okay this end. average kind of figures for this time of day/night.

Stats ok here. The pattern for the last several days has been "good stats until ~4pm PDT and then a "stuck" which never fully recovers--a day which started great ends so-so."

My stats have been stuck for awhile. Appear to be about a couple of hours behind or so.

A horrible day for me - same number of impressions but dollars down by 75%...clicks way behind or else people just aren't clicking. :(

The pattern for the last several days has been "good stats until ~4pm PDT and then a "stuck" which never fully recovers--a day which started great ends so-so."

agree, although what time (GMT) is ~4pm PDT?

PDT, or Pacific Daylight Saving Time, is GMT -7. In other words, 4pm PDT would be 11pm GMT.

In the not too distant future when we switch over to standard time it will be GMT -8.

Ah so... then yes, you are right, stats get stuck for me around 11pm GMT too.

Don't feel like the Lone Ranger, StarryEyed. I have almost your exact situation going on today. The click-through rate is the very lowest I have ever seen with AdSense, but impressions are way up there.

Record impressions, and I'm getting the clicks, but the cpc is down 20% of what it was. Has happened every maintenance for the last year. Adsense is just a cruel joke.

Turned out stats not stuck for me, traffic ok, clicks ok, eCPM took a tumble. It's like watching the stock exchange!

I've been 30% down in earnings over the last couple of days (lower CTR and CPC). Targeting in the US seems off for me, with big directory sites and sell everything sites making a comeback. Hope that won't continue for long.

Same here dawnstar. Traffic was consistent, but my earnings took an unexplained nosedive. Luckily traffic today so far seems way up, so I may be in for a correction.

My CTR took another nose dive today. I thought I had come to the lowest possible yesterday, but it looks like today will beat even yesterday. My CTR has been consistent for the past several years, so this is extremely mystifying to me.

it's my first day to put google ads on my website and the performance is really bad. Up to this moment, the ads were shown a few hundred times and only 1 click was made. My ctr is around 0.3% only. Wish there would be some errors in the stat......

hello friends.

i am from brazil and have a big car blog here, with around 60.000 page views per day, and i am getting the same problem.

the amount of visitors is the same, but CTR and CPM are about the HALF of usual.

thankfully i have been through bad seasons like this in the past, but it hasnt prevented me from getting extremely worried about this.

all my income comes from this blog, and adsense represents around 70% of income.

complicated.

edit to insert a PS here: besides very low CTR and CPM, the amount of clicks came to a HALF too!

perhaps the economic crisis contributes to the "demand destruction"... everyone doesn't want to make consumption now.

Actually, I think most ad buyers are keenly aware of the general economic mood and will quickly start buying when things look up. Today my AdSense account and my brokerage account are both singing very happy tunes, if you're having a bad day today it's not because of the economic crisis. Unless of course you're in the housing or mortgage business.

[edited by: OnlyToday at 5:29 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2008]

Actually it's only my AdSense that is down by 2/3...lowest ever. Google Search ads are paying three times what AdSense ads are, and the CTR for Search is just where it always is. The problem, for me, seems to be with AdSense.

Terrible day for me too. I am not sure what is going on.

Today is another dismal day for me...so far slightly worse than yesterday which stunk...traffic is normal...targeted ads are showing...go figure...

For us it started Thursday, down 35% across 10 sites.

drall, Thursday is when it started here also. We're in the third day of dismal click throughs and CPMs. But the Google Search has the same CTR it always does, and those ads are paying three times what the AdSense ads are. I looked, and they are the same ads! That's why I'm thinking there is something wrong on Google's end. I did email them this morning.

Well, never received a reply from Google. I have about 90,000 impressions per day. AdSense for Content is paying 8 times LESS than what AdSense Search is paying. The CTR for AdSense Search is right up there where it has always been, and CTR has been halved for AdSense for Content. CPM is extremely low. Ads showing are about the same for both Content and Search. It's very puzzling why the Search ads would pay so much more than the Content ads.

Unless something's up at the plex today, my CTR has dropped five-fold today...

Well I was back up to normal dollars on Monday and Tuesday... now today I'm in the cellar again...down 80% from what I had at this time yesterday and Monday...I'm still in the search index - same positions(whew)..so this is all really odd. :(

I'm in the same pretty good position with the search engines, especially Google. I've had AdSense for a very long time, but have never seen anything as nonsensical as this. There is absolutely no reason for it. I'm fairly certain that Google has a problem on their end. I know that all my click throughs are not being reported (about 50% of them). Historically, I have been extremely consistent until last Thursday. This is probably a good lesson for all of us. Diversify, diversify, diversify. That's what I'm busy doing right now.

azlinda, just out of curiousity how do you get so much traffic?

Do you have thousands of pages? Do you pay for advertising such as AdWords, or what?

I've pretty much had the same approximately 2500 impressions per day and would love to know how to get 90,000 impressions a day.

I'm not asking for you to give away your secrets, just curious as to what it takes to get that much traffic.

Thanks for any advice.

Hi, Wolflover, I don't think there's any great secret. I have a 38,000 page site, and it has been online since 1999. Sometimes I run a few AdWords ads around the holidays. Right now I have a Halloween recipes ad running. I also have quite a large number of link partners. I run XML sitemap software to keep all new articles and recipes submitted to Google. Also, I have recently added an RSS feed, and I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the sudden very high drop in CTR and CPM.

hmmm quarter is ending this week...

hmmmm