Those bloggers utilizing Adsense as an income stream who track their statistics usually notice that the price paid per click fluctuates from month to month. I track my cost per click earnings and it is not unusual to have a 20% drop or rise from one month to the next. Fathom Online tracks this too across many keywords and noticed that in their last period after the holidays that there was significant drops in some kewords and an overall drop of 3%.
‘Most surprising was the 28 percent drop in Telecom-Wireless products and services from $1.09 to $.79, possibly reflecting the trend to give cell phones as a gift during the holidays. Keywords in the Consumer-Retail category also decreased significantly by 11 percent from $.58 to $.52 per keyword, evening out some of the huge gains that category registered early in the fourth quarter 2004 when the frenzy to buy shopping keywords was at its peak.’
This doesn’t surprise me in the least – with the rise in keyword costs in the lead up to Christmas things had to slow down at some point.
Check out their table tracking different keyword categories – the big winner this last month was Finance/Mortgage keywords.
