Interesting conversation going on here. Just the other day I noticed the same thing and fired off an email to Google. Below is the message exchange...
NOTE: Clicks & Earnings have been removed from message below - you know that Google policy violation thingy....
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Subject: Question About PPC Earnings
I said:
I have a question in regards to my commission earnings. I have been closely watching my stats and have noticed some discrepancies. Last week I removed a few pages that were not producing good results, which in turn brought my click-thru rate up from an average of 2.3% to 3.7%. The concern I am having is that I have noticed some days I equal or pass click totals for other days yet earn much less. I don't know if you have access to my statistics, but as an example, on Nov. 3, 2004, I had <--> clicks for a totals of $<-->. On Nov. 11, 2004, I had <---> clicks, yet only earned $<---> - more clicks, less earnings. This is just one example, there are more. Now, I understand the above is small change to Google, but for me it adds up to less earnings at the end of the month. If you can shed some light on this matter for me, it would be greatly appreciated.
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Googles replied with:
Recent enhancements to advertiser pricing and to our targeting will affect publishers in different ways and at different times. While your earnings per click may decrease, your
clickthrough rate may also increase due to the increased relevancy of the ads on your pages. In addition, although you are currently seeing reduced revenue, these changes are intended to increase the long-term revenue potential of the AdSense program by driving increased advertiser participation in the Google content network.
Your AdSense reports will give you a good idea of the effect of these changes over time.
Please feel free to reply to this email if you have additional questions or concerns. We encourage you to let us know how we can improve our publisher support.
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On Monday (11/15), I replied:
Thank you for the speedy reply. Let me see if I got this straight...
Recent Enhancements to Pricing and Targeting = An Increase in Relevancy of Ads = An Increase in Click-thru Rate = An Increase in Google Adsense's Revenue Potential = A Decrease in Site Publisher's Revenue Potential?
In a nutshell, driving more traffic to Google's Adsense (more earnings for Google), site publishers earn less? Am I not getting the picture correctly? This sounds backwards. I would think it would be the other way around - publishers earning more for higher click-thru's and increased traffic to the AdSense program? I sorry if I seem like I'm being difficult here, but I just want to be clear with what is going on.
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Google's reply:
<still awaiting a reply>
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Hope this give some of you a little insight into recent events surrounding Adsense....
-RF
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