Diagnosing and treating revenue fluctuations (Part II)

Welcome back to the second part of our series designed to help you better understand revenue fluctuations. if you are very new to this post you may want to know the Part-I.

Choose the right treatment

You're finished investigating the cause of the revenue fluctuations, and it's time to take action. Find the symptom you identified below for suggested treatments.

Page impression changes

• Check for AdSense technical issues or public service ads (PSAs). If ads aren't being served on your site, we aren't registering page impressions.
  
• Don't miss out on search traffic. Use Webmaster Tools to make sure that Google is properly crawling and indexing your site.
  
• Consider the promotions you have running for your site. Did an ad campaign end, causing a drop in traffic? Has a popular site linked to you, causing a spike in page impressions?
  

CTR changes

• A drop in CTR can be caused by a user interface (UI) that's not optimized or by poor targeting. Readers won't click on ads they don't see or find irrelevant. To improve the relevance of your ads, you might want to try section targeting.
  
• Check for crawl problems. If our system can't crawl your page, we can't serve relevant ads.
  
• If you've implemented or changed your ad server, check that there are no new targeting problems.
  
• Have you changed the look and feel of your site? Follow our optimization best practices whenever launching a site redesign. An easy way to start is to match the ad colors to the design of your site and choose a top performing unit such as the 300x250 medium rectangle.
  
• If your CTR has been in a slow decline, your readers may be experiencing ad blindness. Try testing new ad formats, placements, or colors.
  

CPC changes

• CPCs are determined by advertiser bids and are not directly under publisher control. Most large CPC changes are seasonal. For example, certain ad verticals attract more spending during the holiday or back-to-school seasons.
  
• CPCs can also fluctuate as advertisers begin and end their advertising campaigns.
  
• You can always improve your CPCs by choosing ad formats that support all ad types: text, image, video, flash, and gadget ads. More competition means higher advertiser bids.
  

Placement targeting revenue changes
If overall targeted revenue is changing, determine what your average placement-targeted revenue has been for the past few months. Your goal is to determine if the changes in your recent earnings are part of a trend or a short-term earnings fluctuation.

• Publishers can experience spikes in placement-targeted revenue when advertisers run limited-time campaigns. For example, an advertiser may run a large placement-targeted campaign only during the opening week of a summer blockbuster movie.
  
• If you want to increase placement targeting over the long term, set up ad placements. This will make it easier for advertisers to find and target your site.

  

Diagnosing and treating revenue fluctuations (Part I)

The goal of this post, and our follow-up later this week, is to help you understand the AdSense revenue model so you can diagnose and treat revenue fluctuations like an experienced MD.

Study up

The first step is knowing how the figures reported in your account (such as eCPM, CTR, and page impressions) interact to describe your total revenue. Think of each number as a variable in the revenue formula for your site. At the highest level, you can calculate revenue by multiplying your page impressions by the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM) and dividing by 1000.

Revenue = Page Impressions * eCPM / 1000

eCPM = Revenue / Page Impressions * 1000

The eCPM metric provides an estimate of how much revenue you can expect to earn for every 1000 page impressions. For example, if you serve 10,000 page impressions and earn $40, your eCPM is $4. If page impressions increase to 30,000, you can predict that you'll earn $120 given the $4 eCPM.

Most AdSense ads pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, so eCPM is really a measure of your average ad performance. Breaking eCPM into the click-through-rate (CTR) and the average cost that advertisers pay per click (CPC) gives you a more accurate measure of performance.

Revenue = Page Impressions * CTR * average CPC

Once you know your average CTR and your average CPC, you can predict how much revenue you'll earn for a given amount of page views. You can also analyze your revenue by looking at placement-targeted ads versus contextually-targeted ads.

Total Revenue = Revenue (contextual) + Revenue (placement-targeted)

While contextually targeted ads always pay per click, advertisers can pay for placement-targeted ads by impression (CPM) or by click (CPC). To account for both of these bid types, you should look at the average eCPM for placement-targeted ads. More simply, you can just add placement-targeted revenue to your contextually targeted revenue.

Revenue = (Page Impressions (contextual) * CTR * average CPC) + (Page Impressions (placement-targeted) * eCPM (placement targeted) / 1000)

Revenue = (Page Impressions (contextual) * CTR * average CPC ) + Revenue (placement-targeted)

Even though we're looking at contextual and placement-targeted revenue separately, don't forget that these two types of ads compete against each other in the auction. We'll always show the best performing ad, regardless of targeting type, so more competition creates higher winning bids.

Identify the symptoms

Now you're ready to diagnose any revenue fluctuation. Just like the revenue formulas above, let's start simple and gradually get more complex.

The first question to ask is: Did either your page impressions or your eCPM change? You can compare trends in both page impressions and eCPM using the Advanced Reports in your account.If your AdSense page impressions have declined, you should determine if traffic to your entire site is declining as well. A web analytics tool such as Google Analytics can provide you with this information. In addition, you should check your pages for unpaid public service ads (PSAs).

If your eCPM is down, you'll need to dig one level deeper and find out if your contextual or placement targeted ad performance has dropped. You can also find this data in the Advanced Reports tab using the options shown below.
For placement-targeted ads, you should analyze how much total placement-targeted revenue you are receiving and the average eCPM. Changes in either of these metrics usually indicate that advertisers are beginning or ending campaigns targeted to your site. Again, placement-targeted campaigns are more likely to be short-term than contextual campaigns.

Free Methods to Get Traffic for New Blogs

Blog is the one of the most popular medium that enables publishers to start earning money with Adsense. Content is the very first thing that you need to have. After that, driving traffic to your blog is also a very difficult part. Questions on driving traffic to the blog are always the most popular question to be raised in Adsense Help Discussion Group. Joing PPC advertising program can be one effecive way, but not every blog publisher can affor to pay to join such program. In this post, I am going to discuss three quickest yet free method that drive the first stream of traffic to your blog.

1. Post messages and leave signature on related forums/ groups

Just like what I normally do in Adsense Group. Leaving the URL of your blog as the signature is quite effective in driving traffic to your site. All you have to do is find some forums or groups that are related to your area of interest. Just like my blog, who is talking about making money with Adsense, I choose the Adsense Help Group as my primary forum to leave messages. Of course, if you have time, you can find out more related forums by searching through various Search Engines.

Go to a few that you find informative and read around a bit. Join a couple of the forums, that you find interesting and are of value to you, as a member. However, one thing to remind you is that you should check out two things before joining any forum after doing searching.

- A forum must be indexed by the search engines, particularly by Google. If it's indexed, your posts will appear as backlinks to your site, raising your blog's PR (PageRank) in the search engines. You can gain search engine traffic as a result.

- A forum must also permit the use of a signature file. By creating a signature, that includes your blog URL, you have a link that brings forum members back to your blog.

In your member profile, be sure to use a "signature" that includes a link back to your blog. Make certain the signature appears on all of your postings. Without that link, no new traffic can find you.

2. Tell everyone you know about your blog

This offline networking technique will bring a fresh batch of visitors to your blog. As you become more comfortable with talking to people about your blog, your traffic numbers will take a jump. Many of them will surf to your blog, to read what you have to say.

But remember, only ask your friend or relative to visit your blog, but do not mention or request them to click the ads for you. Encouragement or providing incentives to click your ads is highly prohibited under Google’s TOS. Bear that in mind!

3. Put your links on your e-mails

When you send out any e-mails, either personal or business, be sure to add a link to your blog to each and every one of them.

With a quick and easy to click hot link back to your blog, many of your e-mail recipients will drop by for a look. While not everyone will check out your blogging activities, a few will. Another source of new visitors has been added, with minimum effort.

These three free and quickest methods are, after trial, quite effective to drive traffic to a new blog. You should make a try on them now and start earning big bucks through Adsense!