Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Has G introduced a new "click monitoring" system? Fewer clicks but with a much higher value?
My traffic was completely normal however both Saturday and Sunday saw both days only just achieve a New Year's Day quantity of clicks, and when I say "just", I mean 1 click more on Saturday and 13 clicks more on Sunday!
Both days were -23% down in real weekend click volume in comparison to the past couple of month's weekends however the actual EPC was +42.55% meaning that I actually earned the same!
Has anyone else seen similar metrics or am I a test-bed for Google...again?
Read my comments here
Actually I nearly did post in that thread however wondered if anyone else had seen similar over the weekend?
Interestingly it seems to be continuing into today however with a strange twist. I have Core site 1 averaging USD 0.50 per click with one section averaging USD 1.00 per click whereas Core sites 2 are on USD 0.15 per click so far!
The CTR is still well down again however that does usually pick-up for me later in the day as data feeds through.
Something's going on, I'm darned if I know what yet though!
it fluctuated days by days to me.
This isn't a fluctuation, this is a deliberate test of "some kind".
My Monday's metrics were again very strange. The CTR was about the same as Saturday and Sunday meaning that compared to the last 4 months' of Mondays the total volume of clicks was down almost 20% YET I still earned the SAME amount of money due to the much higher EPC.
Today, Tuesday so far, my metrics have gone back to pre-weekend levels, CTR, eCPM and EPC have returned to their former values.
This is bizarre, absolutely bizarre and can no way be described as normal AdSense behaviour.
An entire bunch of worldwide widget advertisers do not decide en masse to increase their bids by X amount all at the same time on a Saturday, then all of them reduce by the same amount after 3 days on the Monday night, meanwhile, and at precisely the same time, Joe Public's CTR is reduced across the board when my historical metrics tell me my CTR actually goes UP on a weekend!
I like fairy stories however this is simply too coincidental to be even considered as anything but a test or another FUBAR but this time I was not financially disadvantaged.
One thing I'd add to the mix is the eCPM increased a great deal on my hobby sites. Very non-commercial sites that I only keep going because I like them, and that generally struggle to a dollar a day were shooting to 3 dollars plus which is very rare for them.
Another funny. One of those hobby sites regards an annual event that I organise. It's not a popular event and I'd expect one email a month about it. In the last week 5 emails and another today. That smacks of a change in traffic to me. Traffic has fluctuated in numbers a little more than usual, but not madly. I suspect the traffic has been for different search terms.
To further add to my confusion (and yours) I decided to open a second adsense account earlier in the year (with the blessing of G) as everything was in a business account and my hobby sites are not for business. eCPM fell by 50% when I moved the hobby sites, but over the last few days they are above where they were. Possibly some sort of re-evaluation of smart pricing, or someone at G turned it off accidentally for a few days?
So I've been scratching my head for some time now.
An entire bunch of worldwide widget advertisers do not decide en masse to increase their bids by X amount all at the same time on a Saturday, then all of them reduce by the same amount after 3 days on the Monday night, meanwhile, and at precisely the same time, Joe Public's CTR is reduced across the board when my historical metrics tell me my CTR actually goes UP on a weekend!
Is it possible that one really clueless advertiser (or a really smart one doing a bunch of testing) hit your site, and then maybe freaked out and stopped the program when he saw what happened?
I took over an AdWords account for a client once who accidentally bid $45.00 per click on an extremely broad keyword that he meant to bid $.45 on. Typo. Didn't discover it for three days, by which time he was thousands and thousands in the hole (that's when he called me to manage, heh) It does happen, and I'm sure the people who got those clicks during that time were very happy campers.
After the first 7-8 hours of today my AdSense metrics are firmly back where they were, in fact my CTR is actually higher than average but my EPC is bang on average therefore earnings where historically they are at this time of day.
I've also noticed that the site section that was averaging USD 0.50-1.00 EPC has dropped today to 0.15!
Overdone it again G?
I dunno, we're all just guessing here. Nobody but Google knows, and they're sure not talking.
for the last days I also noticed less clicks and same earnings.
Could the click counter be broken but not the payout algo? Lol...
That may not be as daft as it sounds since I know I have had click attacks in the past and advised Google and they were onto it immediately.
Interestingly they left the invalid clicks in my metrics and that made the CTRs look good yet the eCPM and EPC look much worse yet the overall earnings were the same. Maybe they simply deleted too many clicks for whatever reason?
And I'm still back to normal after my quirky extended weekend metrics.
And yes my CTR is the same, but EPC is way up. I too thought it may be a clueless advertiser biddng wrong.
It's the sort of thing that happens to me when I experiment with ad placement etc.---the only difference being that unlike Google I don't click the ads.
Why would google click ads? The logs showed one user as being from google the other three had no identification. And yes my CTR is the same, but EPC is way up.
I always had the suspicion that earnings increase after POSITIVE interactions of Googlers with a site, where "positive" means "not negative". :-) I.e.: Googler visits your site, likes it and spends some time, and up goes your EPC.
Starting on the 27th, our clicks and CTR dropped modestly, and our $/click increased by more than 30%. On net, we are seeing slightly higher total revenue per day, as well as higher eCPM's.
This pattern is very unusual -- these recent $/click levels are nearly 30% higher than normal, and our $/click data has always been very stable (fluctuating no more than +/- 1 cent per day for months at a stretch).
Now that the pattern has continued for several days in a rwo, I decided to check this forum to see if anyone else had reported anything similar -- and found this thread.
Interesting.
Yea, but those ad clicks were all from the same page...strange and in very quick succession. I actually had a discussion with somebody at Google a few years back over the phone. Before I picked up the phone the caller ID said Google. He was looking to buy a product. I mentioned I knew he was from Google and we talked web stuff for a minute or so.
To my suprise I got a compliment on my site after I alluded to my concern about all the changes at Google. This was about a year after the Florida update. I was told "...you have nothing to worry about."
Btw, he never did make that purchase but the short discussion was worth it's weight in gold.
