Adsense Earnings October 2007 (And Ramblings About Other Possible Income Streams).

Earnings

Oh Dear!

Visitor and page views were approximately the same in October as September, but earnings were massively down!

Earnings for September 2007 were $1091 but October earnings were only $668 !! This is the first big drop in Adsense earnings that I have experienced since I started doing this.

My site was not the only one affected by a big dip in Adsense earnings. See http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=504798 for some examples...

It is very hard to know what the cause of this is. Some theories are that it could be at least partly because of the worldwide recession / and or advertisers tightening their belts before their big Christmas marketing campaigns. There are also (of course) some conspiracy theories that Google have cut the proportion of advertising revenue they give to publishers to boost their revenue and share price - but I personally do not believe this.

Another theory is that I could have been 'smart priced' i.e. Google have decided that my site's visitors do not convert well for advertisers. Apparently, when you have one Adsense account, and you use your Adsense code on more than one web site, if one of those web sites does not convert well, then you get 'smart priced' and your earnings per click do down dramatically. Since this has happened a few months after I pasted Adsense code onto my blog, I decided to remove all Adsense form my blog in case this was a factor (I had already removed most of it anyway to improve the user experience). I have also decided to remove all affiliate links, and all link ad units, and all mention of 'advertising' on my site to see if I can get my eCPM up again.

I also need to make my site much more interactive / 'web 2.0' to get people to stay around longer. My very first, small, minor, tentative step in this direction is to include 'polls' on my web site from polldaddy.com in the space where I had advertising space before (at the top right of the screen).

I simply do not have enough spare time to properly investigate and manage other alternatives to Adsense, so I suppose that in many ways, Google has me by the balls...

NB - I know that when someone says that they 'do not have time' they actually mean 'it is not a priority', but if if I was to move this to the top of my priority list, I would have to leave my full time job! :-(

But if I did have time/different priorities - here are the three things I would investigate properly:-

Affiliate Stuff

Since Christmas is nearly upon us, It may be worth trying some affiliate links from from Calendars.com.

There are definitely a number of things that could be improved about their affiliate program, such as:

• Proper Geo Targetting - (Users from the UK get prices in Dollars and have to search for a 'I live in the UK link' rather than getting automatically redirected to the UK pages).
• Proper formatting of links in Firefox.

BUT - something that these affiliate links DO have on their side is that they can be made to open in a new browser window, so people are more likely to come back to you web site once they have made/ not made their purchase. This is something that you cannot do with Adsense adverts.

I only made $14 from calendars.com last year but I did not have a huge amount of traffic then, so it might be worth trying for some of you.

Kontera Adverts

I am also in the very early stages of looking at Kontera text adverts. I have read a number of reports from people who have used this on their sites alongside Adsense without negatively impacting their Adsense earnings.

Since Kontera only works well on web sites with lots of text, it will probably not give astounding results on my web site, so I am delaying this for now...

NB - Restricting Kontera adverts to one section of your web page is done as follows:-

<div class="KonaBody">
Text on my web page where I DO want Kontera ads to appear
</div>

Direct Advertisers

This is another area worth considering once you get sufficiently high traffic to your web site... (I tried putting up a banner for a while with the offer of free advertising for a while - but there were no takers after a month, and I would probably not have had time to manage this properly anyway - so I took it back down again).

Statistics To Date

The number of RSS subscribers to my blog has now reached the massive total of 25 !!

See http://www.quantcast.com/jmcwd.com for my web stats.

Adsense Earnings History:
Nov 2006 - 161
Dec 2006 - 157
Jan 2007 - 215
Feb 2007 - 271
Mar 2007 - 377
Apr 2007 - 375
May 2007 - 525
June 2007 - 524
July 2007 - 755
Aug 2007 - 811
Sep 2007 -1091
Oct 2007 - 668

Thanks for bearing with me to the end of this (very long) post, and if anyone has any related thoughts, do please leave a comment below (even it is only to say that I have no idea what I am talking about! :-)...