Google Adsense Revenue and Traffic Comparision

I’m using Google Adsense for more than two years to monetize Ghacks and experienced some ups and downs. I thought it would be nice to create a graph that would put Adsense revenue in relation to the traffic that my website received. This could give courage to those webmasters who are currently struggling with their Adsense revenue especially when it dropped suddenly while the traffic remained more or less on the same level.

The red bar is showing my Adsense earnings (excluding Adsense for search and Adsense Referrals) from October 2005 to October 2007, the blue bar showing the traffic that my blog received in that time (the impressions counted by Google to be precise). For the sake of getting those values on the same chart I decided to divide my traffic by 10, just imagine it would be somewhere outside that graph..

The interesting part is of course what we can learn from that graph. Here are my conclusions after looking at that graph.

• I did not start optimizing Adsense (position and layout) until May 06, that explains the first huge upswing in earnings.
• The rise in December 05 was due to several of my articles making it on the Digg frontpage.
• The big drops in revenue can not be explained with decreasing traffic. I’m not sure what caused the drops, I did change to my new theme in August which might have something to do with the drop. Not sure about the cause in April though.
• The traffic increase can be mainly attributed to increasing the post frequency from three to four / five posts per day.

Did you experience similar increases and drops since monetizing your blog with Google Adsense ? I used to panic a lot when I recognized huge drops in earnings but looking at this graph once again shows me that it does not make sense to panic. If traffic remains steady the revenue drop can more likely be attributed to holidays and advertisers stopping campaigns.