I have a site which is seasonal in nature. My traffic always peaks in August (Traffic and CTR is by far the highest), but this always seems to be the month that my CPC plummets. I see this trend in other months as well, but it is much more pronounced in the month when my traffic peaks.
In Adsense, are these two metrics (CTR & CPC) inversely related?
There’s two possible issues at hand: advertiser volume and advertiser seasonality.
For most companies the summer is the slow season [travel, outdoor and weddings as the exceptions] thus the amount put into programs decreases. This is made worse as people go on vacation and can literally forget to renew budgets, change terms, etc during the summer months. By late July / early August we see this pick back up as back to school kicks in and the weather cools off for fall.
On the other side you’re churning out more clicks which digs deeper into the network. People are seeing more ads, optimization systems are kicking into a higher gear, and as a result you’re getting clicks to less valuable units. The more you expand out [against limited selection] the more apparent this becomes.
If I had to guess I’d suspect you’ve got both issues at hand… less spend, deeper network clicks and they’re combining together. Since you know the season perhaps next year’s plan should be more ad diversity, even trying other ad types and educating on value for what may be a peripheral sell…
Thanks Ted. If it helps my industry is fantasy football, specifically I provide a resource for preparing for the upcoming fantasy football season. I’m not selling a product (site is completely free) but I make my money solely through Google Ads (and some affiliates).
I think your second scenario makes sense. With higher volume I figured the value of a click may be decreased.
Whether you sell a product or not is not going to change much… it’s what your potential advertisers do and a slower sales season means less reasons for them to advertise.
That said, football is obviously seasonal as well and advertising should pick up late summer. Have you thought about shifting away from AdSense and bringing in some targeted programs [nflshop, stubhub, fanzone, etc]? Back to my earlier point you may find success in more focused, content type programs as well like covering tailgating or game time must-haves?
Yes I’m trying out some affiliate programs this year to see what kind of return I get.
My app is essentially a tool for preparing for fantasy football drafts (cheat sheet creation), so the value of my site really plummets when football season starts. My goal to combat that was supporting multiple sports, so last year I also added fantasy racing cheat sheets. The hope being that if I cover enough sports I should keep traffic cycling throughout the year.
Finding convent that remains relevant throughout the entire year has been a challenge because of my site’s primary focus, but I’m slowly improving things.