Adsense Fluctuation

Recently on one of my sites, I optimized my channels for advertisers, as Google suggests to help increase exposure and help target your advertisers.

For the next few days, I made a ton of money. VERY shortly afterwards, I was dropped down far below my previous average.

Any ideas on what accounted for this? My only thought is that new advertisers dumped large amounts of money specifically into my pages to ensure top positioning, and to track how my pages convert. Does this make sense as a tactic to read the profitability of particular content?

It won't make or break me. Just cuious.

Lots of things could cause this. I think that you have a good and intelligent attitude about this. Lots of people would be shouting that Google screwed them.

If there are a few advertisers bidding on certain terms and my site brings large ad inventory into the market that could drive the price down. Also my visitors might click the ads and not buy... then some of the advertisers figure this out in a couple of days and pull out of that bidding.

It could also be short term such as a movie being promoted, or a TV program, or someone has sold out of a product or just decided to stop PPC. I could be bidding ten cents a click one day and change to $1.50 the next, and move back to ten cents depending upon what is going on in my office or how I feel about a branding campaign.

Thanks for your thoughts. They're always appreciated. Anyone who thinks that Google intentionally screwed them must be dabbling in black hat magic. No, I still have a lot of faith in what Google is doing.

I guess there's really no way to specifically pin point it unless I was in control of both sides.

The only reason I brought it up was because my revenue jumped so drastically (increased to over 200% of my average) for a little less than a week. Then a drop so far.

I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and chalk it up as a fortunate bump in the road.
Thanks again.

A friend of mine experience the fluctuation too and he found out that Google Checks Only Page Title, Description and URL When Picking the Topic of AdSense. Simple meta data and maybe keywords in URL is enough for Google AdSense algo to choose the topic of its ads for your pages. Maybe you can try that too.

I believe Mr. Berg is already highly above this in targeting the advertisers. In fact, meta tags doesn't help at all, apart from the description which only helps to make your site better looking for the searching users, not for the search engine.