My Google Adsense Revenues Showing Signs Of Life
Today while reading the post at TheDomains about Google declaring the recession in Ad revenues over I was reminded of a post I was meaning to do last week but never came back around too. I have noticed over the past few weeks my Adsense revenues have been looking up. My traffic overall has not significantly increased on any of the names (until yesterday but thats another story).
While I will not shoot out specific numbers I noticed that on sites that were receiving clicks in the 30 cent range a few months back I am now looking closer to 70 cents on average which is close to on par with numbers mid-2008 on the same sites. That is a significant jump. If it was just one site I would not think too much about it but its over several sites.
I cannot say I have done any indepth spreadsheet analysis of this, not enough time to do all of that, but I can say that I compared enough of the numbers to notice a shift.
I don't think this necessarily is Google being nice and letting me have more:) But I do think there is a chance some sectors are starting to recover and the comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt today quoted on TheDomains.com may be the first sign of a bit more money coming back to PPC.
Are any of you seeing the same? I thought it interesting to see that story today and have noticed a rise in earnings lately.
Google Adsense Targeting Fail – Wordpress Caching Tips
Today while reviewing my Google Adsense statistics for my Wordpress news aggregation site focused on the Apple iPhone I noticed that the CTR and RPC had dropped dramatically the past 24 hours. This site is a very consistent performer so it was an obvious drop even though it was only over a short period of time. Initially I dug into the Awstats and some other tools I use and could not quite put my finger on it then I took a look at the front page of the site and realized that for the last 18 hours a few of the front page articles were either on the iPhone sexual offender app or an app used for locating criminals.
Based on this Google Adsense had targeted the ads on the site exclusively on sexual offender sites, criminal record sites, and other ads such as that. As you can imagine on a site that has thousands of pageviews a day all focused on iPhone apps the CTR dropped like a rock. This site has been up and running for over 2 years and I have never had this happen. Did not take long to figure out but still a bit of a pain and a shock to initially see such a drop in revenue before I could see the problem.
On another note, if you do happen to run a high traffic news aggregation site on Wordpress and seem to be having page load time issues and general performance issues there are a few things you can do. At one point around a year ago I was having constant issues (HTTP server dying, MYSQL issues, etc) with this site. After trying everything that could be done to tweak the server (it was on its own VPS) I went with the obvious, I installed the WP-Supercache plugin. Almost immediately the site performance was better. Remember that if you ever into Wordpress performance issues.
