Why a Drop in Adsense Revenue?
I recently made some adjustments to the layout over at PCMech. Nothing I thought was very drastic. I was simply re-organizing some elements and fixing some long-time problems (like creeping CSS layers in IE). Well, after I went live with the new layout, I began keeping a close eye on the various revenue sources. One of the things that caught my eye big time was a drastic reduction in clicks generated by Google Adsense. The CTR (click-through radio) went down by almost 0.5%, which is quite a bit. And since it is clicks which generate revenue, that obviously affects my bottom line.
I had a few theories on why this might be the case and I started looking at the situation. My theories are:
- The ad is placed right next to the tabbed content loader, so perhaps users are more interested in that than the ads.
- When I changed the design, I also changed the URL structure to the articles. I made sure that all the pre-existing URLs to articles still work (don’t want to break any pre-existing links), but I made all the articles use the titles to generate the URL, much like Wordpress does. I did this because using keywords in the URL is much better for SEO than an article ID number. Problem is, all those new URLs are new to Google, too, and the ads may not be as well targeted as they were, thus generating less click traffic.
You can view our new review on the Ion DEC-180 Digital Media Center to see what I am talking about.
Right now, I am leaning toward the second item above as the likely explanation. In order to help just a bit, I went ahead and adjusted the colors of the ads so that the links match the link color in the site’s articles. That is always a good idea. And, to test my theory, I set up a URL channel in Adsense so that I can track revenue based on the URL being used to call up the ad. I have URL channels now set up for the old article URL format, and another for the new article URL format. I can then see which is generating the higher click-through. My guess is that the new URLs just have not been spidered yet by Google. Once they have, I bet the revenue will increase. We shall see, and I will let you know.
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You are not alone. I have done nothing to my site and I have seen a drop this past month by well over half of what I was getting on a monthly basis. I even went as far as thinking it was my domain host as one evening quite late at night I noticed my site was down but within the hour it was back up so I didn’t do anything about it. Then I realized the google bot would be affected big time if it couldn’t find my site, therefore I am still discussing this one outage which I have been assured it was the one and only but regardless if I do not see things increase again within the next month I’ll be doing a lot more wondering. It is nice to see however, that I am not alone and therefore can start to point fingers at google instead of my domain host.