Forum Moderators: martinibuster
When I was reading this post [webmasterworld.com...]
of Optirex, I realized I am always sort of puzzled by the stability and the detail of the numbers he provides us. If I have a friday with only 70% instead of 85-90% of my Monday to Thursday page impression average, I wouldn't even notice it.
At the same time I realized I am also puzzled by all the fascinating tweaking experiments done by for example Ann, David_UK and Hobbs.
It appears to be there is a rather large category of Adsense publishers who invest a lot time in the circular process of "tweaking and calculating".
An interesting example of this, is Ann's smart pricing experiment at [webmasterworld.com...] The pattern with these kind of experiments is always the same. The OP has a theory on how to increase CTR, ECPM and/or earnings by changing ad format, ad color, ad placement, channel settings, etcetera. People tweak their Adsense accounts and/or websites accordingly and then they observe or calculate changes, if any. If there actually are any positive changes, the tweaking is refined and new observations and calculations are made. This process will be repeated until there is some kind of optimum result.
During my first year with Adsense I have done my part of tweaking. But my problem was and is, that it is very hard for me to draw conclusions from the results, my page impressions are way to volatile.
I have no idea what days are my best days and how they compare to other days. I just don't collect that kind of data. I used to think weekends are slow but some of my best days this year were saturdays and sundays. When my page impressions are 70% of the previous day, that's business as usual. The next day my pages impressions might be 150%. I have no idea what my average CTR or ECPM is. All I see is it goes up and down and I canīt discover any logic in it.
When I started with Adsense, I thought the volatility was caused by my relatively low numbers. Back then I had about a 100 page impressions a day. Today it's a bit (;-)) more, but the volatility remained.
The problem is that most of the tweaking experiments are of little use to me. There is no way for me to measure the results. Therefore I decided earlier this year to sort of ignore my day-to-day stats a bit (only check about every 15 minutes), forget about tweaking my web pages, improving CTR whilst beating the smart pricing algo etcetera, and just concentrate on what I like the most and what I think will bring me more cash. And that is making new content, writing new articles, publising new pictures, starting entirely new websites, day after day after day.
All I am interested in Adsense-wise is making more cash.
And since I stopped tweaking, calculating and trying to beat algoīs and stuff, and instead concentrated on making more content, I managed to make more money every month.
One day I redesigned my website and, all of a sudden, earnings skyrocketed. I think that a major redesing should be done after one or two years.
Or maybe not. If you read the search-engine forums here at Webmaster World, you'll see complaints by members who have redesigned their sites and had their search rankings plummet. And in the offline world, publishers know from experience that redesigns don't come without risk, because they can drive away existing readers.
If your earnings skyrocketed after a redesign, it may mean that the new design works better than the old design did. But it's unlikely to have anything to do with the redesign process or the intervals between redesigns.
