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.

[RedBar]

Apart from my super click, yesterday was yet another mediocre day. The problem I now have is that April has been so consistently down that I must "assume" this is my new average i.e. now -25% v March/February/January.

[breeks]

This morning my main site is over run with smog check ads. The site subject has nothing to do with cars, smog checks or anything remotely related to the subject. I block one and another one pops up. So far have blocked six. All from the same company just different locations. Each locations has a web site.

[avalon37]

breeks I am seeing a huge increase in absolute crap in terms of contextual relevance. More Google tinkering - it's way too early in the month for this to be Advertiser budget related.

[AlexB77]

Very strong day with high CPC from US, UK, Canada and Australia. Mobile clicks are up by 35% today and Tablets are also up by about 4-5%, but desktop hasn't changed almost at all.

[kireb]

5th super day with high value traffic from my main countries US, UK, Canada and Australia. Desktop platform stands on 95% now. Super. April is turning from bad into good this way.

The more I am rwading about the shift to mobile, the less I agree. Some software is just not meant for smaller devices. Illustratot, Photoshop, Cad Cam, no way I'll use that on my phone.

[londrum]

I've just discovered lazy loading of images (i'm a bit behind the times). It cut my page speed dramatically and upped my earnings too because the ads are appearing quicker.
...might be worth a try if you haven't already got it

[trebuchet]

londrum, are you lazy loading ads and images, or just images? Because I think it's a violation of T&Cs to lazy load ads.

[londrum]

Just the images

[Ironside]

Yesterday was absolutely diabolical, today it looks like it's going to be no better, £.28 so far, I might as well not bother. The way things are going, this month earnings will be about the same as I was getting five years ago, a few months after I first started with Google AdSense. Stupid thing is, the amount of visitors and getting doesn't appear to have dropped too much.

[RedBar]

I don't earn as much in a month now that I did in a day a few years ago...to make things seem even worse I could say I don't make as much per day as I used to do an hour!

[RedBar]

Can I have a red bar please? If not then all the wheels have fallen off my waggon!

[MrSavage]

Perplexed. I'm not sure how my highest traffic days in a couple years could fetch one of the lower earning days of the past couple years. I wish my "Earnings and Observations" were more uplifting and optimistic, but I need to be honest about it. With this bump in traffic, I have a good test sample to compare with from the last time this happened. I'm getting some Baidu traffic so perhaps the system is analyzing longer. Not sure what the issue is. I've never had to concern myself with these types of questions before.

[Ironside]

I haven't even reached £1 yet. I don't think this has anything to do with my website not performing well, something is happening somewhere within Google. I know some people are still doing fairly well, but there are more people this has affected than people who are not affected.. How can you go from doing quite well, to absolutely hardly anything in just a matter of a few days? I changed some of my AdSense units again yesterday. My main articles have now got a responsive skyscraper (160 x 600) in the left-hand column above the main menu And another responsive unit at the end of all the content, all the other articles have got a responsive banner above the content, just below the heading, and another one at the end of the content.

The AdSense unit at the end of the content always used to do really well, as did some of the skyscraper units located in the left column, all of these have fallen off the edge of the Earth when it comes to performance in the last few days.

[ember]

Heck of a day. Both ctr and epc are way up.

all of these have fallen off the edge of the Earth when it comes to performance in the last few days.

I have periods like that, too, when it seems that it's the end. I used to make changes, often in panic. Change the ad placement, change the color, etc. Usually did not help and often made things worse. I've learned to just let things ride. Eventually, numbers return to normal. I also look for other ways to earn revenue, just in case.

[Mentat]

For me Easter is still here, record low CPC and it seems the this weekend I was hit again by a tweak, because my traffic does not recover.

[MrSavage]

OMG. A trickle like never before. No joking here folks. One of my champion sites is seeing a major bump in traffic and for whatever reason, my earning are trickling in and showing results like I had when I was a 6-month Adsense virgin. I mean there could be an adjustment coming to me, but I'm not banking on that. It's absolutely remarkable. *stunned*

[AlexB77]

Quite possibly one of the strongest days of April and and whole 2015. The day is not over yet for me, but I am already in top 3 digits. Traffic is just as normal as it was, but US clicks are much higher than average by a huge 137% today. It is my second highest day of April.

[frankleeceo]

business as usual today. highest rpm of the month however, but nothing out of the water.

[EditorialGuy]

April is looking pretty good for us. (Probably because of our topic and the time of year.)

[Ironside]

If you think about it, the UK is minute compared to North America or other countries like Australia. However, even though Australia is a massive country, there are less people living there than the UK. So in theory, if you only got people browsing your website from a smaller country then surely you are not going to get as many people clicking on your AdSense unit. Even though I'm in the UK, my website is.com and therefore most of my visitors are from the US, even though I do get a lot of visitors from other parts of the world. But I think most of my revenue does come from the US. If you think about it, the United States and Canada is such a massive country, there's a lot more of an opportunity to get people who want to advertise their AdSense units on your website. I don't think I would get any money if I relied on just the UK for Google revenue, there are just not enough people. I think it would be a lot harder to find a niche in the UK that would work. So I think reaching out to the whole world is bound to bring you in more money. Does that make any sense?

[trebuchet]

@Ironside, my experience concurs with that. Many more people in the US and many more American companies targeting those people. Also, CTR suggest that American users are more likely to click ads than British or Australian users. I have always SEO targeted the US for those reasons. Having said that, I'm sure there are niches that work for UK and Australia, however mine doesn't seem to be one of them.

[Mentat]

Well, I'm glad that some of you are fine. We cannot be all miserable :)

For me is still incredible that my CPC and total earning today is less than Easter!
In fact, the CPC is at a historical minimum for me, but my CTR is higher than usual.

It's like all the big advertisers are still on holiday!

The payment and lower traffic each week = game over for me this year.

[SEOPTI]

Mentat, same for my clients US CPC is at 40% comparing to last year. The CPC decline started in January, especially desktop CPC is at an all time low.

[MrSavage]

Insanity is record traffic with earning going in the opposite direction. More customers in store meaning less sales. Imagine that. It defies logic.

[Mentat]

Hooray! A new minimum CPC, great doing Google!

Keep up the good work!

[Ironside]

@trebuchet My understanding is that my website falls into a very tiny niche, basically one fish amongst thousands of different species. However, it just so happens that it's a very popular fish and I'm not competing with many people, in fact there really is only one other website who I could call a competitor. They have been running since 1999, I've been running since 2006. For years they used PHPbb, I started off by using Joomla!. Because my website was made up of lots of articles & they were just the basic forum, it wasn't a long before I completely overtook them in the rankings. However, they caught on eventually and swapped over the Joomla! as well. Having said that, I'm still ahead in the rankings after a lot of testing and comparison.

Now, if I was to rely on just the UK then I would get absolutely miniscule amounts of money because compared to the US, there are not many people in the UK who seem to use my website. But if you think about it logically, there are probably 100 times more people in the US who keep the fish compared to the UK. So for me, it makes sense to target the countries where more people are looking for my particular niche. I would be lying if I said I chose .com so that I could target the US audience, it just so happened that I got lucky, I don't think I would have done half as well with.co.uk domain name.

[trebuchet]

@Ironside, you've got me wondering now what special kind of fish this is! But I am not surprised about your UK returns. No doubt there are aquarists in the UK but most people there eat fish, not keep them. If you had a site focusing on Premier League football then no doubt it would be a different story. My niche is different and for a while I targeted the UK fairly rigorously, but the returns were so pitiful I just gave up.

[Ironside]

@trebs my site focuses on the Oscar Fish Cichlid from South America. However, it just so happens that many of the articles I have written our helpful to people who keep other types of fish. Yes, I agree a website on football would be quite popular here, but then you would have to compete with thousands of other people doing the same thing, probably not even worth the bother, unless of course you know you can do much better than everybody else :-).

I think Oscars are fairly popular here in the UK, like they are all around the world, but I just don't think there are enough people to really make it worthwhile just targeting the UK. However, carp on the other hand is a different ballgame altogether. I don't know where you live in the well, but let's say we're talking about the US, and probably correct in saying that the largemouth bass is probably among the top five most popular freshwater species, that's exactly the same for us with the. So a website about carp could do quite well. Whether you would get the thousands of visitors every day that you would need to make money, that's questionable. Problem is there are absolutely loads and loads and loads of carp fishing forums and websites in the UK, so it's difficult to compete. Mind you, the search term "best way to catch carp" brings my website at number two on Google, and number one on bing, not sure how that happened :-)

[RedBar]

Is the US closed today, Saturday?

After almost 9 hours of an AdSense day I've had 7% of average visitors from there and not a single click!

Either that or AdSense has disappeared into oblivion.

[Mentat]

I believe they are making some kind of update.
I cannot see the traffic information, but as CPC it's hell on earth!

I did not see such low figures since 2005!
30% drop of CPC in the last week is huge.

Only a miracle can save me now.