October RPMs

[MrMedia]

Anyone else seeing a VERY slow start to Q4?

These are the months were RPMs are tradtionally through the roof for display ads but month to date I am seeing an overall decline on September (!) RPMs of around 25% and around 30% down year on year.

Traffic is stable.

Could be advertisers holding fire until the season really gets going and activating campaigns but it seems weak so far.

Anyone else seeing a slow start to this festive season?

 

[Ryuzaki]

In my main vertical I saw a boost in RPMs. It included a boost in traffic, but RPMs ignore that, and RPMs are up.

I imagine that there's some companies and verticals that start to contract before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and then crank up the awareness campaigns and then really go for it on that whole weekend (though Amazon will probably buy out the planet's display ad inventory).

As far as display ads go, I'm not seeing that yet. But I do feel like the users themselves are starting to wait for Cyber Monday deals, especially on higher priced tech-ish purchases.

 

[Darth]

October usually down for me. Had a great Sept and expect things to reset and explode upwards in Nov and Dec of course.

 

[MrMedia]

Yep September was very strong which is making October look especially weak so far.

 

[MrMedia]

Update.

On further investigation it looks like page level ads served by adsense suddenly increased activity on my sites. The effect of this seems to be to make visitors less likely to click on more valuable ads in posts and therefore reducing my RPMs.

I have disabled them for now to see how it impacts overall revenues.