Yesterday it was revealed that AdSense were making the clickable portions of their Ad Units Smaller. Today we’re seeing these changes rolling out on different publishers sites. It seems that this means different things for different ad unit sizes. For example 468×60 and 234×60 ad units still seem clickable on the text of ads – perhaps because they don’t have a URL on these ads. All other ad units that I’ve seen just have the title and URL clickable.
So my question to you is – have you noticed any decreases in CTR yet?
We probably won’t see the full impact of the changes in today’s earning results as they’ve been rolling out during the day – but my own CTR is lower today than any other day for this month. Having said this – I’ve had lower days (2 were lower in October) – so I won’t really know what impact it’s had for a few days as things do tend to rise and fall.
How about you – is your CTR up or down today?
Today is my blackday after starting adsense. Yday it was $100. I think today i can hit only $25. I have very tough time to optimize my ads. If anyone have ideas please post it here. This change will make new wave in the adsense world. Infact this is good for long trem. We have to bare this low atleast for few months.
My CTR has dropped 1.67% lower compared to usual. CPC has dropped 10 cents per click.
Today is the 4th worst day of the year so far… but the other 3 worst days were days that we were doing split testing with Adsense.
I will be dropping Adsense if they don’t fix this by Jan. 1.
Earnings are down upwards of 50% (hard to say due to natural daily variance). CTR is lower. However, it seems logical that earnings should gradually go back up to where they were as advertisers see value in paying more to get those higher quality clicks.
My earnings started to go down, but have since recovered (within a day!).
My Advide: Post more often than usual, or put more quality into the stories and your earnings will return.
~Darnell
This is a very interesting post, a friend sent it to me as being important. My first thought was, big or small, who cares, a person who read the advertisement and is trying to click will get it to work. Oh yea, then I remembered, many people put ad so close to other ads they get accidental clicks.
I have a techie that works for me, i give him huge chat lectures about thoughts like this. I said I make good money from from google. Please do not tempt them to ban me, I could lose my whole income because of some sneaky methods. I try to set policy that all adsense has to have a good distance between it and the text, I want zero accidental clicks. I wish it was that easy to just say, get the distance this far.
Google does not tell you the rules, my advice is to make more blog post and make the on topic aspect better. I am starting to know that many post on my blog is a problem. They go off topic and the density of keywords is decreased, and then googles ads are confused. (hmm does this comment box have spell check…very good.)
I also thought, so 99 percent went from making 1 dollar to making 99 cents. I wanted to say to my friend, focus on making on making more pages, the more good content pages you make, the more money. Try to get honest clcks and somehow google knows and likes you. My clicks did not go down. I have about .. oops. I thinks TOS of google.com I am not suppose to talk about this.
My advice is get rid of any accidentally clicks, and any confused person clicks, make them focus on the content. When they get bored, hope they click to leave on an ad.
Andy of HoboTraveler.com — Free Hotel WebPages
I’m glad I read this post. Now I know it’s just not my site. My earnings are down >50%.
My CTR is way lower than usual. Right now it is 0.49%… Of course the earnings are much lower too.
Down 40%, too bad. The worst thing is that in Latinamerica there’s no alternatives, we have adsense and nothing else, there’s no chitika, no amazon, … This is really awful
My CTR and eCPM dropped incredibly :-S
I never quite understood why advertisers would raise the click price. I know I would not. I would say, great, more conversions with a lower budget. Lets put some more money into Adwords bidding on the same terms and the same click prices to get even more conversions.
Can’t see that this will benefit publishers at all in the long run.
I’m Seeing no change for the 15th & 16th
@ Martin
You said “I would say, great, more conversions with a lower budget”
That is not how it works. The good old “invisible hand” is at work here. More bidders should simply lead to a higher price. You are assuming some Kartel or agreement between buyers that is impossible.
Some other conspiracy theories from my twisted mind that are more likely:
– Perhaps Google concluded that there is an 80/20 rule, 20% of their publishers generate 80% of revenues and the new settings won’t hurt their top dogs and will shake out the smaller publishers where the profit margin (costs vs returns) is lower.
– also, like widgetbucks, Google is optimizing its installed base of publishers ridding itself of unattractive countries / publishers.
By running thier alghrithms they must have found reducing the click area is a much more elegant way to shake out unwanted publishers than a discrimination (country) based shake out that would potentially hurt their image (big evil Google etc.).
It is all geared towards some natural “Shake-out” IMHO. Just like Widgetbucks, Adsense wants a higher return per publisher shaking out the small publishers / publishers in countries that don’t convert well.
In the end, it’s business.
CTR way down, pay per click way down, impressions aren’t counted (compared to my traffic, it’s going towards *half* of my actual impressions).
Don’t know what is up, but Google really are messing with us.
I also just noticed my CTR is way down, but my pageviews are up… Less money… more stickiness.
Time to exploit some more CPM programs… ;-)
My adsense earnings are severly affected, and I’m sure sooner or later, everyone will realize that Google ads are no longer worth the space given to them. Pls post about some good adsense alertnatives available internationally.
My CTR has dropped from 9-10% to about 6% now which means that i’m earning 40% less everyday. I wanted to wait it out a couple days before I report and now my CTR has been steady at 6% for the past 4 days, never has been this low and today isn’t any better, I’m at about 2.5% CTR. I’ll be dropping adsense today and moving on.
My CTR and CPM have been cut by over half and I am usings Google ads that look like regular blue links with a white background – nothing out of the ordinary as far as background and border color. I hope the cost per click rises over the next few weeks or month as advertisers will be competing for fewer click now.
We have found that as we add more Content to our site we gain a better CTR. We have our ups and downs but where we have good inbound links and intra-links combined with on-target content relevant to our business theme we see the climb.
For those of you who are seeing a decrease, do you think it is because you were getting a lot of accidental clicks? Those accidental clicks decrease the value of all clicks. If more clicks were intentional and converted for advertisers, the value of each click would go up. As someone who only wants intentional click-throughs, I have not seen a decrease in CTR or revenue and don’t think I will. I am happy with the change.
I advertise ON Google AdSense as well, and I never want anyone to click on my ads and force me to pay unless they are actually interested in the content. Advertisers will love this change. It will increase their confidence in Google. And that’s in the best interest of the long-term health of the network.
Way down. Here’s Hoping that EPC goes up in the long run.
Way down, will quite adsense soon
Yes thats right but maybe in this case less clicks better per click money?
Yes CTR has gone down but not too much. I provide Free mobile downloads and produce over 100K adsense impressions daily on different sites.
I noticed almost 8 to 10% decrease in clicks I was getting. I think it is good decision to keep the advertisers comming back with confidence.
It’s interesting how people are reporting numbers from 20%+ down to like 1%. I guess it depends on what site you have, I’m just trying to figure out what kind of adsense numbers i should shoot for on my site.
I guess it depends on your first impression of your page or how you put your ads. I decorate my ads with background images and my CTR increases to 10%. May be you would to like to know how place the ads with background images. Here’s the link http://djyano.blogspot.com/2008/04/increase-adsense-ctr-with-background.html
Regards,
The-Online-Quest
well sometime CTR not well, i mean CTR down due to no clicks but CTR have no relation with page impressions.
Thanks
CPM of my site is also dropped from 3.5 to around 2
You will have 3-4 ads on your page MAX. (NOT ad blocks. ADS). The fewer Adsense ads show on a page, the higher the average earnings per click for you. If you place more ads on your page, they will show ads that rank lower on Adwords (and are cheaper). You don’t want people to click on ads that pay you $0.05. You want them to click on ads that pay you $0.50!
It seems that page CTR has dramatically dropped for many blogs which directly affected daily income.A couple of top-earning blogger have mentioned this to me last month but I brushed it aside thinking that it could be some pre holiday advertising jitter of some sort. Usually, the month of October and November are the lowest months of the year but it also depends on the niche of the blog.
This is another move by Google against publishers that signifies a “shark jumping trend” we should expect to see more of over the next year. Whereas Google before was an innovation company i.e products and programming to support products, they are now retreating into a “preserve and enhance revenue” mode. Google is penalizing adopters of the technology for a number of reasons; advertiser maturity, better revenue through lower payouts, etc.
Google fails to see the value of billions of long tail channels in favor of the short term big pay out.
My CTR is down but my earnings per click is up a tad. I am not sure if this is Google playing with the percentage they payout or what. Advertisers haven’t adjusted their rates yet as I believe they will with better quality clicks.
CTR is good but CPM have prob. what can i do?
(My CTR is down but my earnings per click is up a tad) how can this possible.