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

make sure you are not being smartpricing and try to get rid of those MFA ads. Tweak the ads placement/types. let see if things will improve. Give google soem time to set everythign to normal.

 

good idea!

adsense will send you "relevant" ads based on just one keyword match, even if the ad is completely out of context for your site... that sort of thing has gotten out of control in the last six months, it never used to be a big issue like it is now.

do you have site targeting enabled for your account? are you getting a lot of banners? they don't usually pay well for most people, and you can't rely on google to serve up relevant banner ads... you could get stuck with ron(run of network) banners that are complete crap... like that fart button ad, lol

 

Danimal, I do have site targeting - and to be honest I never really understood what it means or looked at my reports that differentiate this. Turns out site targeting has generated SFA for me in the past 18 months. It represents about 0.4% of my revenue during that time, but 2% of my impressions. I've emailed the google to ask them to disable site targeting on my account. Maybe that will get rid of some of the ringtone garbage.

thanks

 

a lot of people out here are clueless about site-targeted ads, in part because of the media blitz google put out several months ago that never explained to publishers that site-targeted equals banners, which are the low-paying scourge of the internet.

you should be congradulated for knowing that 2% of your total impressions are site-targeted ads, because most people don't even know how to look it up in the stats!

when i got rid of site-targeted ads, they were probably .02% of my total impressions? practically non-existant, but a waste of bandwidth nonethless.

the good thing about site-targeted ads is that you can use 'em to monitor your relative epc... regular as clockwork, when the % rises, it's time to go mfa hunting, because your average epc has gone down enough to let the banner trash get a foot in the door.

so it would be very interesting to see if the % of site-targeted garbage went down as you cleaned up the mfas.