Technology Reports

Adsense, as most webmasters know is both a source of joy and Frustration. It is a joy when you reach the $100/mth and get paid, it is frustrating when you see your website income vary day to day and month to month. This is something that I wanted to write about after reading a thread at DP where someone mentioned their drop from $40+/day earnings down to $6!

Ok, lets look at some background. My main niche site has reached an Authority status and features strongly in it’s niche in the SERPs. Since Janurary, the number of page impressions has remaind fairly constant, the number of clicks has remaind fairly constant but my earnings have varied greatly! I have not seen a $40+ to $6 a day drop, but I have had some very different days.

I guess I keep a pretty close watch over my sites and monitor them fairly closely. I like to look and ensure that the site is up and working and also make a mental note of what adverts I see on the site.

Over the last 2 months I have been paying particular attention as last month I had a fairly big drop in revenue. Whenever I see a drop for more than a day I go and look at all my stats to make sure everything is up and working. What I noticed that on the days where the revenue was low there were different Ads showing on my site. Now, during the month I had several days where the revenue was down over 50% and the ads displayed were all the same or similar on those days. Towards the end of the month I had a couple of great days where daily revenue was very high.

On the High revenue days I noticed that the ads displayed were ones I had never seen before.

Now we moved onto the current month. For the first week or so I had some of the highest days I have ever had - and the number of clicks was down! The rest of the month was a bit up and down, but more up than down will see me end the month about normal.

Seeing the variotion in advertisers and earnings I decided to do a bit of research. Of course most Webmasters don’t really think about the other site of the equation and think about the individual advertisers who are using adwords - the actual ads appearing on your website. I set about learning a bit more about the other side of the business. The advertisers run their ads, and of course they experiment somewhat. They want to get visitors to their sites at the cheapest possible price. As such, all advertisers “bid” on the words they target to get their visitors. Now, when there is a lot of demand for a particular keyword, the price goes up, and when there is not many people bidding the price drops.

Does that sound a bit familiar? Am I not seeing the average earnings go up and down day to day? Do I not notice that there are different Ads on my sites at different times? The direct co-relation has been found between my income and the Ads displayed. When there are a lot of people bidding for keywords in my niche, the price goes up and I earn more. By the same token, if an advertiser finds that they are not getting a good return they stop bidding on those keywords leaving only lower priced bids, and therfore lower priced ads appearing on my sites.

There are a few “trends” I have noticed. Different days of the week can see different ads. Different times of the month sees different ads. I guess that any savvy advertiser is watching their spending and the ones who manage it best get the best returns for their advertising $$ - which means that they only run their ads at the times (days) when it is most profitable to them. Now the trend that towards the end of the month when revenue drops can be explained that an advertiser might simply have used all of their budget for the month - leaving you the publisher with lower paying ads.

Now, I don’t get to bogged down with the day to day revenue, instead I just keep an eye on things and monitor the daily, weekly and Monthly trends. I keep my site up to date to keep the visitors coming back and hope that there are at least a few advertisers competing for the keywords in my niche.