If you have been an AdSense Publisher you have probably seen your earnings, revenue per click and click through rate  fluctuate.  In the life of an AdSense publisher, this is pretty normal.

We operate a site called HubPages that has content on a wide range of topics and significant traffic.  It’s the diversity of content that makes HubPages a good barometer for changes in AdSense. It’s pretty rare to see big fluctuations across the site, but it does happen.  When we see these, they tend to be holistic changes to AdSense that affect most publishers.

If you have a vertical site or smaller site there are a few things to look at when you see big swings in AdSense earnings.

1. Did you change your ad sizes and positioning?  The number one factor we see with influencing AdSense performance is placement.  Placement of a single ad can change the performance by upwards (and downwards) of 40%.
2.  Did you make any recent changes to your channels?  For example, did you remove a channel.  If you change channels, it’s possible to lose site targeted buys.  Site buys can increase earnings and if you lose them, so go your earnings.
3. Understanding seasonality.  For example, movie sites can see big swings during the high movie time like Summer and Christmas.  When new movies are launched, it’s possible to see a big increase while a campaign runs for the launch and a corresponding decrease when the campaign is over.
4. Traffic pattern changes. Sometimes a site’s traffic pattern can change quickly and have an enoumous impact on AdSense earnings.  If you see a big increase in natural search traffic, we’ve seen that have a positive affect on CTRs and CPMs.  If you get a spike in traffic from a source like Yahoo Buzz, then you’ll most likely see CTRs and CPMs decrease because this type of traffic is much less likely to click on ads.  To diagnose this, it’s helpful if you are using analytics on your site and can run reports that show the percentage changes.
5. Did the quality of your site change?  Sometimes a site will add a significant number of low quality pages.  One of the things we have seen is that as the quality of the content decrease, CTRs increase.  We speculate that this happens because the AdSense ad is offering more value to the user reletive to the content.  There is a threshold where AdSense content ads are so much better than the content on the page that users will click at a much higher rate.  However, AdSense is pretty good at adjusting revenue per click when this happens.  So, it’s likely that you’ll see revenues drop.  Also, increasing the quality of your sites content can have a big impact on revenue per click because more advertisers will want to be on your site and drive your advertising rates up.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.