Many webmasters started to see a decline or sudden drop in Google Adsense revenue in September 2006. If websites were not affected by Google’s July 2006 changes many webmasters thought they were going to be all right. September and October 2006 were actually very good months for some web sites, including VoIP websites. Then came Google’s adjustments for December.One webmaster said “something definitely happened to my sites yesterday, 15 September. Earnings from month average down 25%, earnings from recent Fridays down 40%, ctr from month average down 30%, ctr from recent Fridays down 30%, and today is about the same as yesterday.” Reports like these are published everywhere on the web, in blogs and discussion boards, and on static web pages. Clearly there is a dark and bloody time ahead for those that worked hard and published great content.
Unfortunately Google’s ‘Do no harm’ motto is at odds with Adsense and Adwords clients and their perception of what is happening. In fact we see no help from Google and no solution to the problem. Neither do thousands of others. We lived off of the content network instead of trying to compete in the VoIP field straight up with the likes of Vonage and Sunrocket. Adwords were way too expensive to do that and our budget was limited. Landing page quality score was not an issue, keyword density was fine, and Google’s representative gave us a pat on the head – the best way to describe the answers we received:
Another webmaster said “Never seen such a sharp decline! One of my first thoughts (have also read Adwords forum) is it has indeed to do with some heavy adjustments in the content network that hit my site. But what exactly? No clue.” Indeed if you are trying to figure out why Adsense revenue is down and increasing your Adwords spending make no noticeable difference you are not alone. We are all in the dark. However, we did notice that the content network and non-US versions of Google have not adjusted to new changes in the United States. Perhaps such changes are ongoing, as it has been a while since we saw a decent day like we once had. In fact as we write this article we have yet to earn more than pennies.We tested one new page, combined with Adwords to push traffic to the page. In the past we were happy to spend a small amount on Adwords and we say a 10 percent to 100 percent ratio. In other words for every dime we spent on Adwords we made a dollar. Conversely if we had a hypothetical $80 day – hypothetical because we do not want to violate any TOS agreements – we could safely assume we sent no more than $8 to get there. Of course a fair amount of revenue came from the open search. Therein lies the problem. What happened to the open search, and search engine positioning? Google Argentina and Google India seem to look the same by Google US does not. We have a Live Help traffic monitor running 24 hours a day so we know where our web visitors are.
Not to get off topic, let’s talk about our new test page. As late as early September 2006 we made hypothetical four digit months with 110 to 130 visitors a day from the content Google network and those from the open search – both Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others. In our test we sent 334 visitors to our test page. Revenue did not make it into double digits for the day. Adwords took more than we made on Adsense. Google’s Adsense ads did not pull anything although the subject – VoIP – matched our keywords and page content was relative to the Adsense ad. Even if web page content were poor certainly somebody would click on an ad to leave the site, or select from the menu. It did not happen. Adsense did not monetize at all.
Web masters, blog writers, Adsense publishers and Adwords advertisers deserve an answer from Google. What happened to revenue? We did no harm. Most websites are honest sincere contributions. We report shady MFA sites when we see them. But to have 334 clicks on our Adwords ad and almost no clicks on our website Adsense ads looks more like click fraud coming in to us than real visitors like those we once had when Google search worked correctly.
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Google is having problems for sure. Filtering not working in Adwords, changes upsetting perople, etc. Revenue problems seem to effect voip sites more than others. What changed? Why did it happen? Does anyone know more?
Changes always upsets people but when revenue drops from $1000 per month down to $2 per day Google clearly did something somewhere which impacts certain websites. Google Adsense is not working either for some websites and keywords.