Click Scrubbing? CTR way way down

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Click Scrubbing? CTR way way down

heyday

2:12 pm on Jul 10, 2018 (gmt 0)

I've noticed something interesting. I have a certain site that due to the topic it has always performed well and gets a high CTR... I can usually read the stats like clock-work. yesterday and today the CTR is way way down and I can usually know exactly how many clicks I'm going to get each day and there is a dramatic difference.

Is it possible that Adsense may be scrubbing my clicks before they even show up in the reports?

I've seen where sometimes I get a click and then a while later it's gone but I've never seen this where clicks are so off like this.

Click Scrubbing?

tangor

8:46 pm on Jul 10, 2018 (gmt 0)

g has been cleaning up its reporting to both sites and advertisers, in part because the advertisers are more educated about how the biz works -- or how it actually does NOT work. Last two years has seen a number of changes that have significantly affected income/revenue for publishers. Going forward this will be the norm and the old days are not coming back.

heyday

10:03 pm on Jul 10, 2018 (gmt 0)

Thanks Tangor..... there is one constant for sure with Google and that is "Change". :)

Runfun

10:49 pm on Jul 10, 2018 (gmt 0)

Change in their favour. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I have to laugh or almost cry :-) When CTR rises, CPC goes down. If CPC rises than CTR goes down. How much I improve and tune there's not much long term benefit because overall eCPM is struggling.

rocketsites

2:53 pm on Jul 13, 2018 (gmt 0)

First of all did you do anything to the site that would affect the ads visibility such as changing of placement, background colors, or layout? Assuming you didn't. Also to check, is it a site-wide decrease or does it affect some ad units more than others? It might be a certain advertiser or advertisers that your site visitors normally respond well to pulling funds from their campaign or pulling targeted ads from your site. The other thing it could possibly be is the two-click Adsense penalty:

[blog.ezoic.com...]

Ive noticed that certain ads on my site drastically fluctuate in terms of CTR. It can have a super high CTR for a few weeks or even months, and then a period of very low CTR. Check out this CTR graph of one ad on my site. Its historically done great and then plummeted. This is the main money maker ad unit of our site, so when the CTR is in a low period, we suffer.

[evernote.com...]

heyday

3:45 pm on Jul 13, 2018 (gmt 0)

Thank you! I didn't not know about the two-click policy! I wonder if that is the same with Adsense for Search?

so helpful. Thank you.

levo

9:01 pm on Jul 13, 2018 (gmt 0)

We're talking about real-time clawbacks. First, read all the placement rules

[support.google.com...]

and ad experiences for desktop and mobile.

[support.google.com...]
[support.google.com...]

Go back to your website, and try to evaluate it as impartial as possible. Do you have a next page arrow just next to an ad that you always thought is OK? move the ad. Do you have a fixed menu/header bar that covers ads when users scroll? hide it when they scroll down. etc.

Strictly following placement rules really helps. I fixed lots of 'should not be a problem' mistakes after reading stever's post (https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4902533.htm 3rd message) and realtime clawbacks dropped significantly.

heyday

1:31 am on Jul 14, 2018 (gmt 0)

So much great info! Thank you Levo....

Now to throw a curve ball... I should have mentioned this in the original post. For this case I'm only using Adsense for Search so I actually don't have any control over placements of the ads....

All my traffic is pretty much searches done on mobile devices so my guess is the clawbacks are coming because of "Fat Fingers"