Google accepts all merchants selling anything under the sun as long as they pay for any adword campaign. With only $50 investment a merchant can show 25000 impressions of his advertisement. It's that cheap, adword campaign has become a down to earth cheap way of projecting his advertisement across the Internet. When cost is only 2 cents for 10 impressions, who will not run for it? Google found it hard to accommodate a virtual stampede of advertisers in all of its outlets like search results, froogle, blogs and even now maps. They opened the adsense entrance gate wide open to let in almost whoever applied with any text page and URL address from anywhere, with a little or no exceptions. Today every other website in the internet, you visit, has an adsense bar; People ownling sites made exclusively for adsense. Funds available for adword campaigns were disproportionately increasing, so google had to find cheap outlets like adsense publishers' WebPages. Publishers with adsense bars, an year back, could make a cool $1000 a month with 50 or so pages. Now they have to optimize and compete with the new comers or compromise in income. Adword campaigners are now a much more knowledgeable lot than before. A merchant knows the tips and tricks for getting a click through from his past experience. No web page or ebook can provide optimization tips for his specific adword campaign. He employs real, living experts who have past experience of handling Internet business similar to his products. Optimization of adword is far too different from search engine optimization of WebPages. Search engines prefer the high click through rate (CTR) ads irrespective of the money they offer. A publisher with adsense bars in his pages, feel happy to see good CTR for his adsense. But the inevitable also happens; many of the clicks are only 3 cents each. An adsense publisher finds too less daily earning than before, because many clicks are worth 5 cents and less. Imagine a publisher gets 10 clicks worth 5 cents each. He makes $0.50. If he eliminates the specific URLs responsible for 5-cent clicks, he gets 2 clicks only in place of 10 clicks, one for $0.20 and the other $0.50 to replace those 10 clicks. Thus he earns $0.70 in place of $0.50. He has increased 40% in adsense earning. His CTR % of course takes a dip. But this is the reality of marketing world. Choice is yours. Whatever is happening to Google adsense today, YPN Campaign of Yahoo will face similar situation . Publishers may not get any better ads or higher income with YPN ads. Yahoo has a vast network of advertisement outlets. Now it has introduced Yahoo Publishing Network for U.S. publishers (beta). With Google and Yahoo in adsense market, will MSN stay far behind? Google has to pay its publishers still better to dominate the Internet ad market. Google may pay better than 60:40 ratio to adsense publishers to hold them from joining Yahoo YPN campaigns. PPC search engine marketing will become far more competitive and better paying than now. Publishers may soon find adsense income has regained its past glory - a handsome looking cheque at the end of a month. Long live PPC search engine marketing, long live adsense!!
i've had a 30% increase on income for the last 7 days on the same traffic & clicks for a network of unrelated sites. pity i have too wait soooo long for my christmas bonus check....
Problem is in adwords since everyone can run ads. Competition is higher which should enable higher bidding/income for publishers of adsense, but quality is in degrading line. That result in visitors more common not click rather than lets click. Also, since adsense become very popular many visitors have impression of ads like banners - ignoring them at all.
And who would have thought we would be extolling the virtue of MS being involved in a market because its competitive impact! When there is competition markeyts find their level, which in this case should actually put money back in people's poockets. Without it, even companies like Google can return to their primary concern -- raising shareholder value and retained earnings.
I guess this is the proverbial mass-market-drives-the-price-down scenario. Remember how the prices of mobile phones or DVD stuff were coming down because of extensive mass production of the products? I guess somewhat similar is happening here. More and more advertisers are joining AdWords. I haven't done that yet, but who knows, if the cost gets lower enough, the barrier of entry is effectively gone. Everyone would advertise to get traffic and hopefully get a meagre return from the arbitrage opportunity.
There is a season for everything, depends very much on the subject of your sites. 0815 sites going to be affected most while others are gaining. If your content fits advertisers they will bid high in order to be seen on good site.
I don't think that's the reason, since it's been INcreasing steadily until the last week or two. My personal belief - it's because IT'S THE HOLIDAY SEASON!!! Most people seem to surf from work; most of our traffic comes during the day, not at night. So not surprisingly, if people are on vacation or away from work, ... we get less traffic. In the past two days it really dropped a bit and I wonder if that's because of the holidays or because of the subway strike! There's a few millions across the river... Even with the same traffic, people are probably tight on cash and spending on holiday presents. If you have ads that are relevant to that, you'll probably be doing great. If, like me, you do not, you might suffer a bit. And in case you were wondering, the site's content-heavy automotive - and I suspect auto sales are pretty low this month. I know our viewership always goes down; but I was surprised to see yield per page going down too! I'm guessing, as you saw, that people are thinking more about presents than about chrome crap for their cars.