Today I spent a little time digging around in my AdSense earnings stats to see how they’d been performing over the last 6-12 months and particularly was interested in how the RSS advertising was performing.
I decided to pull out some of the data that I found and chart it (I’m a visual kind of guy) and thought I’d share some of what I saw when I analyzed how the ads are performing in the feed of my photography site since August 2008 when I started running AdSense in the feed.
I’ve removed the figures from the chart to comply with the Terms of Service that AdSense has that prohibit sharing of too many specifics but have below charted Earnings (the blue line), eCPM (earnings per 1000 impressions – the Red line) and Impression numbers (the yellow line). I’ve also included a linear trend line to help visualize the average movement.
When I initially looked at the raw data I was surprised to see how much the ads were now earning on a daily basis. It’s been a long while since I looked at the figures so they actually looked quite healthy (RSS ads now make up around 10% of my overall AdSense earnings). My first reaction was that perhaps AdSense have got RSS advertising right at last and it’s starting to earn more per impression.
However the chart above tells a different story with the increase in earnings coming from an increase in impressions. In fact eCPM has been falling.
My next question was whether this fall in eCPM was due to the economy or whether it was more to do with a trend in RSS advertising – so I decided to compare the eCPM of my RSS ads vs the eCPM of the AdSense ads on my site. Here’s what I found:
This surprised me. While RSS eCPM (blue) is on the downward slope onsite eCPM has been on the up and up.
Of course this could be explained by the increase in the popularity of the site and more advertisers targeting it (I’ve noticed that as traffic and the brand of DPS grows that more and more advertisers are targeting the site) – but from what I can see advertisers are targeting the feed as well as the site, yet the eCPM is falling there.
Keep in mind that this is just an observation of a single site – I’m sure it’ll differ from site to site and industry to industry (for example the RSS ads here on ProBlogger’s feeds are performing appallingly less than a tenth of what they earn on DPS despite having half as many subscribers) but it does make me wonder whether others are seeing similar trends?
How is RSS advertising performing for you?
