Why are Adsense payments down?

[retired_member12]

We all know that our Adsense payments have fell through the floor, but to be honest, I don’t get why.
None of my mini-sites have seen a reduction in visitors. Statistics being what they are, I can’t see any reason to presume the visitors are less inclined to click the ads. I’ve switched off the free info services type ads, so only paid ones are shown, and I check the sites live through a different IP to check ads are running, which they are.
The argument is that advertisers are pulling up their socks and not using Adwords as much, lowering the ppc value. It’s this that I don’t get. Over the past 5 years of more, I’ve explained and installed Adwords accounts for maybe a dozen or so customers I’ve dealt with over that time who were clueless about its potential. In the past week, I’ve been in touch with them all, scratching for business, but whilst on the phone, I took the opportunity to ask them all if they still run their Adwords campaigns. All of them said yes and all still pay their bills accordingly.
So why has the Adsense dropped so much? I must be missing quite a few obvious points here I’m sure!!!

 

[foz]

Dec '09 to Jan '10 (to date) eCPM has dropped ~%25.

It fluctuates for me. Google has smart pricing and will place value on the "quality" of the traffic.

No doubt most Adwords clients have Google Analytics installed on their site, so Google would see the whole picture from click through to conversions (that is if the user has set Goals).

Also, advertisers may have paused their campaigns over the Christmas/New Year break.

 

[Takwa]

I have seen a 5 to 10% dropped but I thought it was just normal, I would have thought the advertising would go up as my companies are recovering

 

[Tricky1]

Could it be down to more companies selecting to only display their ads on the search network, as oppossed to the content network.. saving costs and targeting only the genuine customers.

I know that when I was running my own campaigns for my business a couple of years ago, I ended up using the search only as the ctr on the content was very low.

Not saying that is it.. just my own experience.

 

[foz]

I think its true to say that the traffic from paid search is of higher quality than content traffic. In turn, the cost of content traffic is far less.

The advertiser will decide what streams of traffic are of value to them and price bid accordingly.

What you and I get paid as publishers, is left up to Google and its downstream partners e.g. parking companies.

 

[Tricky1]

so a site like yours should do welll.

Who's site DA, are you talking to me, reason I ask is I'm the only one with a site in my sig, if so will look into it as it's something I've never used or heard of..

 

[retired_member12]

Actually, I just found this article which could explain a few things:

Google banned 30,000 advertisers post Economic Resurrection ? The Register

More important than ever to make sure the content matches the top advertisers needs then.

 

[lethal0r]

my adsense income has been down considerably since november / december.

I always wondered why, thats a very interesting article. there must be some correlation.

 

[retired_member12]

To a certain degree, I'd say the Adsense/Adwords programs actually fueled domain registrations in certain areas.