Written on December 4th, 2007 at 09:12 pm by Darren Rowse
Analysis of AdSense Earnings - Post Click Zone Changes
Amit has posted some analysis of his AdSense earnings since the changes that AdSense made two weeks ago to the clickable zones on their ad units.
Amit says that his CTR has dipped slightly and his eCPM has remained fairly steady.
I thought I’d take a look at the same figures of my own AdSense earnings (I run AdSense on a couple of my other blogs but not ProBlogger).
Here’s how my own stats look (I’ve stripped them of actual figures as it’d break AdSense TOS to share them).
I’ve gone back two weeks before the changes were officially announced by AdSense (on the 15th November) so that you can see the trend before the changes were made.
Here’s how it looks:
It’s an interesting graph on a few levels.
I should say that the interpretation of the figures are made more difficult because we’re just entered the ‘Silly Season’ where advertisers begin to spend more on advertising in the lead up to the Holidays - this traditionally pushes eCPM up a little.
Having said that - the raw figures show that CTR (click through rate) has definitely been lower (in fact some of those days are my lowest CTR for a long time) but the eCPM (the earnings per 1000 impressions) have remained steady - and in fact have had some very good days (or at worst, considering the ’silly season’ seem to have remained steady).
It is too early to tell (we need another couple of months data after Christmas to see the real impact) but at least on my figures the expected hit in earnings hasn’t been too bad. My own actual earnings are steady (if not slightly up).
However I can’t help but wonder what earnings would be like if CTR were higher with the increased eCPM that I’m seeing.
How do these figures fit with your own?
17 Responses to “Analysis of AdSense Earnings - Post Click Zone Changes”
Arkenor
December 4th, 2007 9:41 pm
Interesting. I’m glad that I haven’t arrived at the Adsense party too late, after all. There’s been a lot of folks talking about the changes having had a far worse effect on their earnings, and it was getting rather discouraging!. Now if I can just get my CTR above 0.4!
Krzysztof Lis
December 4th, 2007 10:12 pm
I have similar results, though my CTR is more turbulent. ;) I must say that on my web sites the clickable area was changed couple days after it was announced on Inside AdSense…
Rhys
December 4th, 2007 11:23 pm
Before Change: $0
After Change: $0
Yep, no change there!
(ironically, my Text Link Ads has gone up ever since my page rank has dropped)
Anthony Lawrence
December 4th, 2007 11:40 pm
I agree - no real changes. Possibly down a little bit, but it all varies so much I cannot be certain yet.
Andy
December 5th, 2007 12:18 am
I didn’t notice any changes to my Adsense earnings, still low compared to the effort involved to generate income via this route.
Mike Goad
December 5th, 2007 12:26 am
My earnings were dropping before the change, but have rebounded and started rising, not that I make that much.
Ari Shohat
December 5th, 2007 1:11 am
Hi all, this is indeed very interesting. I have three points to make:
1) A lot of publishers with Adsense have been complaining in the last few months that their adsense earnings have been really staying the same or often dropping as of late despite the fact that traffic actually went up. Some call it the ‘two sided shave’ to mean Google gets away with everything in the middle while paying publishers bare minimum and charging adveertisers maximum they can get away with while having advertisers coming back. Certainly across my business sites I have seen a 30-40 % drop even before this clickable area stuff rolled out. Okay onto my point: one of the plausable conspiracy theories would be that Google rolls this ‘feature’ out now to deflect growing criticisms from publishers as of late. One could reasonably argue that “oh your revenue went down because they cleaned up the ads, you must have had many accidental clicks before”.
2) Holiday ad boost aside, is that perhaps revenues stay nearly same despite a clickthrough decrease because Google already used to account for many clickthroughs as fraud in the past, rightly or wrongly. If they did a good job then, this would explain the stats now with a more efficient clickthrough rate.
3) And finally a third point is that comparisons over few months have to be made very carefully lately while keeping in mind that the dollar is in a freefall. In other words advertising space is morphing and reacting and could account for a lot of changes or revenue drops as I described above without Google having too much to do with it.
sorry about any spelling mistakes, I am on a tiny mobile :)
jhay
December 5th, 2007 1:14 am
The recent changes has decreased my CTR by about 20% so yeah, I’m feeling the ugly end of it.
If this continues and the measures I try to catch up fail, I’m leaning closer to dropping AdSense as a money-making tool.
Joe
December 5th, 2007 1:56 am
Adsense can be a tough earner anyway, but it’s doing ok on my sites. I wish I had more traffic and a higher click thru rate though. I’m still getting a few clicks a day, so I guess not much has changed for me.
Keith
December 5th, 2007 3:33 am
I took a look at my big site that relies on adsense each month, and the averages for the 15 days before and after the change did not change at all for CTR, but are up 10% for eCPM. It will be interesting to see if things change as they go forward.
Dean @ Technical Itch
December 5th, 2007 4:42 am
Both CTR and eCPM have increased for me, but I’m not sure if that is due to the changes in the click zones. I’ve seen steady growth for several months now so other factors could be contributing to the improvement.
Natalie
December 5th, 2007 6:00 am
As an internet user, I welcome the change from GoogleAds - I have in the past clicked on Google ads by mistake and that annoys the hell out of me because it takes me to a page I don’t want to view and it distracts me away from what I am reading.
As for my own blog, I’ve not seen any change in CTR and eCPM, but my traffic is relatively modest.
However, the low value of the US$ is a bad thing for us europeans!
Tony
December 5th, 2007 7:07 am
CTR and CPM are up for me. Maybe more relevant ads?
Webmaster Marty
December 5th, 2007 8:00 am
Great post. I think CTR has dropped a little because the clickable area was re-defined so now there are no accidental clicks… or not so many anyway!
jackbravo
December 5th, 2007 8:26 am
I don’t have a big blog or anything, but after the change my adsense went from about 50cents a day to about 5 cents a day.
That’s pretty signicant for a small blog like me.
Carleenp
December 5th, 2007 8:27 am
I have not seen enough of a change for anything to be significant. My earnings have been going up substantially, not just from adsense, but from all sources. I attribute that to the shopping season, both in terms of advertisers spending more and in terms of increased traffic from holiday shoppers. The extra traffic would cause clicks to go up too, so it is a bad time of year to draw any conclusions.
Donncha O Caoimh
December 23rd, 2007 5:48 pm
CTR is down by a small amount, and CPM is down by almost a third. December is going to be my worst month in a long time ..
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