I am not sure what is going on with my site, perhaps someone else has had similar effects on theirs? I know that currently a lot of people have taken extended Easter Vacation and hence normal surfing statistics cannot be used now, however, over the last two days, my site has seen an earning crisis that has taken my earnings literally through the floor. OK, I am one of those site owners who does not get a massive amount of traffic every day but is quite happy when I see double figure earnings per day from the ad clicks. I also use Adsense tracker just to keep tabs on which ad format is best performing and which color schemes are doing well - not alone on that one. But, I have taken a four-day-away from webworld during the easter holidays and since I was completely away from any internet connection, I was not able to update my site and crucially provide any new content to it. When I have done this in the past, I had noticed a marginal drop in earnings but not this time. I have noticed a 95% drop in earnings over my so-called test period, which is a particular time-frame that I use as an indicator as to how the day will be overall, and this was the case both yesterday and today. No clicks whatsoever for the first 9 hours and then averaging one per hour thereafter, which for me was shocking. Firstly I thought maybe I have violated some TOS at google without knowing, but this cannot be as I have been offline, then I thought that maybe due to the holidays my visitors are not actually surfing either, but when I look at my traffic numbers they are not too low, as I would have hoped for. So I guess what I really want to know is, has any adsense server been down for the last few days, has anyone else noticed any strange statistical trends recently, does holiday tool-down-time have really such a major effect? I just want to know what happened and can I expect this for the future or is it temporary etc etc. Dave P.S. One more thing I should point out, my livingingermany.de site has recently been bumped from PR4 to PR6, which as nice as that was to find out, the earnings were much better before, I can tell you.
Can't help you out specifically - usually weekends are bad times for me (both visitors and clicks down) but Easter has instead been a bit of a bonus for me - more visitors and more clicks. I can't figure that one out! LOL So maybe all of yours came across to mine. I guess wait to see what happens over a 'normal' week. Sometimes holidays can be wierd anomolies.
Did you see a drop in traffic? Drops in traffic usually results in lower earnings than usual; likewise with increases in traffic, which usually results in higher earnings than usual. Otherwise, earnings go up and down all the time, especially if you have a small site with small numbers. One of my site does an average of 700 clicks a day, but that fluctuates anywhere from 900 one day to 500 the next. You can't really blame it on any one thing -- fluctuations in clicks are just a part of life with Adsense, and there's usually no rhyme or reason to it. It just is. But if you have a small site, I can see how the fluctuations will seem more extreme to you. But fill us in on the traffic situation. Did it go down drastically? Somewhat? And what kind of site do you have? A blog? Blogs always require more attention; plus, pinging requires updates.
Thanks for the replies, my site is www.freiburg-home.com/germany - but I also get traffic through www.livingingermany.de - the official name of the site. I run mostly advice articles about living and working in Germany for the English speaker but also have a few other services, such as weather forcast, that also bring the visitors back. It's a joomla site and it occasionally takes the mySQL server of the hosting company down due to the amount of SQL server requests. To keep the site fresh, when I cannot be online to update or write new content, I import RSS news feeds into the news section, therefore bringing the google spider back when someone goes to the news page. One final thing in this message, since writing the first post in this thread, my income for the whole day has been the lowest in almost a year - incredible, less than 10 clicks Traffic has recently gone down during the Easter holidays, but in fact I noticed only a maximum of 20% drop in unique visitors, compared to a drop in 95% income.
are you suffering because of 10 clicks per day? I have received 1 click in the last 7 days in my best performance site (PR5) that's why I have seriously decided to limit Adsense to a dozen of my sites and go for other revenue solution for the rest.
You still haven't said how much traffic you normally get. It's kind of hard to do any kind of evaluation when the most important part of the puzzle is not known.
oops, sorry I did kinda go off on one for a while there... anyway, my normal traffic rates for march were as follows: Month | Unique | Number | Pages | Referrers Mar | 13207 | 16388 | 105918 | 2990 and on a good midweek day: Unique | Visitors | Pages 715 | 806 | 4292 Stats taken from my joomla stats component Yesterday I had 525 unique visitors, so hence not a big drop in traffic
Similarly, my stats did not change but my ctr dropped to half and my earnings dropped to one third the normal for no reason!
There are always reasons, so don't think it is no reason. A few reasons for drops in CTR can be: 1. Relevant ads have run out 2. Your website's SE ranking has dropped 3. Your market's interested is down It is possible that your most relevant ads aren't showing because the advertisers might have run out of budget in close to the same time. I've seen this happen, and the ads can just be odd ones. If this happens, you either have to wait for the advertisers to come back, or you have to accept this change until new advertisers buy in to the topics you're discussing. Some advertisers have been opting out of the contextual publisher advertising completely due to the MfA fraud going on. If your website was ranked fairly well in the top 20 searches on whatever search engines but then fell to the next 20 or worse, you might see a huge traffic drop. When I'm ranked higher, I tend to also get more links from non search-engine sites. When I'm ranked lower, the traffic drops significantly. The adage that it is easier to go from $10 to $100 than $0 to $10 is true -- traffic builds traffic. If your topic is very market driven, it is possible that your market has switched to something else in unison. I write about some niche topics, so my traffic can come and go as the news media covers my topics. Humans are not so different from one another, they tend to jump in and out of interests. The best thing to do here is keep updating, keep adding fresh content, and keep doing what you always did. 2 days is nothing. Even 30 days is nothing. I've watched some topics drop for 45 days and then rocket for another 15, more than making up for the dip. It isn't important -- those who give up during dips will just make those who stick to it wealthier and more popular.