LZZR

Google Adsense Hits Hard

Watching my Adsense traffic from over two hundreds of sites I’ve noticed lately an unusual drop in performance. My average adsense income per site had dropped almost in half. The truth of the matter that I honestly considered this to be a natural phenomenae accuring as a result of lowering traffic and never bothered to look into my server logs. Not until I stumbled upon this article which thanks to it’s authos is published under very liberal licensing so I will draw upon it rather heavily since there is no need to rephrase something with wich I absolutely agree. Here is the punchline:

Data on several sites maintained by the operators of Texxors.com suggests that Google may be manipulating the profits webmasters receive from Google’s Adsense program. Our analysis shows statistical evidence that as a website becomes more popular, it receives less earnings per click (EPC) from Google Adsense. Since the EPC is determined by Google’s algorithms prior to the ad being served to a page, this suggests that Google may be intentionally or unintentionally manipulating EPC to increase their profit and/or Adsense participation. The method appears to be similar to the “throttling” practices that landed online movie retailer Netflix in legal hot water last year.

What follows is a quite interesting statictical analysis of stats which leads to this conclusion:

Clearly, whether you judge a site’s popularity by clickthroughs per day or page impressions, sites (and individual web pages within that site) that are more popular appear to be making less money per click from Adsense.

For all of us trying to make money with Adsence it’not good news at all. This prompted me immediately to look into my own server logs and compare the data with Adsense earnings. The sample is rather representative as it includes over 200 site for the period of the past 10 months. Foolyshly I thought that the decline in revenue stream was caused by the decreasing traffic flow; although at one moment Yahoo started sending less traffic to my sites but this was effectively compensated by the increasing flow from MSN Live, and the almighty Google itself started to send more traffic as well. So overall background gives not a decrease but a slow natural increase in SE traffic! It is rather unfortunate that the article in question does not provide any data comparison between daily page impressions and daily Adsense ones. In my case I’ve clearly noticed two things:

• decreasing EPC
• increasing discrepancy between Page Views and Adsense views

the latter being another and no less significant factor in the collapse of Ad revenue. In layman’s terms Google just refuses to display their ads on pages it deems too dull or for visitors from obscure countries (no offence intended) etc.
One way or another something had changed in Google Adsense from what it used to be. Unlike Bryan from texxors.com (the author of the original report) I don’t think it has a lot to do with the age of the resource. To mee it seems like Google is introducing a new Adsense algo since the beginning of this year. It looks like they inserted some sort of capping on Adsence Earnings and when you get too successful in your campaign either through too much of traffic or too high CTR you are being done by this filter. This conclusion doesn’t contradict Bryan’s observations at all: you start earning more -> your earnings capped.
I must admit this is only my gut instinct but isn’t it all we base our most important life decisions on?
So who is winning and who is loosing if it is indeed new rules of the game being at work here? I might also put forward another suggestion: Google is doing it in a bid to clamp down on MFA sites that are automatically generated in unbelievable numbers by SE spammers and BlackHat SEOs with their automatic content generators. If it is so the attempt is futile as it is nothing other than a half-measure. MFA sites in theory are violating Adsense T&C and again in theory should be banned from Adsense altogether. An attempt to impose a caping of a sort on unusually high-earning sites will certainly hit spammers but this will not spare some innocent bystanders like myself who just happen to be small-time high earners. Instead of lessening the amount of spam on the net this measure will only stimulate spammers to produce more attempting to regain lost profits. But what do I do being not in the position to generate googlions of pages as I don’t do autogenerated sites? How do I recap for my losses? In the event when it all begins to affect my pay per click profit in best traditions of free market economy I’ll start looking for adsense alternatives. Google seems to forget that their AdWords are not the Pay-Per-Click monopoly they used to be as a number of alternative ways of traffic monetization are now at hand.
So, for all of you trying to plan ahead your ROI for your Adsense-based projects here is a good adsense tip - whatever optimistic your initial EPC might look like be realistic and try to base your calculation on below 10-12c threshold or your business is in danger.
Another free adsense advise I am going to give and first of all to myself: Don’t be lazy, setup alternative ads page (I didn’t do it on my sites - and most certainly will do now!). Google hits you by not displaying their ads on your page - hit it back by displaying alternatives! Let’s not forget the main rule of advertizing - if it’s not your logo on that billboard be sure it’s your competitor’s one.

tags: cpm, epc, google, mfa, ppc, pay-per-click, se, seo, adsense, adwords, alternative, automatic, blackhat, business, competitor, content, generator, income, money, spam, traffic, truth

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Posted by LZZR under Advertizing, Blog |