Though July was a positive month for traffic and impressions (they both went up), revenue was down by a decent percentage, wiping out the gains I had steadily banked over the last few months,
Throughout the rest of this article, I’ll deep dive into the statistics, and uncover where the revenue loss can be attributed, while also outlining the plan for August.
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.
July Statistics
Overall earnings were down on all revenue sources. Even though the traffic was up, my ads income dropped substantially, and though my Amazon commission income was higher than the trend over the last 6 months, it did not match the previous month’s revenue, which suggests it was a spike and not necessarily and an indication of huge improvement in amazon traffic conversion rates.
The below screenshot from my Ezoic Ads dashboard shows the ad earnings of just under $50 for this test site, which is a significant percentage dip from last month, even though visits were up by a measurable percentage.
There have been a few discussions happening around the Ezoic community about ad rates and many people experiencing a decrease in EPMV. In response to this, a great blog post was published by Ezoic detailing some steps you can take to analyze potential causes for a decrease in revenue.
The Big Data Analytics dashboard reveals that overall that has been a very small decrease in EPMV (3% give or take), but many publishers are reporting much more serious decreases in revenue than 3%.
The first thing I looked at, based on the article’s recommendations, was changes in the device used to access the case study site.
From the data, we can see that, though traffic on all devices increased, those increases did not translate to increases in revenue. Alarmingly, for desktop traffic, there was nearly a 50% decrease in revenue, though the traffic was up 20%.
The traffic source report includes hundreds of different sources, but the major players showed mixed results.
I definitely lost some traffic and revenue from Bing, so that will prompt me to double-check inside Bing webmaster tools and see if there are any alerts, or outstanding issues that may have arisen that would have contributed to such a fall. Otherwise, it could just be changes to their algorithm.
The other most interesting source is ‘unknown’. It is annoying in a sense because I can’t quite pinpoint the cause behind this, but I can clearly see that these unattributable sources have significantly dropped.
This could just be users from ‘known’ sources that have ad blockers on or didn’t consent to website privacy policy etc, or it could have been ‘bad quality’ traffic to begin with that has now returned to more appropriate levels.
There are some other reports I plan to run and analyze later in the month, and will share that analysis in next month’s report.
August Activity
August will be a relatively straightforward month with a focus on continuing to publish more amount of content, heavily influenced by Niche IQ. I am going to focus less on quantity and try and produce a smaller number of high-quality, in-depth, long content pieces to see if I can get increased time on the page.
I’ll also get busy deep diving into Big Data Analytics, now I have more idea of what to look for, and see if I can find some insights that I can use to publish more profitable content.
