Low CPC on Adsense

Ah! It just happened to me again.

There's really nothing you can do about it.. This is happening because all advertisers choose how much they want to pay for a click, and that has a lot to do with where you traffic comes from.

Before Google displays any ad on your website, it checks what your website is about and then it checks where the visitor is from and display the relevant ads available, in some cases there might not be relevant ads to that given country and therefore you will get non-relevant ads dropping your CTR and usually a lower CPC.

I usually take a look at this when the traffic is coming in, so I know what forums and blogs I should focus on, why would I post on an Australian blog if I would get more revenue posting on one from the United States per say, now don't get me wrong, traffic is great doesn't matter where it comes from. But, would you post on 10 Australians forums to make the same you could posting on 5 Canadian forums per say?

Make sure to use Quantcast to know where the traffic is from on the forums and blogs so you know where the money is.

If your traffic is mostly coming in from the search engines, be patient and keep adding content as well as building more backlinks and sooner than later you will be ranking higher for all countries.

Hope it helps you

I've had this happening to my authority site for a few weeks now it seems like.

I am at 9 clicks today with around 0.01 CPC as we speak, about an hour ago it was at around 0.20, had near $2 in revenue. This fluctuates throughout the day, some days I'll end with $4+ in revenue, some days I'll end around $0.60 in revenue.

I should note that 80% of my traffic is recurring traffic, I have a very loyal user base. Only about 20% comes from SE.

I have a friend got ZERO clicks fore more than 3 weeks with no apparent reason. All traffic and ad impressions factors have never changed on the same site. The site was getting around 80-120 clicks per month.

Stats for today: 17 clicks, 0.02 CPC, 0.26 in revenue. Numbers don't even add up, the CPC is laughable. Can anyone shed some light?

Want niche are you in? some just don't convert very well. You can have a site with 10,000 uv's per day and they just won't click anything.. no matter how many ads you put under their noses and how relevant they are.

Your seeing your cpc go up and down because Adsense are paying more for some visitors and not for others so they need to calculate the totals at the end of the day and the end of the month.

They are most likley smart pricing your account and filter any low quality clicks from social networks like Twitter or keywords that don't perform historically, if they do, the price goes up and that's what you're seeing there.

To improve your cpc and ctr look at your site, it's topic and your visitors. Are they looking for a product or information? Is their any products or services that relate to their query?

If it's info they want then you can find ads with high cpc that compliment your content and are in high demand. Go to the G Adwords tool and pull all of the keywords relating to your sites content or topic, then copy and paste them into the estimate cpc module and check were the demand is..

The go back to your site and write up some content relating to this topic, you will need to wait a few days before the Adsense bot crawls your site and displays better advertisers.

Then use the Adsense preview tool for I.E, record all the urls from the spool and use a tool like sem rush or seo spyglass to see what they are paying for cpc.. filter out the low paying ads and block them using the settings in adsense..

I'll look into smart pricing for sure.

Here's the thing, I don't actually have written content. It's a popurls inspired site that aggregates RSS feeds from other sites. So all the ads are taken from the titles of posts from the blogs/sites I aggregate from.

But all in all the ads I see do seem to be super targeted for the site.

Anyway I'll look into smart pricing.

I am having the very same issue. I have been observing this for over 4 days now, taken screenshots and noted the odd behavior.
it may be a very wild guess BUT i think this is somewhat related to the Penguin screwup, err... update.
IF, Penguin messed up the SERPs and filled them with irrelevant results, it is possible that the smart pricing analysis may have gove totally off as it can't properly determine site/page relevancy?
Again, this has started happening in conjunction with Penguin, the first few days I noticed an overall drop of CPC and I thought that good old Goolge not only had slapped my rankings but also decided to punish me by paying me peanuts for the same ads that were returning 10x more just the week before.
The the fluctuations started.
Coincidence?

I think this hugely depends on the niche too! Some 'programming' sites or 'image (wallpaper)' sites attract huge traffic, numerous clicks but still end up with few bucks. Also as you have lots of recurring visitors so Google may count many click from those to just one or few in a specific time frame (say per day).

I have had this same problem as you and it is very frustrating.

First time in a week that my CPC held steady, sitting at around $0.43 with 5 clicks and $2 in revenue today for this site.

The days I get 20+ clicks seem to be the days where CPC jumps from $0.40 one minute to $0.02 the next minute, back up again, back down again, so on and so forth.

We'll see what happens.

In thailand very low CPC, thai keyword $0.01 most.

There are alot of factors that determine you cpc but here's one.

If your site has poor quality, i.e has a sucky CTR then advertisers don't have to pay premium because your traffic is not converting or leading to a result.

It's called Adsense Smart Pricing and it's Googles way of protecting it's advertisers

check out this post it explains what smart pricing is
About smart pricing - AdSense Help

MassivePassive, did you disabled interest based ads in adsense interface? If you didn't, do so.

You shouldn't disable third party ads. Since it raise up a competiton among the ads and raise your CPC.

Well, just to update.

Earlier today: 4-5 clicks at around $0.60-$0.80 CPC - totaling $3+
About an hour ago: The same 4-5 clicks at around $0.20 CPC - totaling $2+
Now: The same 4-5 clicks at $0.02 CPC - totaling $0.07

So I began the day with $3 in revenue, and now in the afternoon I am at $0.07

Nothing else has changed, the CPC drops on its own, it goes up and down during one 24 hour period and I either have revenues in the $ dollars or $0.01 - $0.10 range.

Keep in mind, this is only happening for ONE of my sites. The others have 2 clicks at most and don't ever see a fluctuation in CPC.

I am surely no expert on this matter, but I think that CPC fluctuates based on from where are your clicks coming from. I also have a site that I'm monetizing with AdSense and most of my visitors come from UK, and when someone from UK clicks on my AdSense ad, my CPC gets higher. Why? It's because advertisers will pay more for these type of countries (English speaking, IMO), and you can see for yourself in the AdSense control panel how much you have earned from each country. For me, the best CPC is for the English speaking countries, UK, Canada and USA. Now add all the other counties, and it makes perfect sense for me that CPC is going to go up and down. Not every country will have the same CPC, if 10 UK folks click on an ad, CPC will get higher, and afterwords if 10 people from Denmark click on ads, your CPC is going to get lower.

Update.

After another day of 19 clicks at avg 0.04 CPC I decided to investigate.

2 clicks for "rich media" ads at 0.23 CPC
7 clicks for "image" ads at 0.02 CPC
4 clicks for "text" ads at 0.04 CPC
3 clicks for "animated image" ads at 0.00 CPC
3 clicks for "flash" ads at 0.00 CPC

Can anyone shed some light on why there are 6 clicks for 0.00 CPC?

Thanks.

LAF Riot? Have you been noticing flash/animated ads with 0.00 CPC? You can check in your adsense account.

1. Check with Google keyword tool on the Competition on your keyword. If its Low, then that is why your CPC is low.

2. Check Spyfu for your keyword. It will show the CPC. If it doesn't means very minimal advertisers are advertising for your keyword.

3. Switch all your ads to Text ads. They usually have a higher CPC.

4. Location. A click from US will be much higher than a click from India.