May 2011 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[HuskyPup]

For me, so far today 1st May, it has continued in the same vein of the past few days.

I've never experienced such bad endofmonthitis before, here's hoping for a kick-start Monday or Tuesday or whenever anyone, asides from us lot, go back to work!

[azlinda]

I noticed almost immediately after I began making changes on my site. I put "no index" on all the pages that have never done that well. I'm removing the 336x280 AdSense ad from beneath the leaderboard at the top of every page. I put the Value Click 160x600 at the left of the content and put the Google 160x600 at the right of the content. I changed the Google leaderboard to text only, and left the Google banner at the top images only. I'm not saying that all this has made a vast difference so far, but I noticed a good difference after I put everything into channels. I guess the coming days will tell. To sum it up, I'm down to two AdSense ads per page.

[azlinda]

I'm sorry, I meant to say that the Google leaderboard is image only, and the 160x600 is text only.

[HuskyPup]

Oh dear...no click dump and still an incredibly low EPC v average.

It's looking more and more likely that me and Google will have a divorce this month...believe it or not the only hesitation I have with placing ads for my own prodcts is IF I can cope with the extra orders!

I find this scenario quite incredulous, just how many other major widget manufacturers are they pi$$ing off?

[sailorjwd]

For years now I have been scared to death of running afoul of some obscure Adsense rule and getting the band-for-life email. I never in a million years thought that I would have to leave Adsense simply because it didn't work anymore.

Going from paying for healthcare and a nice long vacation each year down to literally a couple of dollars a day continues to astonish me.

At this point I have to try to recover my consulting biz by removing adsense and, with other changes, get out from under the grip of Panda.

Google has gotta start understanding they have a heck of a lot of collateral damage with this Panda update and whatever is going on with Adsense.

[Rockyou]

Well i already divorce adsense in few of my websites & I am very very happy. I don't have to live with a mad man managed Google. This Peace of mind is worth millions of dollars. Throw Adsense out, Get life.

[coachm]

Well, we've shut down some sites, in the process of removing adsense from every site but one, and plan on closing a few more sites, combining some things, and doing a lot of redesign I've wanted to do for ages, but worried about losing adsense money.

I've said before it's not just the money but the crazy day to day unexplained fluctuations which have gotten absolutely insane. If on a Wednesday, I make $60 (example number) and on the Tuesday, I make $20, and on and on, I can't run a business like that. Good for pocket change now.

Tell the truth, I've been trying to integrate my sites with Facebook, and they are 10 times worse than google for usability and poor docs. Even simple things to access the API require developing apps, and the facilities they require are horribly limited. I'm looking forward to the day, I move my business off the 'net. It's a goal.

In any event, I figure the next three months will be thin $$$, until probably Fall, when I've reconfigured, reoriented my business.

[azlinda]

I'm going to give my changes about a week, then I will seriously consider removing AdSense from all my pages.

[Play_Bach]

Earnings at 60% of average today. Three hours left to go.

[WolfLover]

I'm going to remove my AdSense ads too. It's not worth it any more to send my visitors to my competitors. I've gone from 4 figures per month to 3 figures and it's absolutely ridiculous. I don't understand why the CTR has fallen so much. Has to be that stupid thing where ads that don't apply to your site appear because someone did a search for something else.

Has anyone had success with removing the ads then bringing them back after some period of time?

[Play_Bach]

@WolfLover

The Interest Based Ads have turned my ad blocks into gumbo. Hopefully one day Google will allow publishers the option to turn them off. I find it hard to imagine that Google is making more off them on niche sites like mine than they were before, but maybe they are. All I know is that AdSense clicks/earnings for me are now down to about 1/3 and from what I'm reading on this board, many others are experiencing the same (or worse).

[Scurramunga]

Well i already divorce adsense in few of my websites & I am very very happy. I don't have to live with a mad man managed Google. This Peace of mind is worth millions of dollars. Throw Adsense out, Get life.

I've done it already and it feels GOOD

[Scurramunga]

I don't understand why the CTR has fallen so much. Has to be that stupid thing where ads that don't apply to your site appear because someone did a search for something else.

Funny how so many publishers mention issues with CTR. I know CTR decline was a major factor before I pulled the plug on Adsense too. I think it would be highly likely that we are all in niches which differ from one another and yet CTR decline (in some cases sudden decline) is what we have had in common. Strange.

[zarathustra2011]

I'm probably not going to be popular if I say yesterday was a record earning day for me..

A good while back I did experiment with chikita, but didn't get anywhere with it. It's good there are alternatives about, but I think it takes a lot of time and experimentation before you find something to beat GoogleAds, and there's always going to be that nagging doubt - what if June things return to normal!

[HuskyPup]

I know it's early in the day but I just have to post this, so far for Thursday:

CTR 0&
eCPM 0.02
Earnings 0.01

I don't think I can even go to a public toilet for that!

[Automotive site]

Yesterday was easily my best day this month. Still not reaching the levels of April, but still significantly up on daily averages for this month.

[Automotive site]

Guys, don't get disheartened. The Internet is here to stay and the advertising spend is increasing year by year as more and more people buy online. Just concentrate on developing high quality niche sites and there will always be a way to make money.

[jost]

My earning fell off substantially on Jan 1 of 2011 and have never recovered.

All due to CPC dropping 30%+ and staying there in a tight range.

CPC rates used to swing pretty wide causing some months with 50% jumps in profit.

But CPC has entered a narrow tight range of variance that is a lot lower.

It sucks, because im at record breaking traffic, growing well and it seems every time I substantially increase my traffic, googles payout goes substantially down and I end up slightly negative.

I may have to divorce google too and ad a contact page for direct advertising and cut them out. I just dont want to deal with clients, accepting payments, and all that managing crap. But I gotta make a living.

Going to have to build my own automated adsense system to accept payments and automatically turn off ad's after X impressions/click throughs etc so im not doing manual labor.

[HuskyPup]

The Internet is here to stay and the advertising spend is increasing year by year as more and more people buy online.

And herein precisely lies a problem for my widgets and Google.

No one in my industry physically buys my widgets from "unknown" suppliers, that's asking for financial and business suicide.

From established suppliers or long-term industry suppliers who have created shopping carts, fine, they're a known entity and negate the need for either Google/Bing/Yahoo! plus no necessity for AdWords and AdSense.

Some of us are in businesses whereby the company and its capabilities, all B2B, have to be known and proven and it seems to me that maybe Joe Public purchaser is realising this now and possibly has learnt that cheap online may not equate to customer satisfaction.

I must repeat, I am talking about my widgets, not branded Sonly/Nokia/Mercedes product numbers and it still doesn't explain my rapid decline after Panda 2.1

[jmccormac]

Dead today. I guess the Adsense people are out meeting their public in local roadshows and haven't remembered to feed the hamsters.

Regards...jmcc

[azlinda]

Well, so far it's dead for me also today. I've tried everything I can possibly try. I did notice that I have good search results on DuckDuckGo - much better than on Google.

[Play_Bach]

Targeting seems very off today. I check using a browser cleared of everything (cache,cookies, history etc.) and out of eight ads, only one has anything to do with my site.

[coachm]

Guys, don't get disheartened. The Internet is here to stay and the advertising spend is increasing year by year as more and more people buy online. Just concentrate on developing high quality niche sites and there will always be a way to make money

Admittedly ad spend will go up. In case you haven't noticed it's going to places like Facebook and LinkedIn, and continues to go into google search properties and probably the larger name-brand sites like NYT,CNN, etc.

I'm a little morose so it might be my mood, but I think we're at a signpost time/end of an era in many ways re: the Internet. I spent 12 hours working on a site redesign yesterday, and woke up wondering what the hell I'm doing.

I'm a writer, conference speaker and trainer, and I spend my time trying to second or third guess a bunch of computers. Who's the "mug" here.

Not only am I ready to get back to dealing with real people live face-to-face, but I'm also ready, as a consumer of the Internet, to stop doing that. It's not fun with the spam EVERYWHERE, the lame conversations (excluding here).

Panda and the adsense craziness have stimulated me to rethink and I remembered I started my own business 20 years ago because my job then went from great to really not fun.

I think it's time, again.

PS. I saw the lowest numbers this morning ever for adsense. I don't put much credibility in anything less than a weeks data, but you gotta wonder.

[azlinda]

My stats have been stuck for over an hour.

[jost]

Dont sweat stats being stuck mid-day.

Google has to crunch an astonishing amount of data, and they often seem to get behind.

When my stats are way off in the morning, I dont look until the next day to see how the day went before I freak out.

Sometimes ill see them only 25% complete at midnight on east coast time with only 3 hours left on the google clock, and by the next day the stats are all caught up and look fine.

They get clogged up...

[Atomic]

Good start to the day. Just passed the previous May record with 12 days to go.

[zarathustra2011]

As jost says - don't panic - they get stuck daily for me. Mine do update but very, very slowly, showing just a few clicks paying out pennies. Later in the day, the pennies turn to a lot more pennies, and the clicks update themselves too, returning everything to normality before the next stall comes along.

[HuskyPup]

but I think we're at a signpost time/end of an era in many ways re: the Internet

<A little off topic but is this the way things are going? For me especially...>

Yep, I've been thinking along those lines for awhile now. Realistically advertsing is an added-on bonus for our sites but now that this is not delivering really good beer money and that my own factories are full of orders, I have decided to try another route.

I've approached a couple of major players in our widget industry and am presently constructing them a couple of sites under one of my company names however solely promoting their production. One or two lines do crossover into mine but that's no issue since we supply them the raw materials anyway and they're targetting a different market.

We'll see how it goes.

</off topic>

Rabits and skinning come to mind here:-)

[Automotive site]

Today is not looking so good after a pretty good day yesterday.

[JCKline]

Today looks better then yasterday for me, which isn't saying much.

[azlinda]

My CTR and eCPM have gone to the bottom of the barrel today.