How Bad Traffic Kills Your Earnings (and Solution)

A quick post to share some interesting insight I experienced recently on my blog. It receives traffic from all over the world. But recently, I noticed a peak from Russia. I checked the Referring URLs to my blog in the Stats > Traffic Sources menu.

All this traffic was coming from the same referring URL. At the beginning, I was not really concerned by this, but it became more and more annoying. I was trying to perform some statistical analysis, and I knew this traffic was nothing but bad data.

I decided to report it to Google via this page. Within two days, this traffic was gone. Then, something unexpected happened. I was monitoring my Page RPM (revenue per mille, or per thousand page impression) from my AdSense account. It got multiplied between 5x - 10x. My good versus bad traffic ratio was miles from this ratio.

In other words, a site with 10 000 views with a RPM of 0.10$ and (say) 15% bad traffic would generate 1$. After removing the bad traffic, and assuming a 7x increase in RPM, it would generate 10 000 * 85% * 0.1 * 7 = 5.95$. That is, an extra 4.95$.

Conclusion: bad traffic kills your earnings! Get rid of it!