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]

Don't give up yet, Scotland. I keep hoping that there is some glitch in the system that will be taken care of eventually. Meanwhile, I'm doing everything possible to get my site up to par. Right now I'm running a duplicate content checker. I have a feeling that, with mine being a culinary site, I have a lot of duplicate content.

[Play_Bach]

Earnings at 65%. Six hours to go.

[azlinda]

I just finished doing an exhaustive check. I looked at many well-targeted ads on my website this afternoon. The ads that are appearing are the same companies who appear at the top in the search results. I'm of the firm opinion that if you do not use AdWords, you will not get a first page mention - especially in my particular category.

[Play_Bach]

@azlinda

I don't use AdWords. Been at the #1 position in a highly competitive niche for the main keywords for years.

[tangor]

I'm just going to give up following the reports now, and will check them each morning instead.

There is something to be said for that... "a watched pot never boils"...

Checking once a day (better once a week when real statistics can be accumulated) is better for blood pressure.

Were I real tinfoil hat kind of fellow I'd wonder if Google keeps track of who's keeping track and how often they keep track of the tracking...

[zarathustra2011]

Not a great day at all.
I have a lot of organic traffic, and prior to April I could almost predict my earnings to the dollar - my reports showed a very consistent line. Since this time (and more so in May) I swing violently between fantastic days, to poor days - my graph shows such an intense saw like pattern, I fear I could injure myself on it.
My traffic remains consistent and I check my ads from time to time, and it's always the usual, relevant ones that appear (though their order changes by the hour). I just don't get it.

[koan]

Earnings at 65%. Six hours to go.

Not sure I get the point of those type of posts.

[HuskyPup]

Not sure I get the point of those type of posts.

In my situation 90% of my earnings have nearly always been in the 90-110% daily range except at times of Google glitches or exceptional circumstances such as Xmas.

Since precisely May 6th my daily earnings' average have been at ~50% of January 1st - May 5th average. For me it was not just a cut in Page Impression but an across the board cut in CTR on the same day.

It stands out very clearly as follows:

Daily page impressions 62%
CTR 82.5%
Earnings 43.5%

Since May 6th I have not had one day of Page Impressions, CTR or Earnings better than my 2011 average until May 5th.

[Play_Bach]

> Not sure I get the point of those type of posts.

@koan
This thread is about AdSense Earnings & Observations. I'm trying to share both in my posts. AdSense since 2004 and have a pretty clear idea about what my daily average is as well as the typical reporting pattern in the stats. Lately these things have changed, a lot.

[community2004]

Hi everyone,

For us, this month is approx 33% better than last month in terms of earnings (and last month was above average)

Out of interest, how big are your sites? Our daily adsense is $475~ on average, so a month that is 33% more is a big leap.. I'm not sure how big any of your sites are, but for someone to report '7 clicks' in another post I am guessing they are mainly small sites? I don't mean to 'have a go' - but with small traffic you can see vastly different earning levels depending on 'a couple of more visitors' than usual? It's also much harder to predict your revenue from experience.

Just interested to see what people are trying to predict based on what traffic they have - the more traffic, the easier I have found?

Cheers! :)

[Play_Bach]

community2004 - You must have a tremendous amount of traffic to be getting those numbers. Wow! Impressive. Just another AdSense minnow here.

[community2004]

@Play_bach

Everyone starts off small! About 5m pageviews a month for us.

[HuskyPup]

Hands up all those who used to be on USD 333.33+ per day and are now struggling to make USD 33.33 per day!

Does anyone else remember the significance of 333.33?

Ah, those were the days:-)

[sailorjwd]

Significance? You mean that noisy truck waking me up? Today I just got over $3.33. Same as day 1 in 2004 when I put adsense up on a single internal page just for fun.

If G's adsense revenues are holding up then there must be a number of new millionaires around here who are keeping very silent. To those lucky ones I'll say save every penny you can while it lasts.

[sailorjwd]

Community2004, As I said: Save it while you can. I used to get 1/5 your visitors but 2x your income.

[JCKline]

Well I'm giving up on May, and hope June turns things around.

[koan]

Ouch HuskyPup and sailorjwd, I've been hit with Adsense issues and Panda in the past months, but I have to admit your kind of revenue drops would make a grown man cry. Harsh.

[sailorjwd]

A funny thing happened on the way to financial ruin...

You won't believe this! I mentioned a little while back that I was giving up. I did for a short period of time and removed all adsense from my website. The funny thing is I was still making money on the cached pages hanging around somewhere. Also, I have an adsense account that I haven't used in 18 months. I'm still making money on there too.

Anyway, I've decided to keep adsense on each page with only a banner at top and a footer at very bottom. No adsense anywhere near the text. That along with removal of a weak section, html validation, grammer checking, some page expansion will hopefully remove me from the Panda non-penalty whenever they rerun the algo. (hopefully this weekend).

One good signal is bounce rate has reduced by 5%.

So, the funny part is that I make almost as much money without adsense on the pages as with adsense.

[Automotive site]

The unpredictable nature of adsense is exactly why I have been hard at work in May in trying to diversify. To read someone going from several hundred dollars a day to double or even single digits a day, must send shivers down the spine of anyone who relies on adsense for a living.

I have resisted in putting in-text ads on (I use to use Infolinks one time) because I am too worried my readers will find the constant links not to their liking. Bizarrely, though, I never find Wikipedia articles, which are clattered with links to other articles within Wikipedia, irritating but rather informative. But I think there are two key differences here. One, Wikipedia's links are to other content within their site and people know there are no ads anyway; secondly, they have a single underline which is less annoying than double underlines.

I am finding cpm ads (Contextweb) horrible. Clickbank, on the other hand, has been a good surprise for me, and that too without needing to write sales pitches which many Clickbank affiliates do. I just put a few links at the end of my articles. I am not going to alter any of my content to gain sales. My content is written for the user and is completely unbiased, but if they click on Clickbank links, then good, and if they don't, so be it.

I just hope sales remain constant, though.

[HuskyPup]

Does anyone else remember the significance of 333.33?

A little hint...UPS

your kind of revenue drops

Over the years I've gone from a 7% CTR to several days recently of much less than 1%.

I'm not blaming AdSense for it all because this week I have had quite a few really good high value clicks proving that the values are still there however I can certainly blame the search team for the arbitrary Panda slashing from 6th May.

I'm fortunate, I do not depend one penny on AdSense/publishing for a living, but I have to wonder just how many they have crucified?

[m0thman]

The machine is well and truly broke then (for some at least). As I mentioned earlier, my partner's site's doing quite well at the moment surprisingly. If only I could figure out what I did to hers that worked...

Of course we're not helped by the bank holiday this weekend.

[JCKline]

I just wish their was a way I could block the Phillipines from being shown ads...so many impressions and no clicks. This must be effecting eCPM in a negative way.

[Play_Bach]

Impressions moving, but earnings and channels stats have been stuck all day. :-(

[koan]

JCKline, check into Geo IP detection and serve ads accordingly.

[zarathustra2011]

Easily my best day ever, which probably means today will be rubbish, so that I can keep the jagged saw-tooth graph thing going on.

[Mentat]

Worst day this month... I don't Know why, Impressions, Clicks eCPM ok, total revenue is very low :(

[Play_Bach]

Yesterday was my second worst day this month as well. However, my traffic was also about 40% down (probably due to Memorial Day weekend) so that could explain it right there. Here's to hoping today is better!

[thechromeguy]

@JCKline I get a lot of traffic from the philippines which translate to .30 cpm no wonder friendster went down.

[HuskyPup]

Saturday for me was a completely normal, average Post Panda 2.1 day...i.e. 40% of pre Panda 2.1.

Now there's consistency from Google!

[netmeg]

Traffic (expectedly) through the roof this weekend, plus I launched two more sites that are starting to pick up, but earnings down and I can pretty much pinpoint the reason - having trouble getting the mobile plugin to work properly, and I notice that a much larger percentage of my traffic is mobile this year. So I gotta bang away at that for a while. Just one more factor.