Six Months of Adsense?

[MissMandy]

Well, its been six months since I started using Adsense, it started off great, but after 6 months, I now find im sending three times the traffic to earn the same amount.
I dont know, is this a seasonal thing or something else?

[Chris]

It could be a normal fluctuation, but also smart pricing. It happens with nearly every publishers.

[mobrik]

Smart pricing by whom? I was under the impression that any page gets the best value there is at the moment.

[rpanella]

Smart pricing is Google's way of pricing clicks according to the quality of your traffic. A good basic overview have be found here: http://www.jensense.com/archives/2005/10/one_poorly_conv.html
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[jonnyhilfiger]

You'll find with Google Adsense that you often take 5 steps forward and 4 back, can be very frustrating at times.

If you're in it for the long run then I think you've got to be pragmatic about it, 1 step forward is better than 1 step back (using the example above) and as long as you are keeping ahead of the game then you're putting yourself in a better future position to then make changes away from adsense (taking your own advertising orders for instance)

John

[Emancipator]

smart pricing makes me want to switch from google.

[MaxS]

It could be a normal fluctuation, but also smart pricing. It happens with nearly every publishers.
Is it possible to determine (for sure) whether or not you have been smart priced?

[Cutter]

Has the ratio of US to international traffic changed at all? I only buy Adwords ads in the US (but I still get some international, go figure.)

[john190]

The rates that I earn from Adsense changes all the time. It depends on the season, how much demand there is per keyword, if your sites content is showing different ads, smart pricing, etc.

[paul]

While there are daily/weekly/monthly/seasonal fluctuations, our overall traffic is up by 20% over last year but our income is flat.

I have started looking more closely at the ads being served on some of my pages and have not been impressed; no wonder they convert poorly. I think their ad inventory for niche sites is much thinner than I realized.

[john190]

So, is the earnings per click down or is that the same and the CTR is just down instead. If the earnings per click is down then you can't do much with that apart from improving your sites keywords or something. If the CTR is down then you can improve that by doing a little more optimizing on the ads.

[paul]

It's earnings per click :( We actually see changes in earnings per click from month to month. I assume that is related to changing ad campaigns.

[MissMandy]

I have found my earnings have picked up by simply reducing the ads on the page back to one ad at the bottom of the textual article. The click thru rate is about the same. I dont know, Ill take a guess because im only showing one ad im showing the higher paying clicks? Any opinion on that?

[john190]

Yep, you are showing less ads, which shows the highest of the clicks. If you had 3 ad blocks then now your visitor is click on any individual ad in the top paid ad block while before some of them were probably also clicking on ads in the second or 3rd ad blocks which were lower paid.

[MissMandy]

Your right I think John, originally I use to show one ad at the bottom of the text article, but it was when I went to two ads, top and bottom I had a big fall, now Ive gone back to one at the bottom, things have gone right up again, also, i found the second ad before was showing a lot of untargeted rubbish, but just one ad gives me high qaulity targetting.

[john190]

It's nice to know that it has improved again for you. Good luck with all this stuff.