AdSense EPC Going Into Freefall

June 25, 2007

For some people their EPC is going into freefall and some people are worried but with this discussion you can learn some tips about it. What publishers make after checking their statistics and see this horrible results?

I am beginning to wonder whether this has anything to do with the MFA/ARB clampdown?

Since June 8th my EPC has dropped 14.39%, my eCPM by 12.21% and comparing Monday 4th v Monday 11th my earnings were down 24.63% with the same number of clicks.

This is a bit too co-incidental for my way of thinking.

No my trade is not on holiday this is a 12 month of the year business generally with few fluctuations.

Yes there seem to be plenty of quality advertisers however I am now seeing a lot of “directory type” sites in AdLinks and they were never there before and checking through the SERPs advertising they are cropping up in the first few pages.

Certainly something significant is happening so far as my sites are concerned and if I have a few more days of this then I shall remove my AdLinks to see if that stops the rot.

Is anyone else seeing similar.

I suggest you filter all the “directory” sites because they are the arb sites but using adwords/other for their trade. I do, and my filter is full again sadly but income is solidly up by 30 to 40 percent over 15 or so hobby sites.

I am seeing a resurgence of MFA’s/arb sites and coincidently the vastly improved performance that started the past couple of weeks or so, is falling back down to towards the 2007 pits. Unless Google culls ALL arb and MFA sites from Adsense and the ADWORDS side, this problem will continue to plague us.

I had been about 10% up for the last week, until today, when it plunged to one of the lowest ever ecpm’s. This on a day when I expect a good level.

I decided to block all sites that don’t have a product or service right on their site. These include MFAs and fake directories & fake comparison sites - about 100 in all.

EPC is improving after a slight decline when google had to reshuffle the ads on my site.

CTR is down about 10 pct I think because the regular adwords folks don’t write copy that is as good as the arb folks. Although I also moved a few ads out of the hot spot so as to be a better adsense citizen.

After nearly 4 years of very successful AdSense we’re ripping it off many, many sites since it is collapsing just as we watch the hourly figures!

Obviously we’ve already contacted AdSense to ascertain if there are any issues at their end meanwhile we are creating a direct ad campaign to our global subscriber base.

And after the first seven days of June the new regime looked so promising…oh dear!

Update

So how did the actual EPC (not eCPM) for 12th June fare in comparison?

8-11 June : -26.05%
1-11 June : -32.69%
1-7 June : -34.60%
All May : - 28.17%
All 2007 : -28.68%

I don’t know about anyone else but that seems a pretty dramatic reduction.

Interestingly I am also seeing duplicate ads on my sites which I never recall having done so before.

I’ve had a very nice response from the AdSense team this morning asking me for more details of the ad duplication I’ve seen and to keep monitoring and compare historical data and I’ve already sent them those details.

Somethings gone awry for me, heaven’s knows what, and I hope the issue is resolved pretty quick since if it were to spread to other publishers this thread will become very long!

I think it will be more dramatic ups and downs than some counted on, lasting for longer periods of time as the shakeout continues.

You really don’t think you can predate a Google event with the small amount of Intel we get from them.

Me? I’m ready for a happening and we should all just gear up (or down) and wait the storm out.

Ann

We’re seeing our worst EPC levels and earnings in two years despite continually trimming under performing pages, but…

Summer is always slow anyway. I’ve been lax about keeping the MFA/directory sites out of the filter because I got sick of it and am concentrating on our main business.

However, there is the possibility that our two month experiment with the PPA Beta has bitten us on the behind. While miserable PPA sell-through doesn’t impact the EPC displayed for the account, it’s possible that it does impact the quality score for the site in some way.

I finally removed all our PPA ads last week so we’ll see if there’s any difference. Yesterday was our best day of June so far, just about the June 2006 average.

I’ve heard many people report that Thurs seems to be algo-change-day or Smart-pricing-takes-effect-day whichever you believe in. Personally ours usually seems to switch on Saturdays.

We’ve been getting the duplicate ads for almost a year, and we told G then, (especially since it used to be somewhere in the TOS that you should not display identical ads on the same page, and THEY were causing it) but to no avail. It seemed to start when we started using google-ad-region. I’m guessing you’re using it too. We just started removing the extra ad blocks since they were obviously redundant and seldom got any additional clicks.

I had one interesting observation the last couple days. Our earnings have been down since Feb right around the time we started noticing something new. Seemed that ads on all pages account-wide or at least site-wide were leaning towards two particular sub-topics. These two topics were those, which in our channel level reports had the overall highest CPM compared to other pages, but are in a relatively narrow topic which does not necessarily appeal to most of the rest of our site. However while the ads did very well CPM-wise, by virtue of either high CTR or high PPC, ON the pages where they were APPROPRIATE, they did NOT do so well on the rest of the site. Since they were not applicable to the other pages, they tended not to get clicked. More of them were of the lower PPC variety, so even when they were clicked, they tended to lower the overall CPM of the pages they were now on inappropriately.
For example, say the site was about all different power tools (our actual case couldn’t be further from that topic), with a single page on various jackhammer bits, and another single page on electric screwdrivers. Ads for electric screwdrivers get a nice 35% CTR on their page and jackhammer bits get a lower CTR but since they have a much higher PPC still get a very nice CPM for on their page. The electric screwdriver page, in this example, is our most popular entry point and a #1 for it’s keyword phrase on G, but has a relatively low PPC of only .10. But, because of the high CTR we wind up with a hefty $35.00 CPM there. The jackhammer bits page is relatively low traffic, but has a decent CTR and a very nice $1.50 PPC, so it winds up with probably a CPM of $85.00. Yet when those same ads start bombarding the radial saw pages, the electric drill pages and even the precision lathe pages, they get relatively no interest and the CPM on those pages has dropped below $2.00 due to the much lower average CTR. Our overall CPM, PPC and Overall earnings dropped to about 1/2.

Then just the other day I decided to try removing the ads just from those two offending pages, totally. It only took about 12 hours and suddenly all the ads went back to the way they used to be a year ago in happier times and our CPM and PPC skyrocketed almost back to the previous levels! I’ve replaced the ads now (they were rather lucrative in themselves) to see what happens.

I’m beginning to think there has been a new flawed algorithm added with good intentions, but bad results, that is doing this and is causing a lot of advertisers earnings to fall. Perhaps it works very well for some types of sites (perhaps ones where the entire site is very focused and ads are interchangeable across all topics), but not for slightly more diverse sites like ours, where visitors viewing one part of the site are not interested in ads from another part!

My 2 cents..
Advertisers now have Placement Performance Report which lets them decide where their ads are performing the best and where they are losing money. So MFA/ARB will be filtered by Advertisers as well. I guess, genuine content creators should not have any problem.

Coming to Domain Advertising services such as SEDO - EPC is down from 0.104 to 0.053 this month

Also, some Advertisers will be tempted to try Panama, but I am not very satisfied with their targeting and I believe Google will remain in control, at least for few more quarters.