My niche site just became #1 in the Google SERPS. My visits have sky rocketed but unfortunately I'm making MUCH less money. I used to make 8 or 9 bucks a day. But now I only make like 50% of that, mainly because the CPC have become MUCHH lower (around 0.15~0.20) with more clicks. When I was third in Google, CPC's were around $1.15 ~2 and I would get 4 or 5 clicks.

Any advice, tips to optimize my Google Adsense? Thanks

Are you targeting a different keyword? If not, with many keywords the CPC fluctuates depending on whether/how many advertisers are bidding on the keyword. There really isn't much to do except wait it out or target some higher paying keywords.

CPC has been really low for me starting 2012. Which makes good sense. I for one don't do any PPC before the 10th, since conversion is really low right after the new year.

Ya, mine dropped pretty bad in January too. I think it's just the month.

I agree with waiting it out; advertisers are just getting their feet back under them after the New Year's festivities.

Originally Posted by lablinks

CPC has been really low for me starting 2012. Which makes good sense. I for one don't do any PPC before the 10th, since conversion is really low right after the new year.

It's been relatively low for me in the past few months for various sites of different niches.

same here as OP .. I was just much less traffic in dec ..this month it doubled but then my clicks slowed down to almost nothing ..

I will wait it out and see if a change occurs

The slow times are the best time to start experimenting with different ad types, positioning, and messing around with the competitive ad filter. I recently changed the interest based ads OFF and noticed a big increase in my cpc and ctr on one of my sites.

Good point fiebs

I wish I had time to experiment with some of the adsense settings. They also have channels now you can add your sites to a specific niche with description, so that advertisers can target better. This sounds like it could bring more relevant advertiser to the site & raise the CTR, since highly relevant adds have much higher CTR.

Originally Posted by download

Are you targeting a different keyword? If not, with many keywords the CPC fluctuates depending on whether/how many advertisers are bidding on the keyword. There really isn't much to do except wait it out or target some higher paying keywords.

Hmm.. good point come to think of it I did target a different keyword but pretty much in the same niche. For example : Let's say I'm #1 in "Silver sword" and #3 in "sword" but when I became #1 in "sword" I'm making less.

It could also be a seasonal thing as well, I guess I'll start experimenting. You guys know of any A/B testing methods with Google Adsense?

January is one of those months that everything seems to stall. I've been through it myself, and it does get better after awhile.

you can ignore this if you want, and maybe it has nothing to do with the specific issue.

but in advertising/marketing in general, pre christmas and christmas everyone spends a lot of money, regardless of wether they have the money or not, and a lot of it goes on credit cards.
so mid january onwards people are receiving their credit card bills for the previous month.
because they do the same thing every year a lot of people have no intention of spending anything because they know the big bills are coming.

Originally Posted by omg123

you can ignore this if you want, and maybe it has nothing to do with the specific issue.

but in advertising/marketing in general, pre christmas and christmas everyone spends a lot of money, regardless of wether they have the money or not, and a lot of it goes on credit cards.
so mid january onwards people are receiving their credit card bills for the previous month.
because they do the same thing every year a lot of people have no intention of spending anything because they know the big bills are coming.

I agree with you. Judging your earnings from one month is not right. At the same time, it may be time for you to add more keywords in your site since you already rank first.

Adsense is all about ranking first in many keywords. So if you have made it in one, the go for the other 50 and the season won't really concern you after that.

Like everyone says, I think many advertisers scale back on advertising expenses quite drastically. One thing you can do is to block small time advertisers who might be bidding to advertise on your site. There is an option in Adsense to do that.

The thing is that you have to guess to figure out who those advertisers are. Just refresh your page many times (use a adsense preview tool if you want to see what ads are loading in other countries) and then quickly copy paste the advertiser url's in your browser. Sometimes, you will see companies with very thin websites advertising on your site. Chances are that they will pay very little for a click, with clever bidding.

After you have blocked a handful of cheap advertisers, give your adsense ads about 24 hours to change. CPC should increase when the cheap advertisers are wiped out.

One word of caution about this method. If your niche has just a few advertisers, you might not want to block any advertisers as Google can sometimes just show the same advertiser many times on a page, because no one else is available. If that happens, your page will look pretty spammy and ctr will go down quite dramatically.

But, it is a method that is definitely worth giving a shot as it is reversible.