For the vast majority of websites out there (and YouTube channels, for that matter as well), they will be generating a lot of their revenue from advertising platforms mainly being Google Adsense. Gaining revenue per click/view is a fundamental concept to PPC for which has proven to benefit both advertisers and publishers alike. However, a key statistic associated with making money with Google Adsense is the RPM, also known as the revenue per thousand impressions. This, as the abbreviation states, is the amount that is earnt per 1,000 impressions that view an Adsense advert.

On the whole, the RPM for Adsense should stay pretty consistant if you do not change anything with your adverts, such as location, size, type and more. However, this does not always stop the RPM from fluctuating, potentially to a lower value.

With this, if you have found that your RPM has suddenly decreased and does not look to be improving any time soon, fear not my friend. Here are some of the main reasons why this might happen.

#1 Time of Year will Vary RPM

The main reason why you might see a drop in RPM in Adsense is down to what time of year it is. This is because:

• The advertising budgets will vary with time. What you will tend to find is that at the start of each quarter, the RPM will decrease due to the fact that advertisers are slow to distribute budgets to new campaigns for the new quarter. This also works at improving the RPM in Adsense at the end of quarters, where left over budget is used in its whole before the end of the quarter, temporarily increasing the RPM.
• The time of year will greatly impact the RPM your adverts achieve. Advertisers do not pay the same amount for the same traffic throughout the year consistently. At certain points in the year, the traffic is worth more to advertisers and less at other times of the year. Such trends tend to be:
  • During the holiday/Christmas period, strong conversion rates for products increase the RPM of adverts.
  • After Christmas/throughout January, the RPM will decrease as advertisers are unwilling to spend much on advertising since the time after Christmas is notorious for being a bad time to sell products/services (hence why many try to tempt back shoppers with ‘January sales’).
  • During the peak of summer, the RPM will also drop based on the advertising rates decreasing due to people being less at a computer and taking more time off for holidays etc.

#2 Time-Sensitive Content

On the whole, the point #1 should satisify why your RPM has decreased. However if you cannot see any correlation between your RPM and the time of the year, you might want to look at the content on your website. This is because a huge factor in the RPM your website achieves.

If your content is time-sensitive, then it is fair to say that as time goes by, your content is going to become less and less useful to the web user. Therefore, as time goes by, more web users will be spending less time after landing onto the time-sensitive content, signifying to the likes of Google that the content is not as good. With content that is not as good, advertisers are less willing to spend big to have their adverts shown on the same page.