What's bugging me is how this happened. A sudden utter complete decline in Adsense earnings. It can't be that hundreds of advertisers decided to stop advertising all at the roughly same time. +-few days. So this has got to be something within Adsense system. Something was changed...

And there is no point in talking how many pages you have. It's all about impressions, and clicks.

Can everybody give the EXACT date they noticed a massive decrease?

Mine was Sunday May 3rd. We're talking a dramatic and sudden drop of 66% total revenue. It was incidentally on the same day I launched a new version of my website.

May 4th-5th it went to about 40%. Now at 10%

Friday 8h May it fell off the cliff.

Same as Huskypup on this end -Friday the 8th

EVENING OF SUNDAY May 10th....anyone noticing sudden increase in earnings? Mine climbing steadily but this has me curious . . . check yours....

> Mine climbing steadily but this has me curious . . .
> check yours....

I've got a long climb still ahead, I'm afraid. I'll be very surprised if I have anything resembling an average day in the remaining three hours.

Friday the 8th for me too (massive decline) but it's been declining since about May 3.

I am very unlike most people here in many ways:

a) I only have two sites.

b) I essentially haven't updated a damn thing [except a few typo corrections] NOR have I added any pages since 2001, correct that's 2001, probably long before AdSense was even thought of let alone invented.

c) I don't "tweak" ads, change positions or colours.

AdSense from day one, was a "manna from heaven" which simply dropped into my lap. For that I'm very grateful. An exceedingly rare "once in a lifetime opportunity".

My sites were never, ever, ever created or attuned with AdSense or other income in mind. They were there to serve a specific international educational purpose and no amount of money was or is going to corrupt that intention.

I only added Amazon affiliate income to defray escalating bandwidth costs biting into my limited retirement income. Became so good we could afford one good "night out" each quarter with the change <G>. True!

Now my AdSense experience after a great many years is that traffic remains essentially the same, EPC remains satisfactory. These are well respected and established sites for my genre.

The only change of significance over the last two years has been a steady continuous downward spiral of CTR. From an average 4% - 5% down to 1% late last year, but very lately down to 0.5%

That's the No. 1 Killer for me. I can only see ads served up in Oz and after filtering stupid dating ads I now see graphic ads for web design, real estate sales etc. etc. all on pages related to design of antennas.

People will not click on irrelevant ads. Now I don't blame anyone because keywords on the page may very well unintentionally trigger those genuine ads appearing.

BUT

What is becoming abundently clear to me is that the ad inventory on the content network for my genre at least, is becoming seriously depleted [or spread far too thin over imitating "johnny come lately's"].

I think much of our problem for many is lesser and lesser ads available. Obviously other people have a different experience.

I think much of our problem for many is lesser and lesser ads available.

I am still seeing a very good quantity and quality of ads for my widgets and my EPC has not reduced whatsoever, like IanCP my CTR has gradually reduced over the years from nearly 6% at the very beginning to 2% at the start of the year, to 1.8% last week to 1.2% in the last few days.

On a very traffic consistent, widget authoratative site, CTR does not drop by 33% over night unless instigated by a program algo update/change or a major malfunction.

I remember 05.05.05 I had a similar occurence when they combined page impression numbers, now it's very strange here we are again in the first week in May and I've been zapped again for some unknown reason.

It took until 9th January 2006 for that "anomally" to be ironed out and that too happened over night. Then we can fast forward to October 2007 when, once again over night, zap...another massive reduction in actual clicks and EPC that continued until January 2008.

These are not normal fluctuations, these are deliberate manipulations by the algo/Plex and they really do not give a damn what happens to us nor anyone else.

Consider this over your coffee/tea/beer!

One programmer syphoning $10-20 per day from 100 accounts...with over 1+ million accounts (I have no idea how many accounts there are but have seen this suggested)...hey, you few are complaining, why is no one else?

Would or could Google even notice it?

Just playing Devil's Advocate but what if?

One programmer syphoning $10-20 per day

Google is an industry maker public company run by mathematician geeks and overseen by obsessive lawyers with transactions audited by an ati-fraud team that close accounts on remote suspicion and obviously fear no one.. You'd think such a thing would trip an alarm or ten? Unless of course you think all those are in on the siphoning game. There's a recent thread full of more plausible explanations.

Enron!

Good information/thoughts to absorb....thanks for being so in-depth. HuskyPup...NO ENRON....Bernie Madoff! Ha! Seriously, over last evening, for whatever reason, LATE....my day's earnings for a Sunday had lingered around that $2 mark - then suddenly the escalated steadily throughout the evening to end the day's pay period at (get this) $6.66 ! I enjoyed IanCP's reflections. Amazing....then again, if it aint broke......
Keep it going that way Ian, don't touch a thing. Think about guys like me....tweaking, adding keywords, exchanging links, making comments on dofollow blogs (I don't feel like making), redesigning main index page of my best earning site etc....while Ian lays back and watches - DAMN. All good thoughts. But seriously I saw my earnings increase quickly for whatever reason....who knows.

I am only playing Devil's Advocate however corruption is rife throughout the world, witness the EU budget fiascos that were never signed-off for 13 years in a row and did anyone do anything about it? No, the whistle blowers were sacked for revealing the reality of Brussels.

In large corporate and public environments things happen since there are some very bright people there and there are also some very stupid people who cannot see, or want to see, what is being done or manipulated.

I am not saying this is happening at Google however sudden, inexplicable occurrences many have been seeing recently suggests to me either a major change in the algo that has hit our CTRs and thereby our eCPMs or that something is "broken" and they are attempting to repair it meanwhile denying all knowledge of such an issue.

Why do I say this? My EPC has been unaffected, if it were purely a dearth of advertisers the EPC would surely go down? Of course one could argue that advertisers are still paying the same and there simply are no clickers...oh, so on one specific day there was a mass movement to stop clicking?

Transparency at the moment would be better rather than idle speculation etc.

I have read every post here and truthfully think that you guys are way of the mark. There is a formula for successful adsense implementation and other factors that will affect earnings.

A.) Your content - You need to write content geared towards helping Adwords advertisers sell their products. Lets assume that you have a website about hotels in Trinidad. You need to write positive reviews about specific locations, talk about how easy it is to book hotel rooms and the different attractions. This will deliver ads that will help with "a call to action". When I learned about writing sales copy I used the same tactic in keyword research and writing articles.(This helps a lot in staying away from Smart Pricing)

B.)What You Write About: It is logical that not all keywords are created equally. An Adwords Advertiser that sells pins for $2.00 each won't be willing to pay $1.00 per click so a website about pins which might yield only $0.05 per click. So write about topics that have a decent value so you can get a decent return.

C.) Adwords Aggressive Education: Adwords in an effort to keep advertisers must ensure that their advertisers see a profit from using the system. So they educate, educate, educate, teaching about how to lower bid amounts and so on. This means less money for us in the short run. A shrewd move by G that we all here would agree has been working.

D.) Adsense On Page Optimization: Heat maps, use of borders, ad placement rotations, image vs text ads, blending, number of Ad units etc. these are all contributing factors to Adsense success. If you optimize your content and don't have good ad placement then the exercise is futile no matter which ad network you use.

E.) The Black Hat World: MFA's and content scrapers affect us too! So we say that we are able to block all these MFA's through the Ad filter. But have you ever thought that these people go through the Yahoo Ad Network, MSN, Kontera, Chitika and others buying ad traffic elsewhere. Google has no idea immediately of their arbitrage and they soak up a lot of clicks and along with it the advertisers budget. Needless to say that they have such a high CTR that they will carry a pretty impressive conversion rate and in essence leave us the "goody 2 shoes" getting those lower paying ads. Its a fact that we have to accept they will never stop.

I have looked on these factors and realized that as the landscape changes so must our advertising strategy. An adsense publisher is first and foremost a Marketing Channel for advertisers, we must look on that and build our entire business plan around that...

My 2 Sense

An adsense publisher is first and foremost a Marketing Channel for advertisers

I completely agree with this and this has been my strategy from day 1 of AdSense implementation on already very successful, authoratative widget sites:

A. Agree
B. Agree
C. Agree
D. Agree
E. Tend to disagree for my widget sector, sure they exist however since my EPC is fine this does not explain the sudden drop in click volume.

I monitor my metrics very carefully against my own logs and Friday 8th May shows an enormous discrepancy between my page loads and Google Page Impressions.

Are some of us into a lost data scenario again? It certainly would not be the first time.

Interestingly so far today, and yes I know it's very early on in the Google day, my metrics look comnpletely normal again. If this continues, fine, they've "fixed it", we'll see what the next 10 hours brings since this is from where the majority of my AdSense earnings are derived.

As expected, no click dump miracle occurred yesterday in the last few hours. Earnings wound up short, again.

I've noted that our Google SE traffic fell down as well. By 50%. Hehe really charming. But that can't have anything with actual CPM and PSA ads. Nothing too obvious at least.

There is a formula for successful adsense implementation and other factors that will affect earnings.

On track with the formula, still seeing a continuous downward trend. What is to be noted is also the fact that Internet is full with adsense ads and people are getting used to NOT clicking them

Not to mention AdBlock

Thats where different revenue streams come into play, if you have more than 1 revenue stream on a page and utilize the call to action then you are bound to see some level of success.

Another day, another dollar - NOT.
Painful to look at the click count and see how little it's worth these days.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 5:44 am (utc) on May 12, 2009]

My initial question which started this thread included the fact that I have 40 sites. These are rather well laid out....a few in WordPress platform, some running PHP scripts etc...not just thrown together or MFA scraper-type sites. That, plust the fact I have meticulously tended to most of them from my very first one 6 years old....then integrated AdSense on it about 2.5 years ago and many of the others up till 9 months ago have been in my AdSense affiliate "circle".
Subsequently I began giving many of them backlinking, then the "directory submissions" route....which has been abussmal considering I recently learning directory submissions are no guarantee of good backlinking anyway....etc. etc.
Of all 40 URLs, one is PR5, a few PR4...many 3's and then 2's and all lower leverl sites.
OH YES, then I discover NO page rank is nothing so now you look back and think WHY DO ANYTHING? These thoughts are based on my having 40 sites. I still empathize with someone with one or two GREAT sites he/she has edited and restructured and groomed over their inception (and probably has been AdSense integrated for many many years) and sees alot of this HUGE fluxuations also...I hear you.
My NEXT question then....anyone get that"Google Ad Planner Publisher Center" promotional email? I mean, how would anyone have any additional incentive to get in on that? You just throw your hands up and say (you fill in this blank).