One month in, low CPCs, far in the red

zackfinch31 · Jul 18, 2018

So I'm officially about one month in on my new site (celebrity/entertainment-related blog), and I've been running AdSense and Media.net ads, along with a few Amazon recommended product links. I've been relying on paid traffic (Facebook/Taboola/Twitter) while I try to generate some organic SEO with my blog articles.

I'm deeply in the red, and I don't know if I can pull out of it.

AdSense
Running 4 ads: 1 leaderboard banner just before content, then 3 more 300x250 ads inside article content.

My CTR has generally been okay — going as high as 8.2% one day, but averaging around 2-3% overall which should be normal. My CPC's, however, are terrible. Averaging around $0.03 per click. The highest they've ever been for a full day is $0.12, but that was only for 28 clicks.

I'm averaging less than $1.00 per day after a month with AdSense, while I'm dumping $20-30 per day in paid traffic.

CPM: around $0.71

Media.net
Running 3 ads: 1 just under featured image/headline, 1 in middle of content, and 1 at end of content.

This is doing even worse for me, averaging about $0.55 per day.

CPM: around $0.15

Traffic stats
Over the last 30 days, I have 22k users/sessions and 61k pageviews, with a 1.8% bounce rate.
70% USA, 16% United Kingdom, 9% Canada.

I have 30 posts on my site, and maybe about halfway through them realized I should be doing on-page SEO for each article, which was stupid of me to forget about in the beginning. I'm not ranking on any keywords yet, and also I thought that targeting keywords in my articles would help increase CPCs for AdSense, but it hasn't shown any improvement yet.

Overall revenue since June 18, 2018
Adsense: +$24.40
Media.net: +$7.89
Paid traffic: -$783.65

Net: -$751.36

Clearly I'm doing something wrong if my CPMs are that low and I'm this far in the hole after only one month. I can't keep buying traffic for that much money, I need to generate some organic traffic ASAP.

I've been lurking at BHW for years, and finally decided to jump in and take the plunge, but did not think I'd be hurting this bad so quickly. Any help or insights or words of encouragement would be much appreciated.

Should I cut my losses and give up? Or are there other things I can try to turn this around?

Degen · Jul 18, 2018

zackfinch31 said:
So I'm officially about one month in on my new site (celebrity/entertainment-related blog), and I've been running AdSense and Media.net ads, along with a few Amazon recommended product links. I've been relying on paid traffic (Facebook/Taboola/Twitter) while I try to generate some organic SEO with my blog articles.

I'm deeply in the red, and I don't know if I can pull out of it.

AdSense
Running 4 ads: 1 leaderboard banner just before content, then 3 more 300x250 ads inside article content.

My CTR has generally been okay — going as high as 8.2% one day, but averaging around 2-3% overall which should be normal. My CPC's, however, are terrible. Averaging around $0.03 per click. The highest they've ever been for a full day is $0.12, but that was only for 28 clicks.

I'm averaging less than $1.00 per day after a month with AdSense, while I'm dumping $20-30 per day in paid traffic.

CPM: around $0.71

Media.net
Running 3 ads: 1 just under featured image/headline, 1 in middle of content, and 1 at end of content.

This is doing even worse for me, averaging about $0.55 per day.

CPM: around $0.15

Traffic stats
Over the last 30 days, I have 22k users/sessions and 61k pageviews, with a 1.8% bounce rate.
70% USA, 16% United Kingdom, 9% Canada.

I have 30 posts on my site, and maybe about halfway through them realized I should be doing on-page SEO for each article, which was stupid of me to forget about in the beginning. I'm not ranking on any keywords yet, and also I thought that targeting keywords in my articles would help increase CPCs for AdSense, but it hasn't shown any improvement yet.

Overall revenue since June 18, 2018
Adsense: +$24.40
Media.net: +$7.89
Paid traffic: -$783.65

Net: -$751.36

Clearly I'm doing something wrong if my CPMs are that low and I'm this far in the hole after only one month. I can't keep buying traffic for that much money, I need to generate some organic traffic ASAP.

I've been lurking at BHW for years, and finally decided to jump in and take the plunge, but did not think I'd be hurting this bad so quickly. Any help or insights or words of encouragement would be much appreciated.

Should I cut my losses and give up? Or are there other things I can try to turn this around?

Those cpc prices are insane, where do they come from? What countries?

Also a bounce rate of 1,8%. That is not really accurate right ??

zackfinch31 · Jul 18, 2018

Stewielenor said:
Those cpc prices are insane, where do they come from? What countries?

Majority of my traffic is from USA, around 70%. UK is 16%, Canada is about 9%. Here's a breakdown of my overall clicks/revenue from AdSense by country:

USA
Ad Clicks: 715
CTR: 3.73%
CPC: $0.02
CPM: $0.92

United Kingdom
Ad Clicks: 49
CTR: 0.55%
CPC: $0.13

Canada
Ad Clicks: 21
CTR: 0.38%
CPC: $0.02

The only other countries I have Ad clicks from is Czechia and Tanzania, with 1 click each. Other countries take up less than 1% of traffic each.

The weird thing is, if I break it down by traffic source-

Taboola
CTR: 2.52%
CPC: $0.16
CPM: $2.03

Facebook
CTR: 5.5%
CPC: $0.02
CPM: $0.55

Taboola's CPCs are WAY better than Facebook, but Taboola is much more expensive and I can't keep dumping money into them with relatively low CPCs.

Stewielenor said:
Also a bounce rate of 1,8%. That is not really accurate right ??

Yep, overall lifetime bounce rate is 1.8% according to Google Analytics. Attaching a screenshot of that.

zackfinch31 · Jul 19, 2018

I think I'm going to taper off the paid traffic and focus on SEO. If I can get a few articles with high SERPs then I think I would start doing a little better.

bigmansyndrome · Jul 19, 2018

Adsense text links pay terrible, but this doesnt make any sense to me. You claim that 70% of the traffic comes from the US and you have a bounce rate of 1.8%???!!! The worlds most popular websites have a higher bounce rate. Sure this is human traffic? Also those CPCs are for tier 3 countries, not the US.
If i were you i would double check my stats, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Sorry to hear you are losing money. Would love to see your page

Pretyyy · Jul 19, 2018

Obviously, you're being trapped somewhere... This can't be real traffic (bounce rate abnormally low) and that would explain such a low CPC. The first thing you should do is check your Ads and where they are served. I know you're having 70% US traffic but might have been spoofed...

zackfinch31 · Jul 19, 2018

bigmansyndrome said:
Adsense text links pay terrible, but this doesnt make any sense to me. You claim that 70% of the traffic comes from the US and you have a bounce rate of 1.8%???!!! The worlds most popular websites have a higher bounce rate. Sure this is human traffic? Also those CPCs are for tier 3 countries, not the US.

That's crazy, obviously this is my first real adsense/blog site so I wasn't sure what to expect as far as bounce rate, etc. The only traffic I'm getting is from Facebook ads and Taboola, with a little bit of test traffic I brought in from growtraffic.com, which ended up being pretty useless. I guess I could be getting fake traffic from somewhere, but I didn't realize my bounce rate should be way higher than that.

Pretyyy said:
Obviously, you're being trapped somewhere... This can't be real traffic (bounce rate abnormally low) and that would explain such a low CPC. The first thing you should do is check your Ads and where they are served. I know you're having 70% US traffic but might have been spoofed...

I didn't think about it being spoofed. It's good to know that my CPCs should be way higher than that, and obviously I'm just doing something wrong. My analytics shows 70% US traffic but that could totally be faked, I just don't know how that's possible — Facebook traffic has got to be legit, right? And it's hard to think that Taboola would be sending shitty traffic.

Adsense itself shows the majority of my ad clicks coming from the US, with a $0.76 impression RPM, which seems insanely low to me.

Is there a better more reliable place to be getting traffic from? Facebook is currently about 56% of my traffic, with a few other random social outlets sending less than 1%. Growtraffic is still trickling some users in, but I haven't received any ad clicks or revenue from them.

zackfinch31 · Jul 19, 2018

bigmansyndrome said:
If i were you i would double check my stats, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Sorry to hear you are losing money. Would love to see your page

If you want to PM me, I'll happily send you the link, maybe there's something glaring and obvious on my site that I just can't see that's really hurting me. I don't have enough posts yet to start a pm otherwise I would have just sent you one.

bigmansyndrome · Jul 20, 2018

The screenshot shows me that the average time spent on the page is 18 sec. When you have such a low bounce-rate it means that the majority of your visitors visit more than one page... curious to see the structure of the page.

A bounce rate between 40%-45% is perfectly acceptable, if its lower, great! When its over 50%,then its time to make some changes to improve the bounce rate. Only exception is when your page is just one big scrolling page, this will always have a high bounce rate since users will not go any further then the page they landed on. But you have the opposite problem..unrealistically low bounce rate.

As for facebook traffic being genuine... i believe there is an entire section on this website dedicated to FB marketing and a whole bunch of sellers who sell ‘genuine’ traffic

But then again if you have setup your campaigns with FB directly, you should assume the traffic is coming from the US.

I’ll drop you a pm to have a closer look and see if i spot something.

jamie3000 · Jul 20, 2018

Paid social traffic to AdSense, I'd be very surprised if that worked. Remember social traffic is smart priced with AdSense a lot of the time so the earnings per click can be terrible. I'd stick to SEO, that's how most use AdSense. Its all a good learning experience though

zackfinch31 · Jul 20, 2018

jamie3000 said:
Paid social traffic to AdSense, I'd be very surprised if that worked. Remember social traffic is smart priced with AdSense a lot of the time so the earnings per click can be terrible. I'd stick to SEO, that's how most use AdSense. Its all a good learning experience though

Very true, quickly finding out that promoted social traffic isn't working well for me

I'm definitely going to pivot to SEO and generating organic traffic to my articles and posts, since I know that's where longevity comes from. Definitely a learning experience!

Badboy Enterprise · Jul 20, 2018

Wow
so bloggers just earn $20 for 60k visits? what the f**** man

and adwords $751.36
very fair...

zackfinch31 · Jul 20, 2018

welneto said:
Wow
so bloggers just earn $20 for 60k visits? what the f**** man
and adwords $751.36
very fair...

Right?! I mean, I didn't expect to net profit in my first month, but I also didn't expect to be this far in the hole. I would be stoked with a $2-3 CPM, none of this $0.71 stuff!

theRevolt · Jul 20, 2018

Really lay off the paid advertising. The times os easy arbitrage (buy traffic and then use Adsense etc.) are gone. Sure you can still make money with it but it is very hard and if this is your first site, then doing PPC is even less advised. While you can do onsite, if you just in the celebrity niche I would not expect wonders in terms of rankings and earnings. That niche is just very saturated to unless you get some organic social or SEO traffic I do not see this being profitable anytime soon.

One month in, low CPCs, far in the red

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