What causes such wild swings in such short spans of time?

This is the nature of Adsense, I'm afraid. It's all about flucuations and adjustments.

But it doesn't appear that you have moved past a 24-hour time period yet.

All types of flucuations can happen during any given day.

I have been charting clicks, revenue per clicks and over all page views vs clicks. What I have found is that up till May 20th it was very consistant. After May 20th it is nothing but a roller coaster ride. I think the primary issue is Google lost the formula with search and has been trying to fix it for the last month and a half. Be patient for it is in their best interest to fix search and hopefully we will see stability return to our daily revenue.

I normally am looking at a 7-day outlook and 30-day though it was just an interesting incident that I swung to such extremes so quickly.

I've been watching the 24-hr swings out of a matter of curiosity. Clearly some good adverts must wash over the pages periodically because it certainly induces a spate of unique clicks and high returns.

The idea that google is trying to reconfigure its algorithm probably stands to reason. Perhaps they like to mix it up just to keep us on our toes.

I for one won't be trying to alter the current pages - rather I'll just keep on adding more useful/informative articles as I have been in the past. It's just all very interesting.

Paul.

Well ... it sure has me bumfuzzled. Mine is up and down like a roller coaster since back in May ....

Last month I had my best day ever, a few days later I topped that. Then right after that my worst week ever! It's like playing poker, I go up, I go down, but month to month I keep going up a bit overall.

I don't attribute these swings to Google as much as some do, I think it's more a reflection of volatile adwords budgets... and planetary alignment of course.

I also experience some extreme down once in a couple of weeks, could go as low as 1/3 of average daily earning.

But so far, the daily average from month to month is giving me an uptrend value.

IMHO, it is normal there some extremes happened. I learn to focus on seeing my daily average. It's make your life easier :-)

In another thread, I said:

Now if I could just figure out why some days have a higher eCPM and earnings than others, given similar impressions and clicks.

Then europeforvisitors replied, saying:

Most likely, it's just supply and demand. AdSense is an auction-based system where the variables on any given day are likely to include:

- The number of advertisers
- The number of keywords bid on
- The actual bids
- The number of publishers
- The number of publishers' ad impressions
- The keywords that match those ad impressions
- The number of site-targeted CPM ads in the mix
- The number of "image ads" in the mix

...and so on.

Its a crap shoot everyday, no ryme or reason.

You got that right.

I started adsense in Jan 04, and analysing the stats since. To be honest, I've never really found any patterns. There isn't a seasonal trend, and the only trends I've really noticed that show on my charts in a major way are being whapped by smart pricing for MFA's, and the consequent recovery when they I removed them.

There is a normal pattern whereby when corporate America isn't at it's desk site traffic (consequently earnings) drop, so weekends and USA holidays I don't have high expectations.

Other than that, what ads show, what they pay, what you earn are all huge variables that I have no control over, so I don't let it worry me. Just ride the adsense roller coaster.

May 16th I wrote this regarding the Rodeo maintenance update of May 13th:

I am seeing totally extreme CTR and eCPM swings from one day to the next that I have never seen before.

Today, Tuesday, compared to Monday my CTR is up 60% and my eCPM up by 105%!

My site in 3 years has never varied +/-20% from its average CTR and eCPM.

IF, yeah if, today continues in the same vein I shall easily have my best-ever day since my earnings are already looking as they normally do 3-4 hours ahead.

Therefore what will tomorrow bring, further new low records?

This is bizarre, what are they doing?

Nothing has changed since that date, all earning metrics are still fluctuating wildly on very stable sites.

I've now gotten to the situation where I don't bother looking regularly at AdSense earnings since trying to understand what is happening is pointless even though overall I am still earning pro rata page impressions, visitor numbers etc with my logs.

In my opinion (not even humble!), they did something on May 13th and they've been trying to rectify it ever since or one helluva lot of AdWorders are trying to game the system!

Nah! That's too stupid to even speculate:-)

The other thing that none of is taking into account, and I am being serious about this, are the extremely hot weather consitions being experienced in Europe and the USA, the two largest consumer markets in the world.

I know my spending patterns have changed, my work output is down and I'm getting very short-tempered with moronic enquiries...multiply that across the Net and what do you get!

Start looking into other revenue sources that are a little more stable ;)

Its a crap shoot everyday, no ryme or reason.

Yep... the last two weeks have been awful. It's like Adsense is having intermitent PMS or something! I'm seeing wild ups and downs in daily earnings.

This week I've noticed that clicks stay stuck until the cut-off point and then there will be a big click-dump a couple of hours into the next day...

Glad to read this topic as I was afraid it was just me. A big 'rodeo' is the perfect way to describe AdSense activity over the last month or so.

What I have been trying to figure out is what possible causes such wild swings in eCPM. So I supposed to believe my site's quality differs by 33% from one day to the next, how can that be? I never changed anything on my site.

I had one day last week with over 1000 impressions across six sites (mostly on two of them) and not a single click - that's NEVER happened. The next day I had maybe twelve or thirteen clicks by 8AM. Weird.

I know my spending patterns have changed, my work output is down and I'm getting very short-tempered with moronic enquiries.

Rex, try air conditioning or a dip in a pool. As for moronic enquiries, if you live in any democratized, English-speaking country, those are only going to increase, so get used to them.

For those of you living in the US, UK or Australia, the previous statement indicates that people are overall becoming dumber. There are, however, pockets of intelligent life. Find them and don't speak a word of them.

The public: a big bloated sheep that will meander anywhere the TV/Print media tells it. (like to McDonalds and get 3 Feet Wide)

That is:

dumb, dumber, dumberest, mas grande estupido y uber dummmm......

It's good to know I'm not the only one experiencing this.

Rex, try air conditioning

I never thought I could warrant it in the UK, long hot spells are a rarity, however my a/c unit arrived and installed in the office today...I think I may sleep here tonight:-)

There also happens to be a beer fridge too:-)

Khensu - ROFL...

a few things can be an issue. ecpm is usually a major cause, sometimes when you have a small number of visitors, you'll see these fluctuations more.

"No Ryme or Reason" - well I guess quite simply AdSense/AdWords is just the same as the stockmarket :)

I'll go back to focusing on the content and let AdSense do its merry fits.

Thanks Opti

Just my Mum's Glasgow sense of humor/irony rubbing off on me.

I had bad influences.

Baaaaahhhhhh!

Somedays I try to think like my visitors,
Other days I try to think like the Algo,
Somewhere in the middle near the center,
Lays insanity.

[edited by: Khensu at 11:45 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]

Usually I get about $0.50 for a click. Today, 3 clicks earn me only $0.20

Today, 3 clicks earn me only $0.20

Something whacky is going on!

I've logged in 3 times to check stuff and had three different earnings for the same amount of clicks varying from:

First time: 0.10 average
Second time: 0.35
Third time 0.22

Page impressions are going up...this must be the continued fallout from yesterday's outtage.

Seeing whacked out figures as well. AdSense is incredibly frustrating these days. Finally start to see new traffic records on my site and now AdSense starts playing up. eCPM is lousy. This game is surely not for the weak-hearted.

eCPM is lousy.

Boinggggg...click dump and eCPM just doubled, now looking "normal":-)

One can't complain of inactivity!

click dump

what is a click dump?

Click Dump = A shower of past clicks suddenly pouring onto your stats usually accompanied by a generous earnings jump.

Should be click jump really, dump reminds me of other utilities located next to the shower, probably the word dump was chosen by database programmers.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of dump:

In computing, an operation that happens to data, often for debugging or recovery. E.g., memory dump or database dump.

Click dump in this case is definitely a "recovery":-))