Five reasons your revenue could be fluctuating
The famous Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”
While he couldn’t fathom the realities of today’s Internet society, he still had the right idea — “hard work will pay off” — and with Yahoo! Publisher Network, the same holds true.
Our publishers often ask why their revenue is fluctuating. Many times, upon investigating, we find that the publishers themselves have made a slight change to their websites, or they’ve modified their marketing techniques. Either of these can cause revenue amounts to change.
To help you have success with your Yahoo! Publisher Network account, we put together five of the most common factors that may impact your revenue.
Pricing discounts for traffic quality
Publishers should strive to host content that is unique and updated frequently. Good content will help drive repeat users back to your site, and with pricing discounts in place for our Sponsored Search advertisers, publishers could potentially see differences in their revenue when their quality varies. Clicks from low-quality traffic sources may be discounted to ensure that advertisers are paying an appropriate amount based on the value of the click.
The categories you target
While we advise publishers to target specific ad categories for their sites, we generally recommend they select categories that are relevant to the content of their sites. For example, a website about popular vacation spots would probably not display ads about computer software. There may be instances where you may want to run different types of ads — a golf site, for example, might want ads for non-golf items that its readers might buy. But in general, ads that aren’t relevant to the site may result in a decrease in revenue.
The quality of your website
Remember that the quality of a website plays a big role in generating revenue — you want your site to be a place where users trust your content and are comfortable clicking on the links. We encourage publishers to place their ads on content-rich pages that are well structured and provide for a good user experience.
Where your site is advertised
One the most important factors affecting publisher revenue is where your site is linked to across the Internet. Listings in search engine results and Sponsored Search ads are widely used to market websites and drive traffic.
But these two methods alone do not guarantee results. For example, search engines constantly change their algorithms and as their search results are constantly changing, as well. A site displayed on the first page of results of a major search engine could suddenly drop in position, and traffic would drop right along with it. It’s vital to frequently monitor your weblogs or use third-party software to identify where the traffic to your site is coming from.
The subject and the season
This is one of the most overlooked causes for any sort of revenue/impression drops or increases for an account. We often forget that searches and clicks are a direct reflection of what is happening in our society and on the calendar
For example, we received an inquiry from one of our publishers who received a good amount of traffic and clicks in May and June, but suddenly experienced a drastic drop in both impressions and clicks in July. We researched the account and did not find any underlying reasons for this sudden drop, but reviewed his website and discovered that it primarily focused on computers.
The increase in traffic was attributed to graduation season. During May and June, computer sales often rise in conjunction with college and high school graduation ceremonies, hence the increase in people searching for computers to give to graduating students. The mystery of the traffic fluctuation had been solved.
If these five factors don’t explain changes in your revenue, contact your customer service team.
— The Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Solutions Team