Drop in earnings because of site design?

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Drop in earnings because of site design?

jonpoh

5:25 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a site that was running Quicktime videos about a particular sport. All html pages. With that I was earning about 10-18 cents per click
I decided to upgrade to a You Tube style system and offer others to post their videos as well.
This has worked nicely, I have more videos now and traffic has stayed up but now I am earning around 1 cent per click.

Obviously I will change it back but does anyone have any other ideas about this sudden drop in earnings?

JONPOH

netmeg

5:37 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Are you seeing the same ads now that you saw before you changed the site, or are they mostly different ads?

jonpoh

6:06 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

yes they seem to be 90% the same. I Can't figure this one out. Seems like they are simply giving me less $ because the site is now youtube style.

Anyone else have similar issue?

Jonpoh

netmeg

6:36 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Smartpricing may have kicked in. How long was your previous site up before you made the change?

Video sites are not always easy to monetize. People come for the videos, but they aren't necessarily coming to click on ads or buy stuff. So even if they *are* clicking on the ads, if they aren't buying, eventually Google and/or the advertisers are not going to consider your site to be the best use of their advertising space.

On the advertising side, when Google first started advertising on a particularly heavily trafficked social networking site with lots of music and videos, I got *tons* of clicks on my ads there, but almost no conversions to sales. Clicks with no conversions are no good to me as an advertiser, so I excluded that site from my campaigns. The clicks went way down, but my ROI was up.

Google does something similar if it thinks that clicks on the publishing side are less likely to convert for the advertisers. You probably want to read up on how smart pricing works.

jonpoh

6:56 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Yeah, I think you are right, my question is has anyone else seen smart pricing kick in simply based on the design change of the site, because this was instant when I put up the new site.
Im wondering if I will get back to my old numbers if I switch back to the old design.

Jonpoh

wyweb

9:15 pm on Sep 24, 2008 (gmt 0)

Switch back and see. I'd have to agree with smart pricing. Roll your code back and cross your fingers.

I seem to have come out of smartpricing after a 3 year drought and I have absolutely no idea how it happened. No changes in the last 3 months but 3 weeks ago my ecpm went through the roof and has stayed there since. I wish I could say I did it, but I didn't....

PotteryCentre

1:44 am on Sep 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

Recently, I also upgrade my CMS and all the url has been rewrite. The impact is lost of SERP rank, visitors, and also revenue from adsense. :(