Traffic, CTR AND AdSense eCPM Down ... Keyword Rankings Unchanged

[Humanovation]

Since the last week in March, one of our sites with ~ 1 million high quality page-views per month has had a 25% drop in traffic, CTR drop from 4% to 3%, and AdSense eCPM has dropped from $8 to $5 ... however, all of our keyword rankings have remained unchanged.  Also, it is an extremely consistent niche with no drop in relevant searches ...

The only thing that we KNOW for sure has changed is the removal of the separator and indentation from the Google search ads to our #1 ranking positions.  Could such a simple alteration in the Google search results UI have such a significant impact on our numbers?  Is anyone else experiencing a similar revenue drop without a rankings drop in the past two weeks?  Besides punching up the titles to make our search results more appealing to users, is there really anything that can be done about Googles new paid results placement?

Your thoughts and suggestions are invited.  Thanks guys and gals

[MonicaOConnor]

My only thought is that perhaps you are loosing positioning on keywords that you can't track. Have you  been monitoring the traffic coming to your site under (not provided) to see if it has any effect? The only thing I would look into is if there is a change in new vs returning visitors, perhaps there has been a decrease in return users and not new traffic.

[JasmineA]

Google is constantly testing things, and your competitive market may have shifted. Maybe your position didn't change, but your competitors have improved? making you a less desirable choice? UI changes have a significant impact on how people use the web. Google went though several ad colors before they found the one that induced the highest number of clicks. and I bet they still test it.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Patrick,

Hm, that's tough. No, I haven't seen anything like that on my site. Could you give me some more details?

• Did your landing pages lose traffic across the board? Or did some fare worse than others? It's possible that only a few really key landing pages were hit, which is having a large effect overall.
• In Google Webmaster Tools, have you seen a dip in impressions along with clicks? If there's a dip in impressions, then search patterns are probably changing (even if you didn't expect seasonality in your niche). If impressions are still high, look for the specific keywords that have a lower click through rate.
• Have your branded searches dropped? Like Jasmine said, it's possible that there's a competitor out there that's stealing your traffic by getting people to search for their brand rather than yours, which would be hard to catch. Any changes like that in your industry?

Best,

Kristina

[jimthornton]

Kristina has good questions. You need to isolate the problem metrics as best as possible. In GA you can parse out influence of click bids vs. CTR having the effect on RPM/eCPM.

If it's a CTR issue that is responsible for 100% of your ad revenue drop and eCPM drop, ie. the click bids went unchanged, then you need to look at Mobile vs. Table vs. Desktop changes in CTR over the period in question.  You might want to take a look at CTR changes based on source/medium as well and drill into anything that seems significant. Some of the adsense metrics in GA are a bit suspect. I like checking earnings per click against adsense revenue / adsense ads clicked.

We noticed a big drop in mobile ad CTR cutting our ad revenue in half, disproportionately affecting iPhones and it was due to the change to HTTPS having an effect on who our advertisers were indirectly affecting ad relevance/quality. Desktop CTR actually went up but the overall decline hid the problem from the client.