Reason could be loss of high paying advertisers in your niche, or probably smart pricing?

Try reading some of GreedyPlayers numerous posts on the topic - you might get some insight!

I would say, these figures may just be normal seasonal variations. With the numbers you are talking about you need to look at a much bigger picture. Have you been using your competitive ad filter? This might help.

I hate to complain, but my pageviews and clicks are way up, but at the same time, my eCPM has been cut down. I'm earning more, but I could be probably another 30% higher if the eCPM had just remained constant.

Why is it that once I seem to have found success, there's always some nagging, niggling part of the Google scheme that keeps me from really making a living without worrying. It's such an incremental type of thing, but where is it written that one will be paid less per click for better traffic and conversion?

Just once, I'd like to see things fall the way of the little guy, meaning me and the other thousands of independent publishers.

OK, I guess that's my rant for the day.

More traffic may simply mean that you're reaching deeper into the barrel of available ads.

>>>I hate to complain, but my pageviews and clicks are way up, but at the same time, my eCPM has been cut down. I'm earning more, but I could be probably another 30% higher if the eCPM had just remained constant.

But it cant/wont. As traffic goes up there is more places for an advertiser to bid on. Its the same effect as the number of pages/sites. So the bid price will fall. Plus you use up the advertisers budgets faster.

Unfortunately there may not be an unending supply of advertisers queueing up to maintain the eCPM as the traffic to a given site increases.

Why is it that people expect eCPM to remain constant whilst their traffic increases?

Maybe if you pages were to help grow the overall market (i.e. you help more people sell more goods and services - so there ends up with more advertising) then maybe eCPM would be maintained.

that keeps me from really making a living without worrying.

If you want constant, secure income without worry, get a government job.

There are so many variables in how a site will perform, that you really need to take a bit of a zen approach to it. If it causes you too much stress, get out of the game.

My traffic increase was due to more traffic in pages unrelated to my core traffic, so you can can the "available advertisers" response, it doesn't apply.

And the "get a government job" is also inappropriate. All I expect is fair treatment. When my traffic increases, I expect there to be some fall off in per click earnings, and overall I am making more money, but when the per click average falls off by 30% or more, it's a bit of a disincentive to invention, don't you think.

In other words, I can certainly appreciate the law of diminishing returns, but I've never gotten to the point at which my returns are good enough to begin diminishing.

Can everyone who posted in response to me claim unequivocably that their epc has diminished as traffic increased? I'm willing to learn, and if that is the case, I just need to continue creating until the bottom is reached, which, last I checked, I made 4 cents on my last 4 clicks, so I must be close.

My ecpm always decreases over a big bunch of sites as traffic goes up and reverses as it goes down. It doesent seem to matter if traffic is low because the ecpm stays high enough to almost compensate. Been doing this since the beginning. Advertisers have only got so much money! The system spreads it all out!

Genuine, thanks for that response. In other words, once you've maxed out a niche, there's no incentive to create more content (and traffic) which is somewhat counterproductive to the increase of the knowledge pool, but I understand the dynamic.

I suppose the best way, then, to increase earnings without a significant decline is to branch out into other areas, i.e., grab market share from others.

A good argument for natural selection. Only the strong survive.

>>>Now I have the same page CTR, the same number of clicks, same number of page impressions, even the same content...

Important details you left out
What do your Unique Visitor Stats look like?
Are your visitors there to review a product or just to read tutorials?

You don't have an average until you've been around longer
What you earn in a year says more about your earning power than what you earned in two months. Your true earnings average may not have been what you earned in the first two months. That could have been a fluke. But until you have more data, comparing two months verus one isn't going to take you too far.

Low traffic? High Earnings Fluctuations
This has to be the number one reason for a wide earnings fluctuation. Very consistently, those who post here experiencing wide fluctuations in earning are those with low traffic. Somone earning $10/day who subsequently begins earning $5/day has experienced a 50% drop in income. Looks crazy-dramatic as a post title, right?

Well, a 50% drop in income looks crazy-dramatic but in reality it's just a five dollar drop in income- not so dramatic after all. In fact, it's somewhat deceptive, or at least an exagerration, to call it a 50% drop in income. While literally true, reality is best served if it's described as a five dollar drop in income.

The lower your traffic the greater your eCPM will swing. A tiny site with well under a thousand visitors per day is going to experience more volatile swings than an established site with more traffic, to which a drop of five dollars is not only minor, it's just part of the ups and downs that balance out at the end of the day.

i've seeing my eCPM drop a lot this month as well....though back in August i saw a big increase when others were seeing decreases.

It could be due to smart pricing.

If you place AdSense on multiple sites, check if the sites have varying eCPMs (both before being hit with smart pricing, and after). If so, try removing the ads from the one site with the lowest eCPM.

It worked for me. It might work for you, but no guarantees. :)

I have been testing AdSense since 2003 on about 5% of our page views. Lately I do see the same trend and the eCPM is down to about half what it used to be. Same ads, same advertisers, same CTR, same number of page views. I even know many of the advertisers so I know they are paying even more what it used to be. Anyway, we made agreement with some of them and we will have our own PPC system in place soon so hopefully that will allow us to make up for the losses. Also I do see good improvements with Yahoo ads where the CTR when up from about 0.3% to about 0.8%. You may try that, since the rewards per click are much higher than Google.

Januuski

It just keeps getting better and better, isn't it. eCPM for last few days has just crossed the sickening line. So off they all go.

It could be due to smart pricing.

And it could be due to pure greed and new shareholder targets... i vote for the later

[edited by: Web_speed at 6:29 am (utc) on Oct. 26, 2006]

I'm down to $1.00 eCPM.

Can anybody beat that figure?

Pengi:
Maybe if you pages were to help grow the overall market (i.e. you help more people sell more goods and services - so there ends up with more advertising) then maybe eCPM would be maintained.

How can we do that when G keeps flooding us with useless crap MFA ads?

 

Its important not to put too much emphasis on your numbers when they are still in the flux that comes of a site being young - while you are still growing your traffic to what it can be, you will find that ctr and ecpm fluctuates and thus your final daily income is on a rollercoaster.
One quick technique for rule-of-thumb judgements about whether you are still in flux is to use a tool like awstats and look at the graph across the hours of the day. If the curve is smooth, you have a (more) mature site.
If its wiggling up and down all over the place, your site has a lot of growth to go yet.
If your site is still in that flux phase then your numbers will go up and down on a daily basis and you should expect that.
(If you've been seeing smooth curves and suddenly things change for the worse - ok, you've got something to worry about!)

andreibilan, sorry to hear your earnings have dropped. Unfortuantantly, earnings dropping for publishers is a regular occurance around WW. This could be due to any number of reasons.

- Fewer advertisers
- More competition for the ads.
- Smart pricing?
- MFA's
- Redistribution of payment share
- Seasonal
- Site display problems
- daylight savings
- Full moon
- Excessive mold in your bathtub

The sad facts are that nobody outside of google realy knows what happened to your earnings.

For all reading this - don't bank you financial security on AdSense..

For all reading this - don't bank you financial security on AdSense..

Or freelancing, or consulting, or retailing, or self-employment in general.

If you want a steady, consistent paycheck, get a government job.

Do people post when it goes up or just accept that peak as "normal"?
Mine never varies much one way or the other monthly. But over 3 years it really has risen about a third overall. Considerably risen for october - long may it last! Remembering that my sites were pre adsense (and google in some cases) and have not been updated since! So its a good measure of an average ecpm over 12 or so sites on a wide bunch of topics and 3 years+ of adsense and about 3k per month.

But when income drops off to the 3 year "average" will I post and say its dropped? Has it really dropped? Depends on what you take as normal. What about if it dropped as far below long term average as this month is above it? peaks and troughs go together!

I think we see a lot more income fell posts here than income risen! It doesent mean that its a real overall trend. Just your perception. I think we get used to the good peaks/months and sulk when it drops back again.

Of course in some cases it really will drop off! Just as some people see rises. Its an auction with many variables!

What it does do is make everybody depressed! I have excessive mould in the bathtub and mines gone up so it cant be that...

[edited by: Genuine1 at 4:39 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2006]

Seasonal factors need to be taken into account, too. The OP mentioned that his blog has been around for three months. That's too short a time to know if seasonal ups and downs are normal for the site.

FWIW, I often see a rise in traffic in the fall, but that doesn't mean my revenue goes up--on the contrary; it always drops. The traffic is probably increasing because more university students and schoolchildren are using my travel site for research, but they aren't spending money on foreign travel.

I believe the only way that eCPM and traffic can both increase on a large scale aove a significant time - is if the total amount of advertising expenditure increases. This will only happen if more genuine business is being done and advertising is seen (by advertisers) as a cost effective means of increasing their business.

I agree that bottom feeder MFAs only take money out and put nothing back - they don't encourage more people to spend more money.

Product and Service providers are the foundation of all the advertising finance. I believe a good publishing site can help grow a market - educate customers about what is available and encourage them to buy stuff - this can provide a service to buy and seller.

I started my site at the end of June and worked my socks off until late August when I had to stop putting any significant time into developing content. Traffic (from AdWords) and Earnings from Adsense had grown up to the end of August - by which point I had about 150 pages with variants showing in each of 5 countries.

When I stopped working on the site, I expected the growth to stop - perhaps a week or two later. But not only did the growth not stop, it kept on growing throughout September and increased in October. [Good job this, I thought, the less I work on it the more I earn].

I've just been looking at my stats and discovered 2 other trends:

1. Since I stopped working the site, my "end to end" click through rate (i.e. Adwords click-in converting to an adsense click-out) has increased pretty steadily from ~40% at the beginning of September up to ~60% for the last week.

2. However over the same period the average price per click I have received from Adsense has steadily reduced - this last week my earnings per click is only about 70% of what it was at the beginning of September.

The increases in traffic and CTR and the reduction in EPC are pretty steady - (looks lke the results from one of my schooldays physics experiments - no big steps up or down (once you allow for the weekly cylcle)

What's causing what do you think?

God only knows. You have good content right? What happens if you rely on natural traffic and why are you buying traffic?

Surely this is just feeding the money back to google?

[edited by: Genuine1 at 7:26 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2006]

>>>However over the same period the average price per click I have received from Adsense has steadily reduced - this last week my earnings per click is only about 70% of what it was at the beginning of September.<<<

were you spending more or less per adwords click, during the same period?

Excessive mold in your bathtub

Ah, ha! After reading this post, I instructed my servants to thoroughly sanitze all 23 bathtubs in my mansion. Chop! Chop!

After a couple of hours of having my Big 3 accounting firm monitor my stats, they noted a 7% increase in eCPM with no increase in traffic or overall CTR. They also sent me a bill for $3000, partially negating my earnings for this afternoon.

My conclusion: Clean your bathtubs (toilets, too) and you will benefit greatly from the AdSense program and have far too much time and money on hand, as I do.

If you want a steady, consistent paycheck, get a government job.

OK, that's the second time I've read that response on an Adsense thread in the past few days and I have to say that it's time people refrain from using it.

Since most of the posters here are either US citizens or British subjects, I believe the irony of the situation is not lost on most of us.

Our various governments tax us to from cradle to grave (and beyond) already, so in some respect we are all already government employees.

We are not here seeking a steady, consistent paycheck, only a fair shake and some share of responsibility and accountability from our business associates, especially large, corporate concerns.

We are a diverse group with even more diverse interests, but the one constant is that we all want to earn a decent living, preferably by building and maintaining quality web sites. I suspect that most of the complaining and/or questioning is being done by people who haven't made it to a specific income level, but prefer working for themselves rather than a government job.

So, please, have some consideration for your fellow webmasters who may not be the most talented or well heeled or may have time constraints holding them back.

If anyone here thinks telling people to get a government job is instructive or humorous, I suggest they re-read Orwell's 1984, because that is the natural outcome of a government-centric slave-state.

We are a diverse group with even more diverse interests, but the one constant is that we all want to earn a decent living, preferably by building and maintaining quality web sites.

That's all very nice, but you can't count on earning a steady, stable, no-ups-and-down income with AdSense or most other forms of self-employment. Just because you want that won't make it happen.

Suggestions:

If you've got a travel site, pretend that you're a restaurant or hotel owner in a resort town, and maybe you'll understand the effects of seasonal demand on revenue.

If you've got a site that depends on online community for its revenues, think about the fact that summer slumps have been more common than not in the forum business since the days of the dial-up BBS.

And if you think earning a steady income with AdSense is tough, try relying solely on freelancing or consulting, where the income stream dries up if you get sick or go on vacation, and where even Fortune 500 clients may take 60 or 90 days to pay their bills.

As a self-employed person, it's your job to take whatever measures are needed to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, and meet your other obligations when AdSense revenues are in a down cycle or your business plan isn't working the way it did six months ago. Blaming Google may make you feel better, but if you fail in your business, it's you--not AdSense--who's failed.

Many of us are willing to accept the uncertainty and risk that go with full-time self-employment. But those who prefer more security shouldn't be discouraged from relying on a day job with a steady paycheck.