One of my websites (named as the best website in its field by the London Times recently) was seeing CTRs in the range of 3-4% during 04-05 and eCPMs of around $10. Since October 05 CTR and eCPM has steadily gone down the pan. What are the reasons?

1. Google adsense blindness - people are more aware about text ads
2. lack of advertisers on Google's network for my niche
3. advertisers not willing to pay as much
4. Google turning the screws on earnings.

The end result is that for a tripling of visitors to this site since Sep 04 (to around 3 million per year) earnings are down 30%.

[...Sure is a mystery.]

******
No... , there is nothing secret nor mystery, that is the Google game of *INTELLIGENT* Ads Distributing (IAS), *SMART* Pricing (SP) and *QUALITY* Score (QS).

All these mean huge and sophisticated, understood? Now tell me what is the difference between engineering and business?

[edited by: GoldenHammer at 1:14 pm (utc) on Sep. 22, 2006]

This is interesting because I have been working really hard (about 30% more than I usually work) the past few months on improving my site, adding pages, optimizing and trying various methods to increase traffic.

Since the past three months have been the slowest, traffic-wise, I was happy with small, incremental gains in PVs, CPM and earnings (bottom line). What I've seen in the past few weeks, however, have been substantially better performance overall. Yesterday, traffic and earnings hit highs for 2005, CPM was good but just above average, but the signal is that my hard(er) work is paying off and hopefully, will continue to pay benefits for many months to come.

What one has to look at, if traffic increases and earnings do not follow are a great many factors, including but not limited to:
Page optimization
Niche growth, stagnation or decline
Are your pages static and/or are you adding content?
Are visitors the same or new?
Pageviews per visitor
Which pages are performing best, worst
Channels (are you using them or not, and why?)
Have you updated your competitive ad filter?
Are you using Google Sitemaps?
etc., etc....

Obviously, in a linear world, if traffic triples, so should clicks and revenue, but, as we know, the net is not linear, though we strive to bring it into that perspective constantly through revisions, additions, deletions. Humans have a hard time getting away from linear thinking and into more abstract forms of intelligence, but therein lies at least part of the secret to success. Look at the Googles, Apples, Microsofts, etc. of the world. The founders and leaders of those companies thought in more dynamic terms and grew exponentially.

Yes, I am just rambling, but food for thought...

1. Google adsense blindness - people are more aware about text ads

Yep... must be some subconscious thing-a-ma-jig or thing-a-ma-bob that makes me AVOID clicking other people's text ads. Imagine if every Adsense publisher suffered the same...

> Yep... must be some subconscious thing-a-ma-jig or thing-a-ma-bob that makes me AVOID clicking other people's text ads. Imagine if every Adsense publisher suffered the same...

I was putting forward a list of ideas that may have affected one particular site I own. YMMV.

> Yes, I am just rambling, but food for thought...

I think those are some more really good ideas. I gave my example just to illustrate that revenue doesn't necessarily follow traffic and then a few reasons why this might be for the site I was talking about. People will have to analyze their own sites.

For people doing well with growing revenues from Adsense that's great and that's not who this thread is aimed at.

For people doing well with growing revenues from Adsense that's great and that's not who this thread is aimed at.

Untrue. The OP did not say "Post only if you are having the same experience I am."

He wanted to know if others had had the same experiene, and then offered an explanation that suggested he thought that what he was suffering was due to Google making changes to the detriment of small sites.

That is why I and others posted examples of results from sites that were not having the same experience.

It's an interesting discussion, but it's frustratingly difficult to draw any general conclusions. For example, I've experienced a CTR recently that's down by more than a third from what it was last year. Is this due to general ad-blindness, as some have suggested? Or is it due to some changes I made to my site structure, which have helped people find information they are seeking? I don't know. On the other hand, a lower CTR may not be a bad thing, if EPC rises....

There's a lot to disentangle here, and I don't think anyone should be excluded from the discussion.

I think in general people have tried to focus on improving the quality and content of their sites - with the obvious extrememly bad "www.findthetop4....sites being an exception. As a result one would expect the percentage of click throughs to diminish, as the quality of the sites have improved. I know that I have significantly spent more and more time on improving my sites - both on content, and visual appearance. This has been as a direct result of reading through the many threads of people being penalised for poor sites. This process has inevitably resulted in fewer clicks and a reduction in revenue. But if it means sustainability then it is worth it.

> There's a lot to disentangle here, and I don't think anyone should be excluded from the discussion.

Sorry Hunderdown, I didn't mean to exclude anyone with useful information to contribute either side of the coin.

> This process has inevitably resulted in fewer clicks and a reduction in revenue. But if it means sustainability then it is worth it.

A very interesting view on things.

Of course in my case a large increase in traffic may mean I'm doing much better in SERPS (in some cases this is true) but with a higher bounce rate because people are not finding what they are looking for - the secret here is to convert those bounces into clicks on ads.

But, having been on Adsense since the start I do believe that things have become harder. Intially content targetted text ads were very new to surfers who probably didn't understand that they were not part of the site's navigational structure.

I know it is slightly contraversial, but I think for long term sustainability it is a necessary evil. What it means is that it is necessary to put up more quality pages with good content in order to gain the same revenue that one was getting before. I have read so many threads both on this forum and on Adwords forum with people reporting sites, attempting to rid the net of them etc etc just because they deem them "not worthy".

I find this quite scary. As what is a good website to one person may be totally useless to another. I find a lot of MFA sites have good content and it is well laid out and quite often provides useful information and advice. I also find a large number of large well established trading names having totally useless sites that are difficult to navigate etc etc. Many of the high street banks have, in my opinion, terrible sites. Google have given people a way of voicing their opinion on sites - via a right hand click - I am not so sure that this will be put to ethical use, and is extremely subjective. But it is what is happening, and unless you react to the market forces you will probably get left behind.

Whether we agree or disagree with Googles continuous changes, they are a fact, they do happen, people do disappear overnight, lose their accounts etc etc, so it is necessary to move with the changing demands. As it stands, Google is the number one player, so we have to go with the flow, and to a certain extent alter our game plans accordingly. Sorry bit of a rant there....:)

trannack, I tend to agree with you but not with this statment:

I find a lot of MFA sites have good content and it is well laid out and quite often provides useful information and advice.

I would be reluctant to call a site an MFA site if it had good content and was well laid out with useful information and advice! Even if it had a lot of ads. What I mean by MFA is a site with very little, if any, content other than ads, links to other pages, and possibly a scrambled paragraph of content stuffed with keywords. They function only as a context for ads. Take the ads off, and there is nothing there. If you took the ads off the type of site you describe, you'd still have a functioning site...