In the past few weeks i have started getting much more traffic, from about 30 visitors per day up to 250+ Previously, i would get 0 to 2 clicks per day, each click netting about $1 Since the traffic has increased, i have noticed that i am now getting more like 15 clicks per day, however total earnings are about $3 to $4 per day, so only about 20c per click. Im a bit confused as to why the amount paid per click would drop from about $1 to 20c. I havent changed the ad placement or anything like that. At the moment, i have 1 link ad unit at the top of the page, and 1 or 2 text ad boxes in the middle of the page. According to adsense, the ad unit at the top of the page gets the lions share of the clicks. Could reducing the number of ads per page make the top link unit fill with higher paid ads? As i think some of the text unit ads seemed to be higher payers. Im aware that the keywords im using are low payout keywords, but was just suprised at the large drop in payment per click.
New content with different keywords maybe? New advertisers? Lower competition now? Your CTR got worse? Many factors man, many factors..
no new content, nothing about the site has changed in the last 2 months or so. The increase in traffic is just down to higher placement in search engine results, and marketing efforts on my behalf. CTR seems to be about the same, if not better...
My best guess as to what has happened is that there are only a few (2 or 3) people competing for your keywords and all of them have relatively low Adwords budgets (i.e. their daily limit gets exceeded pretty quickly, after which other - less paying - ads get displayed on your site). It's quite unlikely but can't find any other reasons for this to happen. P.S. Way to go mate! 250 visits and 15 clicks is an awesome conversion rate. Keep up the good work!
I have this problem too but I'm earning more with Chitika so it makes up for the loss. I'm glad I combined both now it helps a lot.
thanks for replies, i credit the good CTR to having link ads that blend in with my pages navigation menu i.e same colour scheme, and positioning. After looking deeper, i have noticed that the text ads are getting roughly $1 per click, but the link ads getting more like 20c, do you think removing the text ads and leaving only 1 link unit ad on each page will result in those $1 ads getting moved to the link unit ads? I have heard of this happening before, but it doesnt make sense in this case as the link unti ads are the first ads on the page, and therefore shouldnt they contain the highest paying ads? thats what i was led to believe. Thanks again
This is becoming quite interesting, I would like to know what others think about having only one ad unit to get the most CPC. Your text ads unit, are they in articles or in sidebar? Because even if an ad is on top of your articles, Google can read that sidebar before your main articles, so he will "rank" your sidebar ads better than your top one. It all depends on your HTML.
in the html code, the link units at the top of the page appear first, they are the only link units i have. The 2 clicks i got today on the text ad both netted $1 each, the 20 clicks on the link unit gave me 20c. At the moment i can only assume its coincidence, will check over the next few days... might experiement with removing all ads and just leaving the link unit at the top of the page.