How To Use pMetrics to Analyze AdSense Anomalies

The other day, I was having an abysmal (I mean horrid) day with AdSense on PopCrunch. I’d only gotten about $30 for the day and it was about 5:30pm.

As many of you know, a bad day of AdSense can put you in a bad mood unless you’re real careful. Well, I wasn’t very happy when I went to dinner. When I came back, only about 45 minutes later, AdSense revenue had shot up to about $74.

Reporting delay, I thought. So I went to play a little Nintendo Wii (right now I’m playing through the Rookie challenge in The Bigs).

Went back to my office about an hour later to check AdSense (I’m compulsive just like you). AdSense revenue had shot up to $124.

This ain’t no reporting delay, I thought to myself. Something’s going down. WTF?

So I rushed over to my pMetrics account for PopCrunch to analyze live traffic patterns. As usual, it was a number one slot on the Google SERPS for a hot celebrity topic. Loads of traffic poured in.

But loads of traffic pour in all the time, and I never see this kind of drastic AdSense rocketing.

By the time I got done analyzing pMetrics data and the on-page text for the hot article, I checked AdSense again. $185. Then I took a walk with my wife for about an hour (I was in a good mood at this point;-) When I got back, it was at $227.

Things started to slow down at this point, and I won’t give you the final numbers. But it is sufficient to point out that something weird was happening with CTR. It’s not as though I’d never seen traffic flow like this. There was either something distinct about the ads being served or the type of people visiting the site.

Well, without giving too much away, let’s just say that it turns out to have been related to the type of visitors that Google was sending to the site (people who are passionately searching for something specific tend to be good ad clickers).

So why did I tell this story? Well, for two reasons. First, because without pMetrics I wouldn’t have been able to solve the anomaly, pretty much in real-time. Second, because by solving the problem, I was able to quickly reinforce the hot content with supplemental articles and picked up more of the long-tail (in fact, it the long tail is still trickling in).

The next time you notice an AdSense anomaly, why not use pMetrics live stats to stay ahead of the curve, and capitalize? Because on the net, timing is everything and with pMetrics you get stats…live.