, then yes, by definition you are screwed. Get unstuck! (move to a different niche or make a new website)...
my eCpm is like yours. I am in lyrics niche in Brazil. Usually i have 0,3 ecpm but since december i am getting 0,18 to 0,24 ecpm. My ctr drops from 1.2% to 0.7 ~0.8% since december. I dind't change anything in my site.
It is called the recession Everyone is facing it... One more thing I noticed.. If I get more visitors via google images, the CTR and eCPM is dragged down drastically since they have very low CTRs .. that is the google inage visitors...
OK so some of the ads (and my site in general) didn't display well in some browsers. I fixed some of the problems and earnings increased by a little.