Someone's earnings are always falling. Sometimes drastically. At the same time, someone's earnings are always rising, even to record highs. These contrasts occur at the same time. You have a 40% drop. Someone else has a 40% increase. It's uncanny how it works.

Why is this happening?

1. You've been smartpriced.
2. Key advertisers in your niche have pulled out. It happens.
3. The sun and the moon aren't in optimum alignment any more. That happens too.

Suggestions? Absolutely. Adopt a more zenlike approach to this whole adsense thing. Never depend on it to pay bills or buy groceries. It's manna from heaven and if you regard it as such you'll do okay.

I've given you absolutely no insight into your problem with this post because I can't. There are 14 hundred ga-zillion possible factors that could come into play here, 13 hundred ga-zillion of which are not even known. Your earnings have fallen 40%. If your traffic hasn't fallen 40% then see 1, 2 and 3 above.

Our earnings have seen a 40% drop this month over last. Our traffic has been stable and our earnings over the past 6-7 months, until now, have been fairly stable as well. I don't know what to do.
I've analized my traffic and there are no obvious reasons for this. Yet my ECPM has dropped about 40% this month.
Any suggestions

Do a search on WebmasterWorld for variations of AdSense EPC CPM dropped. There are probably 10,000 threads on this subject. You will find enough conjecture and assertions to dominate your time for about a month.

To summarize what you will find:

Nobody realy knows what happened

Google AdSense won't tell you

Diversify your revenue sources

Good luck!

[edited by: Edge at 2:35 pm (utc) on May 23, 2008]

We've been in the adsense program for years now. Sometimes we have good paying months, sometimes bad payers. The rule seems to be any given month prolly won't be what you expect. All we peasants can do is labour in the fields of our web pages, optimize, provide good content, and hope the great God Google blesses our endeavours.

But he might not - deities are funny that way.

2 years ago: Google is evil, it dropped my site, there must be something I can do!

Today: Oh well there goes another site... easy comes, easy goes...

Our earnings have seen a 40% drop this month over last. Our traffic has been stable and our earnings over the past 6-7 months, until now, have been fairly stable as well. I don't know what to do.
I've analized my traffic and there are no obvious reasons for this. Yet my ECPM has dropped about 40% this month.

First, make sure that your traffic is indeed solid, especially in terms of...

Quantity (page views, visitors, clicks)

It could be that the number of page views stays the same, while the number of visitors drops (i.e. fewer visitors request a larger number of pages). It could also be that the same number of visitors accesses the same number of pages but click less. This is typical for forums and community sites. Finally, your click traffic could be facing seasonal effects.

Quality (geographical origin, referrers)

Again, the number of pageviews may appear to be the same, yet it is not. Maybe you are seeing less visitors from the western hemisphere (said to be higher paying) and more visitors from, say, other geographical areas (which may not be attracting high PPC ads). Also, it is not known how Google determines the click price in relation to the individual IP address or even computer who sees the ad.

I recommend to check your stats for this information. Also, do not forget to use daily data with moving averages - Adsense data shows a high variance (alas on my sites), swinging so much that I call it "random". Applying 30/90/200 day moving averages clears the picture up significantly and shows long-term trends that are otherwise disguised by the daily variance in the data set.

It has been long requested from Google to disclose detailed information about the clicks (who? when? what? how much?), but the part-time intern assigned to the Adsense program is busy coding reply-bots to answer angry publisher mails. So I do not think we will see this anytime soon.

With solid traffic (both in terms of quantity AND quality) I guess you

due to the seasonal nature of many topics, I think its wiser to compare your earnings to May 2007.

What does that comparison look like?