Last two months revenue decreased

[Matthew]

I have seen a large decrease in revenue over the past two months, almost as high as 50%. I was making around $2000 a month with half as many visitors as I am getting now. Now I am making only $1300-$1500 a month on the same site (http://www.dxcurrencies.com) with more than twice as many visitors.

The ads are the same, my content hasn't changed a whole lot (well, it's a statistical site so that stats change all the time, but not the wording). Any ideas what is up?

[goofy166]

I saw this exact same thing happen, two months ago I was making 50% more from Google than now. I have no clue what happened, but I saw my impressions take a dive, so that is one part of it. EPC stayed the same and so did CPM. I saw the number of indexed pages on Google drop as well.

I could chalk it up to the seasonal nature of my subject -- birds -- but 50% is really a big drop and it happened all at once, not slowly. Anyone else see this? Joel you have any clues?

[hartworks]

I've noticed a drop though not as great a percentage.

In my case, it seems to be in large part that the last of the Traffic Equalizer sites I had created some time ago are dropping down down down. I've got two such sites left, and neither have TE pages indexed on G but they both had quite a few pp on Yahoo and some on MSN.

It was ironic there that my Adsense income was coming from Yahoo traffic! Nice while it lasted.

I know people are still making money with TE but it is no longer my cup of tea. Now I'm working on various content sites, by which I mean that I write the pages, and as the old sites dropped I am gradually seeing my newer sites pick up about half of what I lost.

[goofy166]

What is a Traffic Equalizer site exactly? So do you mean you used Yahoo Sponsered Search to drive traffic to your site?

[gjansen]

I am in the same boat as you. I purchased Joel's manual in July and started implementing the ideas. The click through rate on my most popular blog increased substantially. On another site, it also improved by a few percentage points (it was already averaging 11%).

For the month of August, however, my revenue has declined by 25 to 40% depending on the day. I have wild fluctuations now. My earnings on the bad days is only one third of my best days.

Could this coincide with the release of the new Adwords keyword classifications? For those who are not Adwords members, Google has altered its classification for keywords. They are now classified as being active or inactive and as a result many advertisers have to re-balance their accounts or increase their bid prices.

Shall we hold tight and wait for things to smooth out once the advertisers get up off the floor?

Glen.

ps. Traffic Equalizer is an automatic page generation tool. People who own it can create hundreds or thousands of pages per day by combining articles, RSS data, search engine result scrapings and product data.

[ukjim]

I agree with Glen that the recent changes to Adwords may have had an impact with advertisers re-evaluating their campaigns.

I have had to. In some campaigns my Ads got 10 or 20 keywords Disabled (pending deletion after an initial period for people to rework them), and some keywords that are now Inactive which previously were costing say 5 cents, now require a minimum bid of 10 cents to re-activate them.

So it will be making advertisers think long and hard about the value of their keywords and how much they are willing to spend.

On top of all the usual holiday period, etc.

[Matthew]

Funny enough, the same day that I posted this my eCPM increased by 50%! Maybe Google is watching these forums and helping us when we complain - maybe I'll complain some more!

Hopefully this is not just a spike and will continue as it is providing a lot more revenue each day.

[tomvilfroy]

although I have had my site (about 8) go up and down..some up, some down, in traffic.

Now my first site has the traffic, which is 180 from the month before of nothing.

[goofy166]

In the last five days since Google instituted there new AD rates that publishers must pay I have seen my earnings about double. EPC is way up, so perhaps these new rates are helping AdSense users at the expense of publishers?

[derrickp]

Great information here, since the new Adwords changes I have seen a slight increase in earnings with the same traffic, but this is too short of a time frame to tell if it is for real. A month from now lets see :)

Derrick

[regent]

I have definitely noticed a change in my earnings since the Google Adwords changes. I think a lot of advertisers (including me) are taking a wait and see attitude about paying more for their affected keywords before coughing up the extra cost.

Linda

[Flashni]

My earnings have risen by around 20% per month in the past three months and have just passed what I earned last month on 23rd.

I put alot of this down to Yahoo finally indexing sites in full at the start of the month and increased traffic from them.

However, I have no decreased income from G.

My sites are all content sites rather than portals. I believe that the SEs are starting to get a bit fussier with blogs due to excessive blogging and pinging.

It would be interesting is those with decreases or increases stated what type of sites they run, ie, content, portal/TE type, blog, forum, etc.

[Mommy2GG]

My highest income ever was this past July and looks like August will be better. 2 of my sites are blogs and the other site is a just a regular content/contest site. So far this month, I have made most of my money with one of my blog sites.

[flyer]

I think results are all over the map for many reasons. My ad income for August is on track to be less than half of July's, with lower traffic to match. That sounds bad, but July was my best month ever, more than double June. So if you ignore July, I've been fairly steady for several months.

[Chuck Brown]

I, too, had my best month ever in July...up significantly from June. But... August is currently running 25% lower than July did... though starting to trend back up a bit here at the end of the month.

I don't know what to attribute it to. I do know that I was seeing lower-paying ads. I know that my traffic has continued to drift down, even as my income has risen substantially.

I spend a lot of time every day on reciprocal linking (avg. 2 hrs). I've experimented lately with buying some text links (frankly, without much positive effect). And I'm spending a fair chunk of change working some interesting angles now...so I expect things to improve over time.

I consider reciprocal linking...at best...a necessary evil (necessary because Google made it that way). I am convinced that, over time, its power is declining. All the experts believe that Google is moving toward relevance as a major factor in the weight it gives to links.

The constant shifting of the rules can be really frustrating.

But, I still feel like this is a much better way to make a living than digging ditches. :p

c-

[flyer]

It's summer, lots of people are on vacation or outdoors & therefore online less, etc. Or they are staying inside more since it's so hot. :D You can come up with reasons to explain anything.