Is IPS not playing well with Google/AdSense?

[Pavel Chernitsky]

So I've just got access to our website's Google AdSense account and started to look at ancient reports. Doing so, I've noticed something pretty odd...

We've migrated our community from VB to IPS on march 2020, and activated Google's automatic ads and all the built-in seo enhancements IPS offers.
Being that we migrated from an old, non-reponsive, slow, and pretty much all-round crapola website from a time "I'm not even sure they had the Google" to a clean, sleek, responsive and up to date one, you'd expect pretty much all the associated metrics would go through the roof.

However... looking at the graphs I see a SEVERE drop on almost all numbers. Pageviews have been cut by more than 2/3 (from an average of about 3.3-3.5M to barely breaking 1.5M a month), Visitor numbers dropped 15-20%, from 550-600K to 400-450K and bounce rates doubled, from around 32.5% to more than 68%.
Consequently (or maybe completely unrelated), Google ad revenue took quite a dive and dropped ~20% when accounting for exchange rate or ~33% raw numbers (not blaming IPS for the devaluation of the USD, of course). That, while ad impressions rose from 3.5-4M to 5.5-5.7M.

Now, I know, 2020 isn't exactly a good year to judge anything or compare anything to, but I can't shake how massive the numbers are and how closely the change follows our migration.
The question, then, is - for you who migrated from a different platform to IPS, how - if at all - did it affect your traffic. Did you see more (or the same amount of) visitors? did your new-returning users composition changed (we now have slightly more new ones, but it's negligible)?  If it did adversely affect your traffic, how long (if at all) did it take for it to return to normal numbers?

 

[CoffeeCake]

Yes, absolutely adversely affected traffic when we transitioned from vBulletin to IPS. We were going from a very optimized vBulletin SEO strategy that we had developed over many years to default IPS, and there was a definite hit across all measures, similar to what you're describing. We took a number of steps (many many rewrite rules) beyond the out of the box IPS URL conversion strategy to ensure that previous URLs ended up, as much as possible, to the new path in IPS. We did our conversion in 2018, and did not have the factor of pandemic. Our research at the time indicated that this was the report of a number of communities making the switch to IPS, and we tried to address as many of the issues as possible in advance.

I think, overall, SEO is a large opportunity for IPS, and hopefully the IPS team is actively working on addressing those opportunities. There are lots of improvements to be made from the default, out of the box functionality, starting with optimizations in rendering speed, lazy loading, improvements in the ability to customize the FURL system at the root application/plugin level (i.e. change "forums" to "whateveryouwant" for both built in applications and third-party applications), and other things.

Pageviews are likely not a fair measure, especially if you're using ajax loading to navigate between pages--as long as your ad performance is good, and your organic search rankings aren't dropping. Our significant measures were unique sessions and ranking in search.

[Pavel Chernitsky]

Thanks for the detailed reply.
Could you list some of steps you took in trying to regain the lost traffic and how much effect (if any) they had?

Also:

2 hours ago, Paul E. said:

as long as your ad performance is good

It isn't, it's gotten 20% worse.

 

2 hours ago, Paul E. said:

and your organic search rankings aren't dropping. Our significant measures were unique sessions and ranking in search.

We're not really doing any SEO.

 

[CoffeeCake]

8 minutes ago, Pavel Chernitsky said:

Could you list some of steps you took in trying to regain the lost traffic and how much effect (if any) they had?

Our biggest efforts were before we converted. We anticipated the problem because many others had posted about it here when we were evaluating IPS. We spent a lot of lead time finding every URL path we had in our vBulletin install (all of which was customized by us for SEO purposes), and crafting rewrite logic to keep existing links working beyond the standard ones the converter addresses with permanent redirects.

We wanted to make sure that any existing URL in search engine indexes would continue working and take you to its new home. This is probably not an issue for a community that had standard vBulletin URLs, but it was for our modified ones.

Things improved somewhat but not back to pre conversion levels. It was a tradeoff for us though--we had our list of requirements, and IPS checked off more than the other solutions, especially the ones that were ranked highest by us. Had we gone with some other solution, we don't know if we would have had the same SEO impact, but here's hoping to needed changes and improvements in this arena for out of the box behaviors.

vBulletin was no longer sustainable, and our community had outgrown the capabilities of the software. Their position was that our community was too large for their version 5, and we were not interested in maintaining and iterating upon version 3.8 in perpetuity.

[marklcfc]

I use the exact same ad setup as a forum that uses Xenforo and all I know is that their site loads super fast and ads show at least twice as fast than they do on mine.

Even simple tasks like swiping back on IPS is sluggish compared to Xenforo where its instant. It feels like when you swipe back on IPS everything has to reload from scratch again whereas XF it remembers what the page was, thats just how it feels.

Probably not related but it's always annoyed me.

[Fast Lane!]

Pagespeed is a big area of work for IPB.  The overhead is HUGE for each page load.  Css and js for the entire site is loaded for every page (but can be cached). DOM structure is massive.

For ads did you have the same number per page? 

As far as technical issues like rewrites I would strongly recommend google search tools and dig in there...   Search.google.com

I would also not use the default IPB ad placement locations. Custom insert in skins.  You can set up ads every x posts that way for example.  You can also limit ads to more senior members based on group or post count.  

 

[Pavel Chernitsky]

On 1/26/2021 at 8:22 PM, Paul E. said:

Our biggest efforts were before we converted. We anticipated the problem because many others had posted about it here when we were evaluating IPS. We spent a lot of lead time finding every URL path we had in our vBulletin install (all of which was customized by us for SEO purposes), and crafting rewrite logic to keep existing links working beyond the standard ones the converter addresses with permanent redirects.

We wanted to make sure that any existing URL in search engine indexes would continue working and take you to its new home. This is probably not an issue for a community that had standard vBulletin URLs, but it was for our modified ones.

Things improved somewhat but not back to pre conversion levels. It was a tradeoff for us though--we had our list of requirements, and IPS checked off more than the other solutions, especially the ones that were ranked highest by us. Had we gone with some other solution, we don't know if we would have had the same SEO impact, but here's hoping to needed changes and improvements in this arena for out of the box behaviors.

vBulletin was no longer sustainable, and our community had outgrown the capabilities of the software. Their position was that our community was too large for their version 5, and we were not interested in maintaining and iterating upon version 3.8 in perpetuity.

Sounds pretty much exactly like what we had, minus all the preparation and generally smart things you did 😄 

 

23 hours ago, marklcfc said:

Probably not related but it's always annoyed me.

Yeah I don't think it is... our website loads and navigates pretty quickly, and scores mid-70s in desktop pagespeed insights. Mobile IS much much worse, but I think since there is an app that hopefully somehow will get out of beta and be fully functional, you want to get people to use it anyway.

[CoffeeCake]

15 hours ago, Fast Lane! said:

Pagespeed is a big area of work for IPB.  The overhead is HUGE for each page load.  Css and js for the entire site is loaded for every page (but can be cached). DOM structure is massive.

[marklcfc]

4 hours ago, Pavel Chernitsky said:

Yeah I don't think it is... our website loads and navigates pretty quickly, and scores mid-70s in desktop pagespeed insights. Mobile IS much much worse, but I think since there is an app that hopefully somehow will get out of beta and be fully functional, you want to get people to use it anyway.

When I say sluggish I meant on mobile viewing, it's fine on desktop.

[xtech]

An app to to address SEO issues would be an instant success. I don't see it as being very difficult from a technical point of view. Many of the main improvement points have been largely discussed.

The most successful ideas are the ones that address user problems. Maybe @Paul E., @Adriano Faria, @newbie LAC, @DawPi and others see here a great chance of making good money and decide to invest their time and skills on it? 

[Jordan Miller]

Thanks for the topic @Pavel Chernitsky. SEO is def a priority for us and are always looking for feedback to help better optimize future releases. If it doesn't involve changing the fundamental functionality have how our pages load, I imagine there could be room for improvement. 

One thing I've noticed is that site speed can change depend on the ad network. Wondering, do you mind sharing who you use? I use Ezoic for my own forum off IPS and it loads fast (fast for a site with ads on it). If you want to private message me that please feel free as well! 

[CoffeeCake]

4 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

Wondering, do you mind sharing who you use?

Google AdSense. Per the title, and posts above this.

[Pavel Chernitsky]

10 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

Wondering, do you mind sharing who you use?

Hey Jordan, 
As Paul said, we're using Google AdSense's Automatic ad system.

[Jordan Miller]

On 1/29/2021 at 8:27 PM, Paul E. said:

Google AdSense. Per the title, and posts above this.

Lol my bad 🤦‍♂️ IDK why I assumed the OP was using this in tandem with another ad network (like how I do). 

On 1/30/2021 at 1:56 AM, Pavel Chernitsky said:

Hey Jordan, 
As Paul said, we're using Google AdSense's Automatic ad system.

Don't think I had enough coffee that day. This is a separate conversation, but have you considered other ad networks? You might be able to generate more revenue. 

[David..]

54 minutes ago, Jordan Invision said:

This is a separate conversation, but have you considered other ad networks? You might be able to generate more revenue.

Do you have any suggestions?

[Jordan Miller]

25 minutes ago, David.. said:

Do you have any suggestions?

Sure thing. I don't know where the lines are in terms of offering advertising advice based off my experience as a community advocate with Invision. However, I can def answer your questions via PM. I feel like that might be a fair compromise. HMU 🙏 

[Pavel Chernitsky]

On 2/2/2021 at 12:21 AM, Jordan Invision said:

This is a separate conversation, but have you considered other ad networks? You might be able to generate more revenue. 

Of course we have, but that kind of defeats the point of this thread - which is solving IPS's issues if there are any.
Not to be a overly rude or anything, but that advice is pretty much the same as "have you considered other community platforms"...

[Jordan Miller]

5 hours ago, Pavel Chernitsky said:

Of course we have, but that kind of defeats the point of this thread - which is solving IPS's issues if there are any.
Not to be a overly rude or anything, but that advice is pretty much the same as "have you considered other community platforms"...

Oh sorry about that! You're right. I only mentioned it in case you were interested in possibly generating more revenue. I'll stick to the task at hand :] 

[Hostingunlock]

were you able to recover your income previously???? with adsense after

[Randy Calvert]

Mine recovered.  It's more than it was last year when I first converted from Xenforo to IPB, but like anything Adsense, it's variable.  Some months are better than others depending on what keywords are "hot", and how the Google Gods feel at any particular moment in time.  

[Pavel Chernitsky]

Same here. It's not as bad as it was, but it still doesn't come near what we had on VB.
*I've PM'd you with more details.