As an owner of a few small personal domains, I have added adsense in a few areas of the site that makes me a few dollars here and there. On a daily basis I can normally tell what my eCPM or effective CPM is going to be by looking the amount of traffic coming to the site. However over the past week, what typically is very consistent adsense traffic has dropped by nearly 80%.

Maybe your thinking…. What did you do the site? Are the ads even appearing like their supposed to? Has your traffic dropped and its affecting CTR? Trust me I looked at all that but the answer is actually very simple, but before I state my reasoning lets see if you can determine why by hearing what this particular sites focus is.

My site is focused around 1 thing and 1 thing only, that being The Ohio State Buckeyes. Its a site dedicated to Ohio State Buckeyes sports news, so the advertising has always been very targeted via adsense or affiliate programs that tie back into Ohio State sports.

If you pay much attention to sports, and you are involved with online marketing then the answer is probably clear. Nearly 1 week ago, a very praised Ohio State team went to Los Angles California to take on the USC Trojans, long story short we got beat and beat bad. The result of this has been a lot of angry fans, fans who are calling for peoples heads whether it be coaches or players. The point I’m trying to make is that factors outside the control of a site owner can heavily impact earnings on small sites like mine when its a very niche category. I read an article yesterday talking about how tickets are going for half of what they’ve been selling for. Because of fans being upset look at how many things are affected.

Peoples attitudes and feelings play a big part in their online habits and buying processes. Because so many fans have a negative attitude towards our program at this particular time, it is reflected in their actions while surfing online. I hope that as time goes on, the bitter taste of last weeks loss will leave fans including myself, but in the meantime I expect lowered results on the current advertising running on my site because of this.

What can a site owner do? There are many advertising alternatives to adsense. If your site receives a large number of page views there’s always CPM based advertising where your still able to make money whether your ads are clicked or not. You can also run other advertising that’s based on a broader category than in just my case a particular team.

For some fair weather fans or people who are out to make a quick buck, they might just create a site around a team that’s hot at that time. Have I thought about doing this in my particular case? Heck No!!!! Go Bucks!!!!