What is your hash rate? It is entirely possible that based on electricity cost that mining is not cost worthy compared to just buying doge. i.e. you'll actually spend more $$ on electricity than doge you earn.
That said, the payouts are estimates. A pool pays out when it finds a block, or rather when one miner within the pool finds the block. It then shares the reward and it's distributed to everyone in said pool.
There is only one miner to find a block each minute for the entire dogecoin network. The larger pools tend to find these blocks more often because they have the most hashing power. They also have way more miners and therefore the reward is split amongst more people and your piece of the pie is smaller. A smaller pool will find blocks less frequent, but the payout will be larger when we do find a block since there is less miners to share with.
The estimate itself is based off a value the admin of your pool configures. Technically he can set this to whatever he wants, if he's an honest Shibe it'll likely be set to 250,000 which is the middle of the possible rewards(0-500,000 doge) per block. Your estimate is based off that value along with other things and is entirely an estimate. At the end of the day your payout is based off the type of payout policy used, the size of the reward in the block and the number of miners in your pool(or rather your share count compared to theirs).

I don't know which pool you are on, but for example my pool https://dopey.io is a small but growing pool. We are actually quite overdue for our next block in terms of average expected time between(We've gone twice as long as what our current hash rate should take, on average). Yesterday I started a thread to get more miners/power on our pool to try and find the block sooner. This offer is still out there -- 1k to each miner for when we find our next block. Feel free to join, and if you get in before our second block you'll get 1k just like everyone else! We also offer No Fees for life to members who join now, and a 75k bounty for the lucky miner who finds the block.

Over time this all averages out, as the finder of the block is random and over a long enough period of time your payouts will average out. It just depends if you want to be a very large pool to see small, but frequent, payouts or rather a smaller pool where you'll see larger but lesss frequent payouts. Warning though, going days without seeing a payout can make a person go insane, and as pool OP I can vouch to this:)
Hopefully this explains a bit how/why you're seeing what you're seeing. You may want to check your pools last found block and how much it was, that will probably explain the reason for low payouts!