Thread: Earnings Increase but CTR goes down.

As you all know I joined NB a week ago and since then I've made a few small changes to my AdSense based on what I've read here. Those changes are: Added a link list, added AdSense to my sidebar, added the Break out of Frame plugin, and changed link colours.

In five days I've doubled my AdSense income however looking at the AdSense reports it seems my CTR and eCPM have halved. Clicks haven't doubled yet earnings have and I am really confused. Why has this happened? In particular I would like to ask if anyone else has ever noticed increased earnings and lower CTR, is this normal?

Have your number of impressions increased a lot?

If CTR and eCPM have fallen but earnings have increased the only remaining possibility is that you have had much more visitors than usual - so probably nothing to do with the changes you made (although perhaps the breaking out of frames has increased the number of site visitors, number of pages visited etc and increased income that way).

Originally Posted by DickTracy

Have your number of impressions increased a lot?

If CTR and eCPM have fallen but earnings have increased the only remaining possibility is that you have had much more visitors than usual - so probably nothing to do with the changes you made (although perhaps the breaking out of frames has increased the number of site visitors, number of pages visited etc and increased income that way).

My page impressions have tripled but my CTR and eCPM have halved.

Well that's great that page impressions are up 3 fold.
Sometimes traffic arrives in big waves from sites like digg and stumblupon - but almost never makes any money, maybe something like that happened with you?

Depends also whether you are talking about big numbers - traffic going from 10 to 30 pageviews is probably just a normal daily variation, but going from 10000 to 30000 is more important.

If in doubt - get google analytics on your site, so you get a better idea where traffic is coming from etc.

But everything else being equal (ie all the traffic is SE traffic) perhaps the changes you have made have made the CTR fall - if visitors are up 3x and income isn't. I'd keep testing, and studying where the traffic is coming from.

Originally Posted by DickTracy

Well that's great that page impressions are up 3 fold.
Sometimes traffic arrives in big waves from sites like digg and stumblupon - but almost never makes any money, maybe something like that happened with you?

Depends also whether you are talking about big numbers - traffic going from 10 to 30 pageviews is probably just a normal daily variation, but going from 10000 to 30000 is more important.

If in doubt - get google analytics on your site, so you get a better idea where traffic is coming from etc.

But everything else being equal (ie all the traffic is SE traffic) perhaps the changes you have made have made the CTR fall - if visitors are up 3x and income isn't. I'd keep testing, and studying where the traffic is coming from.

Thanks for your answer, I have Google analytics on the site, and in the last week most of the new traffic is coming from Google images. Traffic has increased from around 1000 uv per day to 3000 uv per day, and pageviews from around 3000 per day to 16000 per day. At the same time bounce rate has suddenly plummeted from around 60% down to 28%. Income has still doubled.

The only thing I can think of is that more of my clipart is now ranking near the top in Google images, but VERY soon I'm going to need new hosting if this continues, I'm already using around 40gb bandwidth per month, but the problem is that income has only doubled while traffic has tripled, and CTR and eCPM have gone down. So I'm not sure why this should be happening. Any ideas?

In my experience visitors from google images are usually less likely to click on ads - often they just want to look at the picture, or pinch it, rather than browse around the site.

Is this other people's experience also?

Thanks DT for your help. Does anyone know if I can track Adsense clicks by where the referrer comes from? If I can say with reasonable certainty that Google Image traffic ISN'T clicking ads then I would be happy to install a plugin that doesn't show them ads.

I know you can setup adsense and analytics to track what URL's and keywords the click is made on with the amount earned, but don't know if it will give you the source from analytics for the source URL. The give source + keyword though.