Well, I am a long time adsense user. I have watched my page views increase about 30% over the last year. I have gone from 10K page views a day to 13K over the passed year. But earnings have dropped 35%. 27 dollars a day last year has reached an all time low this month of 18 dollars a day. 30% drop in earnings per click which I seem to have little control over. I did just try the adsense blacklist thing yesterday to see if this helps. click through rate on my site has dropped 38% the main hub of my website over the last year has turned to my forums which i know contributes to this problem. I have looked at the heat map and followed all the suggestions, tried different colors, placement, but things never seem to improve. I struggle to get 1 percent click through rate in my forums. I am looking for suggestions on how to get back to where i was before. Is anyone else seeing a down turn in payment per click on dating sites? Does anyone suggest Kontera? I was approved by them but geez these ads really seem to slow down your forums so i temporarily pulled them. Thanks
what you are saying is that traffic is down on the non-forum pages? are the adsense ads relevant to the page content?
Forums are difficult. I assume most if not all of the traffic increase is due to the forums, which tend to get high page views and very low CTR on ads. I can only suggest that you market your non-forum pages a little more and use alternative advertising on the forums if possible.
Yes the page views on other pages are down. i have a dating site where I use to add all profiles by hand in an HTML gallery and it was really time consuming. i switched so that the profiles are part of the forums and automated, so this is the area of central traffic. so far this month i have had 388,269 page views on my site and 249,695 are from the forums... Earnings this month are $620. The ads showing are relevant, yes. one thing that is really killing me is this drop in amount per click... 30% less per click is really a lot compared to where I was say even in January 2007. Maybe the market is now just too saturated with the type of ads I show
epc(earnings per click) is the single most important statistic that you have... everything has to be designed around it. if you haven't already done so, set it up so that you have at least one channel that covers all the profile pages only, so that you can seperate the profile page earnings from the other forum page earnings. so you'd have at least 3 channels: 1) forum profile pages 2) forum pages(non-profile) 3) non-forum pages what we are attempting to find out here is if #3(non-forum pages) kept the same epc that you used to have back when you were earning $27 a day... it might give you inspiration for promoting those pages more, as davewashere suggested, and you'll be better informed about which direction to take.
I've had the same problem and situation. I was seeing the majority of my traffic going into the forums, but CTR and earnings from Adsense was horrible there. I added Kontera and immediately it began earning over $1,000/month - the majority from the forums. My traffic and impressions are higher than yours, but you get the idea - I highly suggest you give Kontera a try.
Thanks for the information Unfortunately the same 3 ad placements show up on all page views in the forums... whether you are on the main page, in a thread, or looking at profiles... two of them are right below the menu bar which always shows.. the other one is a tower left which also shows on all pages... I have put Kontera on about 10 pages outside the forums as a test to see if those clicks on those pages generate a higher pay per click than the google ads on the same pages. I did test Kontera on my forums for a few minutes and i was disappointed on how slow the pages load with these ads... i wonder if I will drive away a lot of members with Kontera slowing down the forums? oops sorry i meant to qoute danimal and address what tearabite said
That's odd about the slow page load times - what country are you in? i've seen a few posts complaining about the slow load times (which i've never seen - on my site, or any else's using Kontera) and it seems they are all sites not hosted in the United States.. Also, the idea is not to get a higher PPC than adsense or to replace adsense - the idea is to use in WITH Adsense to increase higher overall earnings..
My site is hosted in the US and the forums usually move very well... with kontera they bog down.. it is very noticeable.... Well today the spiral continues... July and August were really bad as far ask earnings per click, the worsts in 3 years You know this may just be a coencidence but in July I started using that referral program and ended up doing very very well for 3 weeks.... I noticed that while I was doing very well with referrals my earnings per click on regular ads were on the decline. Then after the sites using referrals (which fit my format) started to pull out the revenue I was generating dried up just as quickly. So I had no choice but to pull the referrals and go back to regular ads.... I know there is probably no relationship, but the big drop in the amount per click with regular ads started when I began messing with referrals.