I’ve recently noticed that my AdSense revenue started plummeting after managing to get some healthy income from AdSense for a quite a while and thought that maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe I was attracting the wrong type of traffic, maybe I had too many or too few ads on my sites, it drove me mad. Especially seeing the traffic rising, the number of clicks rising on a daily basis, but the revenue I’m getting per click lowering on a daily basis (today the average revenue per click was at its lowest and it can’t go lower, unless they put more decimal points to the US currency).
Only after reading fromtheold’s comment on twitter which said something in the line of “AdSense is getting more and more useless by the day” did I realise that I’m not the only one who’s seeing the decline in ad revenue from AdSense.
To put things in perspective, the economic turmoil has everything to do with it!
Let’s say an advertiser spends a $1000 on online PPC advertising. In a good economy, people are spending a lot more and the advertiser might make $5000 profit in online sales directly stemming from the $1000 ad campaign. During economic turmoil, people spend less money, the ad campaign will still cost the advertiser $1000 (since people will still click on the ads), but less people will actually buy the product being advertised meaning the advertiser might only make $1500 in online sales making his ROI (return on investment) a lot less than it used to be. Since the advertiser is making less sales, the advertiser is forced to lower his bids on keywords which means, pretty soon he’ll disappear from the ads being displayed, making his ad campaign ineffective (which will eventually lead to the advertiser halting his online marketing campaign).
This leads to two things, first, the number of unique ads decreases rapidly which leads to a decline in the number of recorded clicks (people won’t click on the same IQ test ad more than once). Second, since the competition is diminishing, advertisers can lower their bids on keywords meaning the revenue per click is also lower.
The result? Blogs turning into advertising squatercamps, mashing AdSense with tons of other PPC (as well as PPM) providers, affiliate links and paid for blog posts polluting the blogosphere. Guess it’s time to find some alternative income sources …
This is true. Where one usually could have one or two ads on you now need a entire army of different ads to keep up.
Another thing I just thought about is that if everyone then stuff their sites with Adsense there will be much more publishers and the Advertisers can then pay less.
That could be another reason, it’s like a vicious circle of self-destruction.
I’ve drastically reduced the number of ads on all my sites, this way I’ll only get the highest paying ones to display (as well as have a cleaner more organised layout).
I’ve lessen mine as well today :)
Seen any improvements in revenue?
I get less clicks but more per ad on average, which means my blog and other sites using adsense are a lot cleaner in appearance, but the total revenue is still a lot lower than it used to be.
I am removing it tomorrow! Time for new things.
Free highest paying keywords March 2009 update, highpayingkeywords{dot}clicks-pay{dot}com
Sheesh, those top ones seem really competitive!
Thanks Ezra, think this might help a lot :-D