Adsense CTR Drop

[scgalvin]

Has anyone experience a drop in their ctr with their Adsense ads in say the last six months. I have used Adsense for over 5 years on a network of sites and have always had pretty constant and reliable results. However in the last six months my CTR has dropped by more than half. I haven't changed a thing on my site, my traffic has not changed and I cant think of anything else that would have impacted my CTR like that. I was making decent money with Adsense but after a drop like this it pretty much changes everything.

Does anyone have any ideas on what could have caused this? Has it happened to anyone else.

Thanks

[kgun]

According to ecomnomic theory, free competition drive pure profit to zero. Now, you may be competing with article spinners and automatic article writing software.

Read: Copy scape and duplicate content - more confusing than convincing.

[DaveSawers]

My click through rate has been almost constant over at least the past two years.

My earnings per click have increased steadily since I started the sites six years ago up until a year ago when they started to decline. Earnings per click are currently down to around 55% of their peak. This effect may be what kgun is referring to. This could be due to too many Adsense scraper sites devaluing the bidding for keywords (which is not necessarily good news for advertisers) or a general effect of declining business confidence.

My total earnings are still increasing because page views are still steadily increasing.

[kgun]

And my earnings trend was down until my account was closed

The true face of a global monopoly finally shows up.

and Google reduced themself to pocket thieves. I don't miss them. And I don't rely on their free sevices any longer. I am very sceptical to code on Google code, and prefer code on https://github.com/

Now for the term

the true face of a kgun

this

http://boardreader.com/thread/The_tr...42buX2fsa.html

mined thread is #1 here. That is another confirmation of the message in my first post in this thread.

[scgalvin]

According to ecomnomic theory, free competition drive pure profit to zero. Now, you may be competing with article spinners and automatic article writing software.

But this shouldn't effect my CTR, should it? Also my CTR dropped pretty dramatically about six months ago, it wasn't a gradual decrease.

[kgun]

But this shouldn't effect my CTR, should it? Also my CTR dropped pretty dramatically about six months ago, it wasn't a gradual decrease.

Yes it should if more and more companies start to use the same service, and there is competition among many small (atomistic) units. Deleting random small accounts that is never mentioned on the internet has the opposite effect.

Reccomended book: http://www.amazon.com/Microeconomic-.../dp/0393957357 if you need a deep analysis.

Here economics is like gravitation and Newtons laws. Already classic economist Adam Smith had read Newton.

[morestar]

OK so which site(s) are you speaking about? The one(s) in your signature?

[chrisJumbo]

I have not noticed a decrease in my CTR. But as kgun points out, if everyone is seeing the same ads or the ads aren't as relevant, then there could be a potential drop in clicks. They may have already clicked similar ads on another site.

[kgun]

.... mined thread is #1 here. That is another confirmation of the message in my first post in this thread.

And the mined hit has http://boardreader.com/thread/The_tr...42buX2fsa.html has AdSense on it. Q.E.D.

[zaneypop]

I can't speak directly to why your CTR is dropping but Adsense is definitely not the money maker it once was. The people who bid on the ads are getting a lot more savy and many more sites have Adsense ads increasing the competition for the same pie.

Have you looked at the keywords and other sources that are driving traffic to your site? You mentioned you saw a drop around 6 months ago. I would look at the traffic sources from that date to now and then the previous 6 months and see if you can see anything. If you no longer rank well for terms or a site that gave you good traffic is no longer referring people that were very profitable for you that could be the issue.

In my own personal experience I went from 200 unique visitors a day on one of my sites to 1000 and my earnings barely budged. The keywords that I started getting a lot of traffic from were very relevant and people stuck around on average for 4 pages and had a bounce rate of less than 1 % but my click rate plummeted and the earnings did not move significantly. I went from a 7.5% click thru rate to a 1% CTR. It had nothing to do with the cards being stacked against me, It had to do with the terms I ranked well for no one bid on.Through research I found these terms had high volume but low competition. In retrospect there was a good reason they had no competition.