Everybody is outside, shopping...

My CTR is higher than usual since the past few days. Anyone?

December is quite bad as compared to Nov. Almost 20% drop. Contributed by fallen traffic decrease after first week and then followed by lower CPC. Dec is always lower because of festivals [the niche is in health and medicine].

Anybody else lacking in clicks today?

I get 300-400% better than usual. Actualy i activate autoads on compatibile wordpress theme so i get double even more than on manual ads. But i keep manual ads running too. But generaly december its double better than usual and double more for autoads

In last 3-4 days my CPC is really bad!
I have a news website.

I dont know what to do. I have 3 manual ads on page.
Some people say I should set up AUTOADS...

Do you have any idea is it normal during december and hollidays to have bad CPC?

I think Auto ads is more suitable for beginners as they don't know where to place ads for the best result. We have enough experience and we also need to make sure the ads are not annoying for our readers. We even don't know where Google will place the ads and how annoying it could be for a reader.

Sometimes the way auto ads are placed is against google policies.

I've found Auto Ads to work out well enough for me IF the site can give Google a healthy-enough data set to work from, then its aglo goes to work and does a fairly competent job with placements.

It succeeds on my larger sites but placements are a little too liberal on my smaller ones. Seems like 10,000+ Page Views is the daily bare minimum for me for Auto Ads have a good showing. Works really well in the 20,000 to 50,000 PV range - that I can see for sure.

[edited by: CommandDork at 1:36 am (utc) on Dec 20, 2018]

Wow!

1p clicks from the USA, almost no public traffic, times are A-Changin' .!.!. Again

I don't trust Auto Ads. I'm not giving away that much control of my pages.

Meanwhile, traffic and RPM are on a slow decline, but I have no complaints, it's been a great ride.

Yesterday was a small miracle, but today it seems that the miracle is getting thinner, but it's normal, as it was really the last day to buy something online and maybe get delivered until Christmas.

All of my image and text ads are now suddenly link ads. What gives?

It's that time again... will there be a pre-Christmas payment? Would be nice, but with last month's in mind it does seem a little unlikely. Speaking of Christmas, does anyone still get a Christmas present from Google? Must have been 10 years ago, last time I got one. A light that changed color, if I recall correctly. I'm making more now, but I guess they raised the bar.

does anyone still get a Christmas present from Google?

I've not had one in years however I still have their 4 port USB hub and it's still in daily use, it's fine for everything except streaming HD movies. I also still have and use the black Google box it came in that's full of flash drives including a Google 64MB one, yep, 64MB!

The good news is I did get the payment e-mail today so MIB by monday.

1. Still have a Google Branded Radio
2. Electronic payment sent, so Monday I should see the money in my account :D

Still have a Google Branded Radio

Oh, that's right, it was a radio! Pretty cool at the time, but no idea where I left it.

Bad second half. Now Jan and Feb will be dead as usual. Nothing exciting to track these thread in next 2 months :p:

The misery period has begun.
My figures today are -40%

Pretty rubbish so far today, not sure what's happened.

RPM is still pretty good, traffic's just gone down a couple notches. People are shopping (offline), traveling.

Saturday saw one of my lowest-ever PVs day but with a double December day average earnings however I feel I can confidently predict that after 12 hours today will be my lowest-ever PVs day, so far in 12 hours I have had what I used to get a minute, yep a minute.

This traffic reduction over Xmas and New Year happens to me every year, even pre-www days we always closed for 10-14 day since trade was so slow, plus it gave us all an opportunity to have a well-earned break ... obviously my widgets are not Xmas related:-)

@Robzilla I'm seeing the same here. I am actually pleasantly surprised that RPM remains strong. It dipped a bit during the week but having an additional weekend just before Xmas is helping. Let see how bad things get after tomorrow.

Amazingly the RPM is holding up even today, but the traffic is slowing.

I guess I will never understand why RedBar chooses to stay in the trenches.

@MrJefe

That's very simple, this week, especially yesterday, today and tomorrow, plus some of next week, are my most productive days of the year ... NO interruptions from anyone, my real productivity level soars, I can easily do a week's work in one day.

Looks like the end of December is going to be pretty dismal for me. I was heading towards another good month but it looks as though it's petering off. I suspect people are more interested in tucking into their Christmas dinner and opening their presents than looking for advice on fish :-)

I read some interesting news a couple of days ago. My website falls very much into a niche and when I started it in 2006 there were only two other websites in the same niche that was very popular. One of them disappeared a few years ago and the other one had a slump for a while, then came back after they upgraded to a different platform but has slowly dropped down the rankings. Their founder posted a message on the forum a couple of days ago stating that the website and basically run its course and they would be shutting it down permanently on Christmas Day. It will be interesting to see if that increases my traffic and membership because there aren't any other dedicated forums in my niche as far as I know. Having said that, I'm convinced that social media, especially Facebook is one of the reasons why forums are declining in membership and usage.

this month is look like very well; better than November, cpc is increasing 50%

I'm convinced that social media, especially Facebook is one of the reasons why forums are declining in membership and usage.

It's possible that instead of searching for real answers people prefer to ask in their preferred generalised social circles, whether the answer is correct or not is altogether different!

I work in a global industry and after 25+ years of the www we only have a couple of forum boards remaining and what is more puzzling is that ALL the top widget industry sites are reporting an overall reduction in traffic even though their businesses are actually doing better than ever.

Is information overload anything to do with this?

I tell you what I have noticed in the bars and restaurants over ths Xmas period compared to only just 1-2 years ago ... the lack of photo taking. A couple of years ago photo taking was a pita with everyone at it, now it seems to be occasional and then only by people who haven't seen each other in months etc.

The www has become a "necessary" service, in general people know where it is and know how to use it, whereas 10-20 years ago many used it as an incredible learning tool, have they now become "bored" with it and realised not only that they can't learn it all, they actually do not want to?