Earnings down suddenly - how to proceed?

[bernard]

What is your method if your earnings suddenly dip from one month to the next?

I have a massive dips in earnings this month.

It's complicated by the fact, I only have 150 clicks to go by on this vendor, so it could be simple variance.

Otherwise, it could be an issue of:

Network tracking
Vendor tracking
Google traffic intent change
Apple ITP update

As far as I can tell, I have around the same clicks from the same pages as usual, with more visitors actually.

Could it be simple variance?

How would I find out?

 

[Ryuzaki]

You could be getting a variance in traffic quality based on you saying you're getting the same number of clicks from more visitors. Typically as your organic and social traffic grows from more sources your RPM is going to decrease quite a bit.

What's your typical conversion rate? With only 150 clicks it's definitely hard to attribute the fluctuation to anything specific. Is there a seasonality in your niche or product type? That's something you could research.

 

[bernard]

I have a typical conversion rate of 4-5% for this vendor. I guess that's well within variance, if you typically get 5 sales on average pr. 100, then some times that's going to be a big zero.

I contacted both, the network told me the vendor EPC was down recently, waiting to hear back from the vendor.

I guess I hate this feeling that somewhere in the process, there could be an error. Either something on my part with the links or the tracking or something else.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm not saying this is the case, but networks will shave too, meaning they'll not award a certain number of conversions randomly across their affiliates in order to make up for the fraud that they have to deal with from bad affiliates too. Plus, as you said, errors on your side, the a middle-man network like Commission Junction or ShareaSale, or errors on the vendors side. It's a reality you won't get away from. Definitely sucks. This is one of those situations where diversifying income streams helps minimize the effect of these issues.