Though Impressions and Page Views for August were very similar to July, revenue for the month of August was lower.
However the cause for this drop was not due to EPMV, but a big decrease in affiliate earnings through Amazon.
I will unpack the statistics and other August events (including the recent Algo update!) throughout the rest of this article.
Site Recap
The site is in the ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 350k words of content over 300+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here.
August Statistics
Website impressions were up, ever so slightly, but actual site visitors fell from 12,700 down to 12,300.
Given that Google rolled out a Core Update in August, the fact that I am only down by a few hundred visitors is a positive outcome in my opinion.
Especially given some of the bigger negative swings I saw some site owners experience.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear trend, in my site statistics, about any specific post, or content type that was heavily ‘punished’ by the update, it seems to be a even/smoothed very subtle dip across a number of traffic generating posts.
The (modest) monthyl revenue for the site dropped from $67 down to $57.
Though ads revenue itself was constant (a slight EPMV increase actualy, given the traffic dip), it was affiliate income which dropped by two thirds, from $15, down to $5 that made the biggest difference to monthly overall revenue.
The amount of traffic I sent to Amazon was a reasonably steady, slightly down at most, sugesting, for some reason I have not yet determined, the Amazon traffic did not convert nearly as well as it did in the previous two months,
I cant yet detect whether a single post ranked better for a small period of time, and then dropped away again, or the nature of the traffic has been the same, but I just had two ‘lucky’ months where conversions were a lot better.
It is crazy to look back at EPMV’s this time last year, which are about double what I am curently getting, and that is with a lot of extra ad placements, ad types and optimizations I have put in place during that period.
September Activity
The plans for September areto continue publishing a batch of new articles, inspired by NicheIQ keyword research, as well as continuiing to update old posts that are gettign traffic.
Given the onslaught of content that is being uploaded to the internet now, thanks to the new AI tools, I am more and more appreciative of ANY blog post that is indexed and receiving traffic, and want to ensure that they stay that way by regular refreshing.
As I type this, i hear news of ANOTHER Google update being pushed out, this time with a focus on ‘helpful content’. A lot of my blog posts would fall into this category, so it will be interesting to see how the sites fair on this occassion.
No doubt I’ll have a lot more to write about, next month.
