Travel website Per Click earnings dropped by over half since July - what to do?

I have been using adsense for 18 months. In the last 3 months, my per click earnings have dropped to less then half what they were (not sure if I'm allowed to post the number). I have not changed content in any substantial way. It is a travel related web site. My page rankings are still slowly climbing. I use a google adsense blacklist to filter out low-paying clicks, and always have. No change there.

Is Google's travel industry ad inventory really low right now? Anyone else seeing the same hit?

The only thing I have changed on the website is I have started using textlinkads - (they are almost now performing better for me than adsense!). The tin foil hat-guy in me says that Google is punishing me for serving up a competitor's ads, even though it's not a contextually based ad service.

Our website - http://www.ianandwendy.com

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

have you looked at your ads? there is a lot off-target garbage on your site.

when i looked at travel in so cal, i found an ad for copywriters in san diego, california solar power, and california photo gallery... 3 out of 4 ads in one block that were not relevant to the page content.

ditch the adsblacklist and populate the filter with urls that are on your specific site... and get more text on the pages, maybe it'll improve the ad targeting.

 

Thanks for your comment. Actually, you picked one of the few web pages on our web site that has not been "reworked" to our new format. Thanks for the reminder!

In fact, I find most of my ads are targeted very well. For example,

http://www.ianandwendy.com/OtherTrips/Egypt/index.htm
has lots of ads about egypt tours, nile tours etc - exactly the context I'm looking for.

In addition, if you look at the ads shown inside the slideshows (where the context is pulled from some behind-the-scenes-trickery of non-flash versions I serve up for googlebot), the ads are bang on - often, ads specific to that city or site. (i.e. Aswan ads in the Aswan slide show, China ads in the China slide shows..)

I'm more than happy to change out my filter list, but on the majority of my website, I don't see many completely out of context ads. Should I just blindly start blacklisting some of my biggest advertisers, since they're obviously not performing well anyways?

5 cents a click just isn't doing it for me. I've tried adbrite, bidvertiser and they're even worse. I get 50k impressions per month (and note that since my slideshows are flash based they count for 1 impression for the whole slideshow), 1000 uniques a day, and since my huge earnings drop in July, I now have almost nothing to show for it.

 

No disrespect intended but I think you need a major site makeover. It needs a more professional look. Look at this site http://realtravel.com/ Then look at yours. http://www.ianandwendy.com You can make way more money with hotel bookings than with Google ads. 5% - 10% commission on travel bookings or 5 - 10 cents on Google clicks.

 

I feel your pain with the lower amount per click and mine has also been going on for months. While my traffic is up substantially the amount per click has dropped so low I am far worse off now than a year ago. I don't think you are being punished for using other ads, I think it might have more to do with saturation in the market. Not just yours, but a lot of markets. Mine is dating and it has been just as bad.

I have realized google earnings on my site will now become less a factor from now on unless something changes, but I don't expect it to. 1K a month has dropped to $600 and I do not think things have bottomed out yet.

I am now trying out other sources of potential earnings from other advertisments. So far it is not showing much but I will just keep trying.

 

I think the site looks fine but I think your ad placements are in the very cool area on the pages I saw. That could make big difference if you make them more noticed by visitors

 

i really like trying to raise the epc of a site, i hope that you'll hang around for awhile and work on this, so we can see if things improve.

for the link you posted, i had no problems finding bogus advertisers:
1) uclickwefind.com is nothing more than a bunch of links for overture ads.
2) africanwomenmeet.com is a dating site, which is way off-target.
3) nextag.com puts up just another paid links page.
4) eazydealz.com is the worst kind of paid links page.
etc.

that's why adsblacklist is such a piece of crap... it can't possibly know what ads are on your specific site, there is no substitute for manually editing your filter.

you are referring to the ads on the slideshow page itself, right? very cool, but i'm wondering why the video clips aren't monitized? you should be able to make more money off of that than anything else on the site.

wrt the ad blocks themselves:
1) put the ad title text in red, so that it'll get noticed
2) get rid of at least one ad block on the pages that have the full complement of 3 ad blocks... between the tla, ads, and small pics there are too many choices on those pages, and getting rid of an ad block has raised the epc for some people.

 

Until you spruce up your site a bit Move the ads where people can see them. Put a large rectangle 336x280 black with white text and round corners on your index page. If you want to make money you have to pimp your site a little. Don't be shy about putting the ads in the sweet spots don't hide them at the bottom of the page.

 

btw, what size are the flash slideshows? the standard screen size on the 'net is 1024x768, so sites like that realtravel.com are throwing away a bunch of screen real estate... i personally don't like that narrow blog type of a design.

if the slideshows are 1024x768, filipina is right, your ads won't get much airplay beneath the fold.

 

change the banner like from big banner you use half banner or something like that you will get high CPC

 

did you check that there is mda ads on your places or not

 

Wow, what an active helpful community! Let me try to answer some of the questions.

1) Trippen - Yes, I know that the site isn't perhaps the most professional. I'm trying to monetize a hobby, and I'm not a professional web designer. Sure, realtravel is a beautiful website, but they have professional web designers - it's a real company. That's not my goal - sure, it would be great - but I'm just trying to create a generic framework for a website that easily allows me to share photos and reviews with friends and families, and oh, by the way, maybe cover part of the cost of the trip. We've got a lot of content, and that's where I want to focus.
2) filipina - Yeah, I know that on the "country" part of the website I'm in the "cool" ad placement section - this is trying to have a delicate balance between pimping ourselves out, and still maintain reader interest. Maybe I'll go with a "friend/family" part of our website that is ad-free, and pimp out the rest (or is that against adsense TOS)

3) danimal - no monetization on the videos because I have a lot of direct referrals from links I put on wikipedia, and editors there are sensitive about external links in the first place, but if I make them ad-free, they're less likely to be reverted. I'll definitely hang around and let you know how it works. I don't see the advertisers you are pointing to on my Egypt page - I see righttravel.com, graduatetours.com, nilerivercruise.com, etc. Oh, I do see uclickwefind.com in the preview tool. Ok, I can filter out stuff like that, but I dont understand (please forgive my ignorance) why I want to filter - doesn't google only serve up the highest paying ads? So, if I'm getting garbage MFA ads, isn't the right fix to change my content/keywording to get better ads?
RE: Screen size. I had some fun with this one - personal pet peeve on mine is webdesigners who cheap out and make everything a fixed width. I've tried to do liquid designs as much as possible - go to one of my country index pages and try resizing, you'll see the content and thumbnails flow around the curved corner boxes (hopefully - browser standards compliance being what it is, it's hard to get this right for everyone). On my slideshows, my ads are right at the bottom, and always visible regardless of screen size. they're also right next to the controls of the slideshow, so people's eyes are always down there anyways.

Thanks again everyone else for the suggestions, I'll have to try some of them out. However, the subject of this post is about the value of the clicks - why am I seeing such a sudden decrease when I didn't change my content. I'm happy with my number of clicks and my CTR - just unhappy with my epc. I've used keyword density checkers and my keyword density seems ok.

 

I don't think there is a point in blacklisting every non-relevant ad you see within an ad block.

 

I have got the problem the same as you.
It the past average $0.20 per click.
Today average just $0.12 per click

 

since people don't click on off-target ads, every bad ad that you get translates into lower ctr... why throw away money like that? you might as well be running banners instead.

changing the text won't stop mfa ads, or even off-target ads for that matter... scumbag advertisers are deliberately gaming the adwords system by targeting keywords that convert.

i saw the africanwomenmeet.com ad with the preview tool, but there is also http://www.labnol.org/google-adsense-sandbox/

mfa advertisers must have cheap keyword prices to survive, so they will not tell google that your site is converting well, because it would raise the price that they have to pay for the ads on your site... so you get lower epc when you let mfa ads or off-target ads on your site.

 

I think your site index needs more 'content'. Target a ton of keywords, blacklist low-paying sites (like you've been doing) and consider getting a site re-design. have you done any SEO?

 

Danimal - thanks, now I understand, and that's a great tool you pointed me to. I'll take some time to try to filter out the crud that people won't click on.

Snailster - SEO I've done is: make sure that title, meta fields are all good. Make sure that all pages are linked. Make sure that Flash pages have non-flash versions for the bots. Try to build up quality sites that link to me with my target anchor text. in regards to a redesign, my pages used to look like this: http://www.ianandwendy.com/OtherTrips/ChinaVietnamCambodia/China/index-orig.htm
so I think I've come far, although yes, I have farther to go What are the parts of the redesign do you not like? I agree that our home page needs work, but I'm happy with the country's pages - the curvy corners I use takes too long to load for my liking, and I should have more even distribution between the bubbles on right and left, but my design is very generic - same template used everywhere, but different content across different pages, so it's hard to get every page looking exactly right without a lot of effort.

 

those days a lot of people has low eraning from adsense

 

OK, I've pimped myself out big time. I've added a big ol' banner to the top left of all the country index pages, and I've also added a leaderboard to the video pages (if it's an internal referral).

In addition, I started using google_ad_section_start and end around my title and main keywords to every slideshow. Hopefully when mediabot recrawls me my ads will be a lot more relevent - on closer look I see a LOT of irrelevent ads (esp. in slideshows) that mediabot is just pulling from a general keyword association of my website.

Will let you know how things improve in a couple of weeks. Any more suggestions still welcome. Thanks again.

 

Change banner position, color combinition and banner size.

Further look on your site, and hunt down MFA sites.

Goodluck