Then put it back to how it was Are you encouraging Google to show high paying ads on content that does not match? It won't work as people won't click and the quality of traffic will be crap for advertisers so Google will cut your earnings. Let Adsense choose the best ads and don't try to trick it into targeting different ads. Just have descriptive titles and useful content and Adsense is generally pretty good at picking the right ads. What's the traffic source? If it is Google then you should be able to get about $3CPM at the very least with Adsense, so that's $18/day. Could be much higher depending on the niche. If you start discussing products and link to places to buy with an affiliate link it will really help affiliate revenue to supplement your earning, you should be able to at least double it.
Not much to gain putting it back how it was, 5c isn't much less than 40c. I don't want to put the ads back to how they were as they are so crap it makes my site look like a joke, I'd rather have a small ad with 0% CTR paying 5c a day than a large ad selling something noone is ever going to click on paying a few cents more. I'm encouraging google to show ANY ads that match. Right now I'm lucky to see one or two relevant ads out of a few hundred, they are so badly matched it would be funny if it wasn't for the fact the payout is so bad. I get around 2000-4000 UV from Google every day at the moment. I did change the ads and the meta keywords (I can't change the content) and am now sitting on a CTR of 0.03 this month which is a lot better than it was (although that is 0 clicks every day for 8 days and a whole bunch of them on 1 day), but at that traffic I should be getting a LOT more than a few cents a day. My *other* website gets the income per day in the teens. Mostly from a small subsection of the site that I replicated, expanded and improved to make this new site. I figure it is going to earn nothing for another year or two and then jump when the traffic reaches a particular threshold, which is what happened with the older site.
See this crazy chart, it compared November this year to November last year. I increased CTR and visitors, and eCPM halved... Makes me sad than I can increase the visitors but the revenue falls. Previously $0.37 CPC, now $0.14 CPC. The AUD/USD exchange rate would play a part, but not this much... Any guesses why my CPC would crash? I would also love to find a higher earning alternative. I believe my traffic quality is pretty good. Page impressions increased 47%, CTR increased 24%, clicks increased 83%, revenue fell 32%.
Nice to hear that you earn these much amounts, but earning from affiliates is not that much easier as people use to say about it. Even you have a website which has visitors in millions but you wont be able to earn more from it, and if you look at Adsense, then it is the best and the most convenient way to earn from your website. That's why many people think only about Adsense.
Why your eCPM drops is covered in detail in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1969885 Your eCPM was already very very high, so it is possible Google lowered it as it was paying you too much and/or your traffic was converting, or the advertiser market dried up. I've found the recession has put downward pressure on eCPM in a number of niches and some niches have suffered a lot more than others. I've found it is best not to worry about what is out of your control. I would say that with such a high paying niche that you must be able to at least double your income by adding targeted affiliate offers to your posts.
I got approved after about 5 days. Going to take freakin ages to stick affiliate links on the site though ...
That's false. There are plenty of people that don't even use Adsense & make a killing in affiliate sales. I think the only people that say things like this are those that don't really know how to make good money affiliate-wise.
Its true, earning sizeable affiliate revenue is a lot more difficult and most people try it but don't have the knowledge or persistence to back it up. Affiliate revenue will beat Adsense in 90% of niche in my opinion, but it is more difficult than just throwing up a banner and forgetting about it, although there are a lot of great tools out now which make it so much easier and scaleable.
Hey, whatever works for you! For some, only Adsense works & for others, only affiliate marketing works. Then there are some who do really well with both.