I'm not even talking about the NUMBER of pages. I've got one page that I made a substantial increase in. No real changes except for SERPs (ranked 9th for the key term in question). I all of the sudden was making 3x the normal amount. A few days later I dropped back to page two and saw the earnings drop. It almost seems as if the payouts are tiered in such a way that if you rank well, you get paid more for your hard work, and if you rank poorly, you get paid less. A click may be a click, but the EPC can fluxuate as google sees fit. I would surmise that it benefits google and its adsense publishers to have their pages ranking high simply because the more impressions typically indicates more ad clicks, meaning more revenue for google and the publisher. It's a win-win for everyone.
hmm? I'll have to keep an eye on it. Since Dec 2004 my ranking under my most competetive term has flucuated from #5, #6 or #3, #4. Right now I am ranked #5, #6 (for some reason G is is favoring 2 of my pages together that's why it's 2,3 or 5,6). This shuffling G is doing hasn't stopped since Dec 2004. So the next time I find myself ranked better than I am I will pay close attention to this. It still don't make sense to me. Maybe we should take a pole right here to see if this is the common thread...Have all AS users that noticed a drop in earnings also noticed a drop in SERPS? Submit here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=104089#post104089
Impressions: No significant change. Clicks: No significant change. CTR: No significant change. EPC: Noticeable drop. CPM: Noticeable drop. Of course, this has happened before -- only to recover a few days or weeks later.
god shawn started a thread about this. I wish I could find it. It wasn't empirical, but it did raise the eyebrows.
Just an FYI: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=4899 I say at the bottom of page 2 that I don't agree with what Shawn is saying because of the fact that I was 9th for my KW, and was not seeing any changes in AS earnings. Well, the keyword I had was a fairly low paying one to begin with. Now that I am targeting a fairly high paying keyword, I can see where he's coming from.
The thread is interesting...I notice it was written in September 2004. I would assume that the owner of DP has his fair share of traffic and probably has a larger sampling so he can throw things out like that. If he is correct we are probably just catching it now. I mean I have good traffic but probably not near the traffic of DP. Another possibility? I have read many people say 'my ads are not displaying'', myself included. Is it possible that when G's servers start to peak out they have some priority level whereby smaller, less significant sites lose their ads? When all my sites are down (they are all on 1 acct with channels) I come to Dp or any other big site that displays AS ads and they are running Is there a way to serve these ads yourself? Or a second choice would be to have code in place that displays if AS doesn't.
I have a bunch of sites very few of which have huge traffic or great SERPs - on google at least. My earnings can vary, on a given site, between .13 and 6.50 a click. For no apparent reason.... A freind of mine compares Adsense to busking. You put out your instrument case, salt it with a couple of quaters and get on with playing your songs...at the end of the day you count your money. If it is more than the original two quarters you are doing ok....but it is barely a living.