April 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[Mentat]

March was a UP/Down month for many, but was generally a quiet month.

April has "two Easters" (Catholic on 5th and Orthodox on 12), an official Google update on 21 (mobile algo) and probably the doorway pages update.

In the last yeast, Google rolled some big updates on holidays, so it's time to prepare yourself for a rough month.

[Ironside]

How important do you think it is to show your custom channels to advertisers?

[nubchai]

FWIW I saw the best daily income n Saturday and Sunday than I've seen this year. The only change I made was to change most of my ads to responsive. I have just one ad block that I didn't change because it looks good on mobiles and tablets already. When I make it responsive it compresses too much. Two days doesn't make a trend but it was good to see,

[netmeg]

How important do you think it is to show your custom channels to advertisers?

I always do for my main placements. It doesn't cost anything but time. And I'm still up, year over year.

[frankleeceo]

@netmeg

RPM rising? or more $ from pageview rising? from new sites or old sites getting more traffic?

Are your best earners all event sites? I remember you mentioned that you are in multiple niches.

Do you notice visitors using more mobile as in percentage increase? How about those mobile RPM's compared to desktop?

[netmeg]

I don't do specifics, frankleeceo, sorry. I have a lot of sites and yes I'm in multiple niches. But my older sites are getting more traffic, the EPC (I just checked) is running exactly the same as last year and the CTR is almost double.

I don't count newer sites in my thinking (or my posting) until they've been around two years. That's how long it takes me to grow what I consider to be a nicely earning site with reasonable traffic and repeat visitors. (If it doesn't make it after two years, I get rid of it)

[frankleeceo]

ic.

no specific is ok, we usually talk in general anyways. I just want to ask the right questions so I can apply to my own sites ;p. The CTR rise that you notice is mainly from desktop or mobile? or both!?

most other people on the forum notice same if not lower CTR (at least i do), you seem to be the only exception so you must be doing something right.

What appears to be best and second best CTR units of your placements? header units work for you?

[netmeg]

I'm doing lots of things right, I hope. I put a lot of work into it from all sides. Desktop is up the most, then smartphones. Tablets are just about exactly the same as last year. (That's CTR) For revenue they're all up in varying degrees. Mobile is about 75% up in revenue YTD.

(I also have to do some guessing, because I had all that ads-clicked-by-bots revenue removed from my payments, but it still shows up in my reports. I can remove it from my totals, but I don't necessarily know all metrics where it came from)

My top placement is a leaderboard. My second is a sidebar 300x250. That's about as specific as I wish to get. YMMV.

[Ironside]

How do you guys go about creating your website?I've been hearing the word niche thrown around quite a lot. Do you find a niche, research it and then do a website, or do you only write about what you know?

[frankleeceo]

@Netmeg Understood. Thanks.

@Ironside

There are mainly three routes at creating sites. They can have some similarities. One is to create micro niche to niche sites that target specific vertical -> specific topic within the vertical.

Second is to create broader topics that encompass more niches or topics.

Third sites with no niche just personal blogs that target whatever that person knows about.

Microniche and niche site is far easier to rank and get traffic for smaller pool of potential visitors. But longer term growth is much more limited.

For example, imagine web development is a major vertical that can encompass various niche such as seo, wordpress, joomla, script, etc....and each niche can encompass even more sub/microniche such as...wordpress plugins, seo backlinks, etc.

Bottom line: You should start with niches that you have a passion for and knowledge for as a starting point. With that as a jumping board, expand to niches that you have less knowledge / idea for with the things that you learned from successful sites.

The secret is to figure out what people need and deliver it with the best site that has no other competitions.

I personally aim for a good mix of microniche and niches as diversification process. I know that I probably cannot excel as an super authority site with my resources so I stay away from those.

[Ironside]

That makes perfect sense. I have one website that unfortunately is blocked from displaying AdSense because of a few rude jokes, honestly Google can be really pedantic sometimes. Anyway, it's basically my personal website that covers all aspects of things relating to myself, including my hobbies. One of my hobbies is carp fishing. In recent months, the one-page my website has really jumps up the search rankings and now I get loads of hits everyday, approximately cannot display AdSense. So going by what you are suggesting, and Micronesia, maybe I could create a standalone website on my favourite way to catch carp, may be float fishing. Float fishing for carp get a lot of search queries so it may be an idea to try that for starters and see what happens. If I create another website, I can put AdSense on it.

[netmeg]

I started my first website because I was collecting the information for myself (and my godson) anyway and I got tired of all my friends calling me up and asking me to read it to them over the phone. That was maybe six or seven years before AdSense (even before Google, I think) Flash forward after I've had it running a few years with AdSense, and in the meantime I've tried all kinds of ways to make extra money with varying success and when I made a piece of paper with two columns, one for success and one for failure, there was only one solid success. So I dumped everything else and decided to try to scale the the successful one out.

For other niches - I try to look for areas that either have no competition, or else the competition is doing a piss poor job. I look for problems that need to be solved, and listen when people say "I wish...", "I need...", or "I want...". I won't start something unless I have a clear idea of how I can do it better, and I don't mean slightly better, I mean significantly better. And then I try to suss out who the likely audience is going to be, because I'm going to be writing for that audience (and their interests and concerns) and hopefully the ads are going to be targeted to them more than they are to my content.

So my niches tend to be more low key, non competitive type stuff that I can grow. I won't touch the high dollar/high CPC stuff. Why beat my head against a wall?

[frankleeceo]

@ironside

You are on the right direction there. Move forward and away from personal blog is the way to go (at least until you are a famous personal brand yourself, ie. matt cutts just for example).

As some starting pointers, think branding, think target audience, and finally think about competition as @netmeg's comments stated. There are other great sources out there that talk about this once you have the right mindset.

If you think you can dominate "float fishing for carps". It may be worthwhile to do something like "float fisher.com" vs "floatfishingcarp.com" so that you can expand your site's subject to other types of fishes later. Just some rough ideas. I do not know the niche but that would be a part of my thinking process.

In terms of relating it back to adsense...think advertisers too: can they advertise strictly floatfishcarps equips on your site, or would be easier for them to advertise general float fishing gears with a more generic float fish site. Most newcomers probably do not consider this important factor, but once you build a site or a network to a certain level, it becomes a somewhat important metric for $. Again I have no specific knowledge but rather just blabbing in as this is a part of my generic research / site creation process.

@netmeg, based on what you said...our strategies are similar and that's probably why our interest based ads campaigns typically outperform our purely contextual ads. I always look at other people's $1+ cpc's in awe.

[netmeg]

I always look at other people's $1+ cpc's in awe.

I get plenty of those. It's the $15+ CPCs I don't see very often. Once in a while, but not often.

[breeks]

Yesterday one of my sites never dropped below a dollar a click.
Today the same site 30 cents a click.

Averages out OK but buck a click is nice. $1 should be the minimum. :)

[breeks]

728x336

Seeing a new ad size using responsive code 728x336.

Looks interesting might make a good image ad, so far only seeing text.

[glitterball]

CTR halved on my biggest site yesterday and looking even worse so far today.
Numbers look normal on my other sites.

[RedBar]

Monday was yet another pathetic day with CTR down again with earnings down 33%. I thought this programme may get through until June before I pulled all ads, if it stays like this until the end of April then it will be gone.

It's now so low it's becoming pointless. Something was changed on 1st April for me, period.

[jbayabas]

When you love your job but you get paid so little, you go insane. What happened to Adsense? I'm just in shock of how low my earnings are.

[RedBar]

My earnings are not simply low, they're now almost zero, even I cannot justify these sites any longer carrying Google for free...all my incentive has gone, great job G!

[Ironside]

After changing all my adds to responsive I didn't have a bad day, not good, but certainly slightly better than the few days before. But that didn't last, yesterday was absolutely diabolical, didn't even manage to make £4, that is just unbelievable. Today isn't looking much better, haven't even got to £1.50 yet. I honestly don't know what is going on. What I can't understand is why last year my earnings were four times they are at the moment, I'm still getting the same amount of hits every day, nothing has changed there. Absolutely crazy

[RedBar]

WooHoo...an animated gif just gave me my best-ever click of $10!

I'd love to know what that was?

[chalkywhite]

One thing I tried since christmaswas to put an ad in my content. Ive always been strongly against this for many reasons but with falling income I gave it a go. It has been a massive success, I placed a 720x90 after the 5th paragraph of each page (500) and that one ad generates about 60% of the sites revenue now.

Observations this week show that nobody is clicking anything on any ad platform.

[kireb]

School holidays seem over, Adsense is making money again. US pv's great, RPM great and most important right now: desktop visitors at a stable 88/90% again. The last 4 days were as good as those in March. April might turn out good after all, though I hold my breath for April 21.

My site contains a database library with 1000's of entries and self made materials. I have hundreds of rubrics and sub rubrics and honestly no idea how to put this in respinsove design right now. When I look at my 'competitors' or similar sites, they look horrible on a mobile phone.I will sit out the storm.

[netmeg]

Up quite a bit over last April. Most of the sites are up traffic wise too (some more than others). So far so good.

[child please]

Might be a silly question, but I often see some of you guys say "just got a click worth $", etc. How do you find that or figure it out?

I'm not sure if I just don't know where to look or is it because my clicks/revenue from AdSense goes up in bulk due to the traffic that I have no way of seeing or knowing this?

[avalon37]

I had been having a very solid month, but the last 2 days have been pathetic. I've seen some awful new tests that I'm sure are related to the poor performance.

[netmeg]

How do you find that or figure it out?

Some sites have low enough numbers of clicks that a big one sticks out. For me, I make heavy use of custom channels, so I can sometimes find one there.

[ember]

I'm not sure if I just don't know where to look

You can also see it in analytics, although it's tough if you have lots of traffic and lots of clicks.

[AlexB77]

April looks great so far, I am already over entire April of last year by 12% and still have another half to cover. Past few days were great except 12th. All looks really promising.

[Ironside]

I don't know if anyone saw the news today regarding Google and how they have been accused of promoting their own products on the search engines. I wonder if the same thing could be said about AdSense? In the last few months I've been seeing more and more advertising for Google itself on my AdSense. What good is that for me? If my users are seeing these adverts then the chances are they're not going to bother clicking on them because I doubt whether any of them are web designers.