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I thought I'd see some discussion about it here, am I the first seeing a spike?
edit: my site bounce rate is very much on the lower side of 50% over the past few days as well, is the spike tied to bounce rate?
edit #2: My quality scores on my biggest site have steadily increased, i've been working on them for months, Is the spike a result of increased value for traffic I send out via adsense? Is google watching conversion rates even more closely maybe?
I was really hoping to see more people active in here today on the subject so that I can adjust if needed.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:03 pm (utc) on Dec. 1, 2008]
My quality scores on my biggest site have steadily increased
What sort of quality scores?
I'm seeing a substantial increase in epc today
Me, too--I don't remember having ever seen such a high average EPC.
Still, the day is far from over, so I won't break out the Cava (who can afford Champagne these days?) just yet.
Record earnings here too BUT a second affiliate is also showing record earnings with a glitch in pageviews (it's not recording them in my control panel for whatever reason, just clicks) and the third of the big 3 I use has also "broken down" and is unable to show me ANY results at all but says all is well and will be updated later on their blog.
Google is also showing a 100% indexed ratio in webmaster tools for the first time ever.
This has happened before where all services I use seemingly go haywire together, at the same time.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 6:12 am (utc) on Dec. 2, 2008]
If your topic cannot be related to Christmas shopping then it's just another AdSense mystery.
It's a mystery that I'm sure will be short lived.
...most pages have no offers at all.
Ahhh... But if newbie surfers arrive expecting offers they'll click the ads, and advertisers are bidding keywords up this week because of all the newbie shoppers that are stumbling around.
Many of the people shopping online this week are pretty clueless about search and ads, probably a lot of reckless clicking going on.
EPC was much higher than usual (with "usual" being about 40 percent higher than the same time last year), but CTR wasn't, resulting in an eCPM that was poor by historical standards.
In other words, it was a pretty normal day in terms of AdSense earnings. In terms of traffic, it was a barnburner: the highest visitor volume in a long time, despite the fact that my site doesn't cater to a "Cyber Monday" shopping audience.
Last night I saw something I've never experienced before: a claw back; I checked the day's amount a few minutes before the cutoff and then again hours later and found the final amoumt about three dollars less. Maybe this is more common than I'm aware, but I've never seen it before.
My earnings are still quite good this morning and that has me fearful because every time I have a good run there is the inevitable brake and series of bad days.
Traffic is up only slightly overall in spite of my having added several sections that are drawing well and climbing up the list very quickly for new pages.
Was Google cheating me? Nope. On closer examination, I could see that the jump in traffic was caused by a news event: People were reading about the news event and going to Web search to learn more about the topic, which led them to my pages on that topic. To judge from bounce and exit rates, most of those people found the information they were looking for and moved on. And because they were interested in the event, not in researching purchases, they had no reason to click on AdSense ads.
I expect that traffic, AdSense CTR, and AdSense eCPM will return to their usual November-December levels as soon as interest in the news event has faded.
On closer examination, I could see that the jump in traffic was caused by a news event: People were reading about the news event and going to Web search to learn more about the topic, which led them to my pages on that topic. To judge from bounce and exit rates, most of those people found the information they were looking for and moved on. And because they were interested in the event, not in researching purchases, they had no reason to click on AdSense ads.
Heh, I had a similar thing this year. I started getting just gobs and gobs of traffic on a site in a niche so small I pretty much KNOW everyone who ever comes to it. There's a set of ad links on there, and a couple of affiliate ads, but it's mostly just for aficionados of a comedy duo from the 1930's.
Anyway, this traffic was all coming in from Google, and it was all coming in on virtually the same search string. None of the ads or ad links were being clicked though.
Eventually I mentioned it to my mother, and a light went on over her head and she said "Oh - that was a clue on my crossword puzzle this morning!" Turns out I came up first in Google for the search string that a syndicated crossword put out as a clue.
Don't think I made ten cents on all that traffic. But it was a little disarming to see how many people 'cheat' on crossword puzzles by looking the answers up in Google!
