Whatever they've done to the SERPs I hope is reversed soon, it was easily my worst-ever day.

Apart from EPC everything set new lows, PVs at 50%, clicks at 30%, earnings at 25%, an almost complete annihilation of my sites and utterly pointless in displaying AdSense.

The culprit is the SERPs, they've absolutely fubard my sector, not just for me, almost everyone in my industry has been well and truly stuffed, great job G!

WTF, I was looking at google analytics, realtime!

NO visitors from US!
Nothing! Is full day now in US!

NO visitors from US!

None? Really. No Facebook visitors, no Bing, Yahoo, Google visitors from the US? No Twitter or Pinterest or LinkedIn visits? No referrals from other websites sending US visitors? Sounds like a traffic diversification problem to me.

The culprit is the SERPs

Here we go again. "Someone cut my SERPS with baby laxative and now I can't feed my dog." Dependency sucks.

I had some visitors from US, but it seems the Serps are moving again. Low visits from US and Canada => VERY low eCPM.

Is not "normal" to lose 30% of the revenue in 3 days, the main problem being the payment.
It is another Panda run, but a limited run, on "selected" sites.

Here we go again. "Someone cut my SERPS with baby laxative and now I can't feed my dog." Dependency sucks.

Read what I wrote:

they've absolutely fubard my sector, not just for me, almost everyone in my industry has been well and truly stuffed,

Where does it say only my site?

If you consider that when searching on Google.co.uk returing 8 UK sites out of 50 results is a good SERP result then you do not live on the same planet as I do.

This is not about me, it is about an appalling set of SERPs on Google.co.uk for a specific widget industry returning mostly US and Chinese results.

This is not a SERP thread or a PANDA thread or a "where did my US traffic go?" thread!

Right Webcentric, but I really think that somehow SERPS and Adsense is connected, not only via simple relation more/less Organic traffic -> more/less $$$.

We all know that there are max 10 countries that matter in terms of visitors and conversions: US, UK, some UE, AU, NZ etc.

When international SERP + local search is FUBAR, you can see wild variations in eCPM and total payment.

Doh! So disappearing traffic has absolutely NOTHING to do with reduced AdSense earnings?

At times it is POINTLESS posting here when you want everyone to abide by YOUR rules!

Yes, if you don't have traffic, your Adsense earnings are going to reflect that. Doesn't really matter where your traffic isn't coming from in that case.

Where earnings are concerned (and we all know it's a numbers game)...

CTR is a percentage and you can have the same CTR with 100 people a day as you might with 1,000,000 people a day.

CPC is based on the average value of the clicks you get. Again you can achieve the same CPC with 100 or one million visitors.

Total Earnings is where the numbers game plays out. If you can achieve the same CTR with a million visitors that you can achieve with 100 visitors, and the CPC is relatively similar, the volume of clicks (and thereby the total estimated earnings) should theoretically increase by a factor of 10,000.

How you go from 100 visitors a day to 1,000,000 (or vice versa) is a subject unto itself IMHO. Yes, it's part of the larger equation the way the economy and the weather and world events and computer viruses are part of the equation. Making Adsense the bad guy because of upheavals in the SERPS though doesn't follow. Pointing a finger at Adsense when the problem is a specific traffic source is a traffic problem. That's my point.

Webcentric is right. I thought it was obvious.

---

Returning to topic:

Since yesterday, the CPC for me was down; and today the CPC is up but the pageviews are down. That is odd. Maybe the stats are a bit "frozen", of the Google elves are tinkering again with the Adsense machinery.

I've seen weak cpc since last week and wonder if tax-time is the reason.

and today the CPC is up but the pageviews are down. That is odd

Seems that statistical fits and starts are the norm now where the adsense interface is concerned. Nothing surprises me where reporting is concerned any more.

AdSense Earnings and Observations

I started this a couple of years or so ago under a different acronynm, it's now becoming pointless unless people stop being so pernickety!

It's about what may be happening and how one is being affected by GooYahBing, FFS, look it up if you do not know what that means ... the FACT is that some of us, probably many, have absolutely no idea why Google deems some of our sites evil when we have done nothing wrong!

We read here and other places about people/companies, supposedly with white hat sites, yet when I see them they are the opposite of epitome, just like Google.

I do not like coming here when people try to denegrate what I am doing, or write, when I am doing nothing wrong, I know my widget industry, I definitley know SEO, ask anyone at AltaVista and why Google head-hunted me in the 90s.

This thread is supposed to be ABOUT what webmasters are seeing OUT-OF-THEIR-ORDINARY everyday, average, experiences. Having to quantify this, in total detail, for certain posters, is going to KILL this board section.

Yeah, I am totally pi$$ed off and a few more ought to say so.

Here's an Adsense observation that may be directly tied to your ability to convert whatever traffic you may have. I just noticed for the first time that those big/bold ad titles are different today. The bold is gone and the text appears to be in a normal font-weight although they are roughly the same size as before. This may be just a small-scale experiment at this point but looks to indicate that those massive bold titles aren't doing the trick. Perhaps some improvements are in the works although I'm not seeing a great improvement with this particular change yet. We'll see.

Also, I may just be loopy at the moment but I'm just now noticing a font-size setting in the My Ads interface. Is this new or have I just been out to lunch on this? Testing 123!

Yes the forum has gone very quiet. Maybe a little over-moderated (sterilized).

Perhaps the threads could be allowed to evolve more organically even if they need to go off on a wild tangent for a spell.

Redbar, I still want to know what your comment was about Spain. Why can't we know? Maybe it can help someone or lead into a new discussion. I know we all want to make more money from Adsense.

Speaking of "organic". Perhaps Google needs to come up with a new word to describe the "organic search results". Doesn't seem very organic to me.

Maybe a little organic

I want people to come to my site so they will click an ad. At any moment the number of real-time visitors is almost always an exact multiple of 5 (depending on time of day). Some social, some direct and referred, and most from organic. Number of real-time drops by a couple, and magically my site is lifted up in the "organic" part of the SERPs.

In real-time the top keywords are often the exact name of my site (or similar spelling). Wondering if this can affect the relevance/targeting of the ads?

What in the name of reason is your point?

Here's what I got out of that. Sometimes your real-time visitor count is divisible by 5 but sometimes it's not.

When your real-time number drops by a couple (meaning that it can't always be divisible by 5), the SERPS change (which must mean they also change when your real-time count increases). So am I to conclude that over the course of the day, your visitor count is causing the SERPS to change?

BTW, my real time visitor count is always

realTimeVisitorCount Mod 2 = 1 or
realTimeVisitorCount Mod 2 = 0

When I want to read about Google SERP changes I flip over to the Google Updates and SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com] thread.

When I want to read about what is happening with AdSense I often open this the AdSense Earnings and Observations thread. Notice that the thread title says nothing about Google SERPS.

The good part about the Google Updates and SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com] thread is that there is little mention of AdSense in it so one can actually find the comments about SERP changes.

Finding comments about AdSense in this tread means wading through sometimes seemingly endless comments about SERPS. Quite a difference from the actual Google Updates and SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com] thread.

.

Thanks ken_b.

As for Adsense, after 5 sluggish days, today has taken off like a rocket. Not sure if the change in font weight has anything to do with it or not but this is unrelated to traffic levels. Traffic was better yesterday but resulted in only a fraction of what's come in today already. Could be a click dump or could have to do with better ads in the auction. Hard to tell. CTR has almost tripled and CPC is about 50% above what I've been seeing over the last few days. I'm not looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Here's what I got out of that. Sometimes your real-time visitor count is divisible by 5 but sometimes it's not

80% of the time it is either 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 etc

When your real-time number drops by a couple (meaning that it can't always be divisible by 5), the SERPS change (which must mean they also change when your real-time count increases). So am I to conclude that over the course of the day, your visitor count is causing the SERPS to change?

This seems like the likely mechanism. It is hypothesis. How else could it be. Maybe the real-time stats are inaccurate.

Stats are as bad as ever; GA and AdSense are so far apart. Now you cannot really even look at performance daily - waste of time. Checking earnings once a week is what I would advise - otherwise you'll drive yourself nuts.

When I want to read about Google SERP changes I flip over to the Google Updates and SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com] thread.

This would be like if I was working in the Geology department at the university, and someone asked me a question involving chemistry and I said "If I want to talk about chemistry, I would go over to the chemistry department."

The two fields are interwoven.

Google adsense has a great eCPM today, but ADX (doubleclick) is at a historic low point!
ADX should offer premium ads/payment, but since Friday the stat is terrible!

Those of us in the Geology department prefer to discuss geology. Chemistry fanatics will find better chemistry discussions in the chemistry department anyway. The thing that will kill a thread more than anything is when people ignore the actual subject in lieu of going off on tangents better addressed in other venues. The actual Adsense observations made today for example don't even have a single reply.

Well, Mentat did just slip in while I was writing this.

Last two days worth of earnings is very much pathetic.

My irrelevant thought: I am more believing that there is at least 2 tiers of Adsense publishers.

I'd say more than 2 tiers.

The two fields are interwoven.

Not here.

I've said it before and I will say it again. Analytics and adsense views will never be the same. Ever. There are a bazillion factors ranging from browser versions, internet speeds, etc. but the biggest one is adblockers. If your ad is blocked, you won't get a view, 10 views, or a hundred views from that user and you definitely won't get clicks.

In addition, Adsense often runs on a delayed standpoint due to filtering mechanisms that filter out invalid clicks.

With regards to the SERP changes, you have it backwards. SERP changes cause your traffic to drop, not the other way around. If you are in my niche, I'm niche leader, and I write an article similar to a popular one in your niche, i'll push your article down in SERPs, which causes a drop in YOUR ranking and therefore your traffic. It may not be your primary keywords that get hit, but rather your long tails. That's why it's important to continually add new content to your website and be aware of your competitors.

Good luck all!

Whelp, I've certainly had ups and downs over the past year in particular. This month however is most likely going to be the least earning I've had in YEARS. Last month wasn't great but it was okay for what "normal" is these days. This month though is heading for something I haven't seen or felt before. I'm not here to complain. I'm stating where I'm at and what my gut feeling is about this month. I certainly hope this isn't indicative of what the future holds for this endeavor of mine. I'm quite desensitized to the recent roller coaster, but I see now that I still have some sensation left. To me it's a close flat line.