I was wondering if anyone else is having this problem. I have a site delivering 5,000 to 10,000 impressions a day for Adsense. A bunch of advertisers have recently jumped on the site to buy cpm ads through Adsense. In the past couple of months, the eCPM has dropped by half. When I view the site, 90% of what I see in Adsense is the cpm banners. My CTR is 10% of what it used to be, the traffic is raising steadily so it's not that. Should I try banning the advertisers who try to pay by cpm? Google is totally useless, they just give me some crappy format email response when I try to ask them about it. Thanks for any advice.
Accoring to everything Google has said about CPM ads they only display them when it's in your best interest financially. Are you finding that to not be the case?
Heh, I think I'd have to classify a 50% reduction in earnings on one of my sites as not being in my best interest. I tried to get some information from them about it, but gave up as all I ever get is canned response.
How long have you been seeing that 50% reduction? Days? Weeks? Toppspinn, they use the eCPM. More details here.
Peter, My own observations are similar to yours. I emailed Adsense a while ago about this because I could not get Link Units to show on my home page. Their appearance seemed to have been blocked by the cpm ad. Google did remedy this. I recently tried to add link units elsewhere on my site and found they have been blocked. (By blocked I mean that throughout my site I get a blank space where there should be ads.) Overall, since cpm ads began featuring prominently on my site, my CTR is down around 50% and eCMP has been hit very hard. I emailed Adsense telling them this two days ago, with the numbers. I've not had a response yet. (Normally they respond within a few hours.)
Well, the good thing coming out of it is that it's really motivating me to go direct to the advertisers. I figure I can sell ads to them at less than Google charges, and still increase my revenues.
GuyFromChicago, Here are some numbers from my home page to illustrate that cpm ads may not be in the interest of the publisher. Nov 2005: Link Unit and Ad Unit showing normally. Page earns $10 per day. Dec 2005: Link Unit blocked. Ad unit shows cpm ads. Page earns $3 per day. I emailed Google and asked them to allow the link ads to show, which they did. Jan 2006: Link Unit and Ad Unit showing normally. Page earns $9 per day.
I read you can opt out of displaying cpm ads but have never tried it myself. If peope want to run CPM on my sites I'm cool with it. I've never seen it have a trended negative impact on my sites and CPM advertisers tend to be pretty loyal if your site is converting for them. It's nice being paid for impressions regardless of the number of people who click.
I had the same problem for a while but somehow the advertisers have left, technically their CPM costs should increase to a level that can compete with CPC ads, otherwise they wouldn't show at all. They are a pain, I suppose opting out of 'advertise on this site' helps too.