You cannot really compare day - to - day figures. You need to lok at a broader relationship. Days of the week gretly vary - for most, as does beginning/end of the month, seasonal variations etc etc.

For me, when I look at figures I have a 7 day rolling figure, I compare same part of previous month, same time last year etc. Take a broader look at the numbers and work out averages. At the end of the day, with those sort of figures, it only takes one big click to totally skew your figures when you are looking at such small data groups. :)

I would rather talk about "page views" and "Unique visitors". What do you mean by impressions. Is it the number of hits you're counting.

Furthermore how many unique visitors are responsible for your number of impressions.

There are a lot of variables going on here. But, depending on season, I'm having about 5k uniques a day generating about 25k page impressions and my Bottom line earnings are pretty predictable.

You are right - nothing is constant!

If you don't change your site at all, there will still be changes to advertisers sites and advertising campaigns and user behaviour and competitors sites and days of the week and weeks of the month and months of the year etc. all of which will affect you. This is without Google making any changes.

Only if you have a large, diverse site with lots of different advertisers and a large amount of traffic, can you expect to see some stability in statistics (provided you look at at least a week's worth.

You wont see any constant figures if your normal amount of clicks is just 20.

When you get to 300 to 500 per day then things tend to even out.

Thanks for the responses guys!

Bddmed, you asked, "What do you mean by impressions?" , I mean the impressions as shown by adsense. I do not mean hits. I just get 600-650 unique visitors each day. So, I guess the number is a little small.

Okay, finally, so when people worry about their low CTR or other such figures, they consider these over a period of a week or so, han?

Thanks!

Nothing is constant. That's the beauty of it. I know exactly how much my monthly paycheck is going to be. I log into AS and I have NO CLUE what it's going to say. Haha I love that.

Even aside from the fact that your sample is small, you need to consider that AdSense is an auction-based system where supply, demand, ad inventory, etc. are in constant flux. It isn't like a conventional advertising arrangement where a buyer might commit at a set rate for a month or even a year.

it sounds like you don't have enough channels set up on your pages... with channel data, you can see what is performing, and what is not performing.

from what i've seen, some new content designs can have a higher epc for a short period of time, which could account in part for the wide range of data.

Once day, I will have a CTR of 0.39% and the very next my CTR will be 1.5%.

I have the same problem. From 8:00am to 8:01am, my CTR was 100%! But right after that, from 8:01am to 8:02am, my CTR was 0%! How can that possibly be? Are Google's stats screwed up? Are they stealing my money?

Sounds absurd, doesn't it? But why should it be absurd to compare CTR from one minute to the other? The answer is: the correct time period to base comparisons on depends largely on how much traffic you get.

To find out what a more reasonable time period is for your website, download your daily CTRs into a spreadsheet. Learn how to calculate a moving average with your spreadsheet. Then, simply increase the "window" of the moving average until the resulting curve starts to look smooth instead of jerky.

For example, it could be that when you look every day at the average of the last 2 weeks worth of CTR, you end up with a fairly stable number. In that case, you know that (until your traffic volume changes significantly), you should pay attention to the 2-week average, and not pay attention to big daily variations (which are essentially noise, just as looking at minute-to-minute CTR on my website would produce nothing but noise for me).

I'd suggest that daily fluctuations may not be that meaningful. I compare trends on a monthly basis, comparing this month's earnings so far to previous data.

I find daily variations are useful.

If my income is down by about 50% then it must be the week-end ;)

I never thought of that. You are right! How would I know its time to go fly my model planes?

So, guys, I was wondering what should i make of it if, my CTR is dropping for the last few months for no change in colours or positions or anything else. My traffic is increasing but CTR is falling? So, what does this tell me?

Actually there are some things constant about AdSense:

- Complaining about AdSense
- Conspiracy theories about payouts and smart pricing
- Panic attack threads when PAYMENT IN PROGRESS isn't on time
- so on and so forth...

Everything else fluctuates all the time, day to day, month to month, season to season.

I'd suggest that daily fluctuations may not be that meaningful. I compare trends on a monthly basis, comparing this month's earnings so far to previous data.

ditto. if I based everything on the daily or hourly fluctuations, I'd go mad. Looking at the bigger (monthly) picture, you will generally see an upward trend and that's encouraging.

I have been making some changes in ads and placements lately and it is having a very good impact. Last 3 days look like last winters when it was still climbing.

Comparing doesn't satisfy me enough to ease my apprehension unless I can equate it favorably to my highest months. I have been playing the recovery game since Feburary.

Ann

P.S. you might want to experiment along those lines.

If I do make changes in add apearence and colours etc, how much time should I give it, before I have decided that the change was a succes or a failure.

Just as a point of refrence, I get around 600 visitors each day and about 4-5PageViews/Visitor. So, some 2000+ impressions.....

Hi must learn more,

Absolute minimum of a week's data to observe results of subtle changes, since there is a very strong weekly cycle in AS/AW behaviour.

(Take longer if there happens to be a significant event for your target audience, eg major holidays, strikes, sporting events, ...)

Rgds

Damon