Adsense Site Breaks Traffic Record, But CTR Down The Drain

[Blackthorne]

This is just unbelievable... I don't have many successful adsense sites, so I'm dependant on my biggest one for a stable income right now.

Recently, I outgrew my starter hosting package. I upgraded my hosting, installed caching on all my sites, and my sites were faster. I instantly got more traffic and made more money.

For 6 days in a row, I made on average 15 euros per day. Then, the CTR on my biggest site fell below 1%.

Despite the fact that my traffic has doubled in a week or two, I'm once again making less than 10 bucks per day.

CTR bouncing up and down has happened to me before. I will not throw a bitch fit over it. But it is always disappointing. Should it bounce back up, then I will no doubt break another money making record.

But I can't just sit around waiting for that to happen.

I realize I'm too dependant on this one site. For this reason, I will focus on getting other sites (both existing and new ones I have yet to build) to rank higher and also bring in some bacon.

That is all.

[BenK]

Keep in mind that CTR can depend a LOT on the type of ads displayed. One week can have some very targeted ads and another week you can have very untargetted ads. It depends on if there are people bidding for keywords that are relevant to your keywords.

For example, you can have a site about "buy midget thongs" and for a a week there are advertisers bigging on "buy midge thongs". You have a good chance of displaying "buy midget thongs" ads on your site, which will rock your CTR. But if no one is bidding on those terms later, you may have less targeted ads.

Hence the CTR dump.

[Phillip]

What is the source for this new traffic?

Are you still pulling the majority of your traffic for the same keywords as before?

If you were previously pulling traffic for "buy hairy green midget thongs" and you were getting a nice CTR and started pulling traffic for "midget" or just "green midget" it is obvious that they are not going to click as much - since it is not a buying keyword anymore.

If you are just ranking higher for the same keyword and pulling more traffic because of that, that your ads have changed.

I also think that people who click on a site that are lower ranking are more likely to click ads. This might be because they already checked out the first sites and did not find what they were looking for, and got frustrated by the time they got to your site and clicked ads - I have experience on lowering CTR the higher I rank for some keywords. Though I am still making more money - so this might not be the case here.

[Blackthorne]

Looks to me like the CTR dump is unrelated to the traffic increase, because it happened before the traffic increase.

I've complained about my adsense rollercoaster previously. I now know it can work this way sometimes.

It's probably the change in advertisements, like Ben says.

Imagine if my CTR goes up again while I'm getting this motherload of traffic. I'll be making big moolah.

I once made 50 bucks in one day with this exact same amount of traffic. Now all I need is CTR, baby.

[Blackthorne]

CTR was lower than 0.2% yesterday.

Over a 1000 impressions. Only 2 clicks.

I don't see a drastic change in my adsense palette.

What the fuck happened...?

[DinoEntrails]

I have had the same thing happen, but mine was related to traffic decrease as well. I used to get 10-20% CTR, but now my traffic was cut by 80%(not because of SERPS, but because of the niche) and my CTR is 5% at best, and most days I make nothing with that site.

[Phillip]

I have had the same thing happen, but mine was related to traffic decrease as well. I used to get 10-20% CTR, but now my traffic was cut by 80%(not because of SERPS, but because of the niche) and my CTR is 5% at best, and most days I make nothing with that site.

Is there the google pic ads displaying on the first page? These might be pulling all the buying traffic nowadays. One of my sites dropped from 100-150 uniques a day to 30 uniques (and basically zero adsense) because there are now four nice bottles of pills on the first page.

[Blackthorne]

I did temporarily allowed the ads to display images.

But that was after the drop. It was in an attempt to get them to click again.

I've set them to text only again. I'm having a more normal CTR today.

[Blackthorne]

CTR is back up again.

I made more than 10 euros per day in December!

I'm setting the goal to crank it up to 20 euros per day before the end of February.

With 2 months time, I should be able to pull it off.

[Mace]

That's great. Congrats!

This month I am focusing on Adsense Snipers, something I've never really done before. Set up around five snipers yesterday and today and have about 15 more I want to get done before the end of the month. Of course, since they are brand new, I probably won't see any clicks for until the end of the month.