July 2011 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[HuskyPup]

Come on G, shake things up a bit, you're becoming far too predictable!

[littlegiant]

@azlinda,

If I recall correctly, you said a while back that you made some changes to some H1 tags and titles (something like that) and your traffic recovered? Did your recovery stick? And if so, now you're suffering from low CTR, eCPM? Because that's what happened to me.

@Everybody,

My recent loss in earnings is not commensurate with my loss in traffic (got pandalized for about 55% of my traffic). Earnings this month so far averaging between 20-25% of pre-panda earnings.

Wiping out my competitive filter list saw my eCPM double 4 out of 7 days in the past week compared to the week before. It doesn't at all feel stable though. Feels like I just got lucky. Although admittedly, I completely revamped my main site. I launched a completely new site design and many pages now carry my main bread winner 336 x 280 ad below the fold because I'm paranoid about this too-many-ads-above-the-fold thing.

I also rewrote about 20 category introductory pages in which I borrowed the first paragraph from other pages in that category to create an introductory page to that section which worked well for many years prior to panda as all those pages had a low bounce rate. I never thought I'd get penalized for borrowing my own 1000% original content to create user-friendly introduction pages.

I'm now thinking that my ad placement is killing my CTR but I'm more interested in getting my traffic back (or at least some of it) and then work on monetizing it better. However, from what I'm reading here on WebmasterWorld, trying to get un-pandalized is probably a total crapshoot.

At any rate, all the changes I made was stuff I was planning to do anyways.

[azlinda]

@littlegiant - I did make major changes to all H1 tags and titles. I was hoping that traffic would recover, but I'm still waiting for that. I'm suffering from both low CTR and eCPM. In fact, it's ridiculous. You were speaking about your ads. I have a leaderboard center-above fold, a 160x600 spanning the fold and a 336 x 280 either spanning the fold or above the fold, depending on the monitor. I replaced the 336 x 280 with non-AdSense for a while, and earnings really plummeted.

[jmccormac]

Strangely earnings for USA on my main site seem to have disappeared even though there was traffic. Perhaps this is why Google had such a good quarter? :) It is a bit unsual but given the general state of confusion that is Adsense, it is probably par for the course.

Regards...jmcc

[nuthin]

Wouldn't be too much of a surprise if Google is trying to get it into our psych'e' that 70 is the new 100'

Just sayin'.

At any rate, I believe we just gotta keep working at our sites and we will return to the good ol days. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Sort of glad I stopped monetizing my sites via Adsense full time a few years ago and re-focused my business on other areas, but still I could see that if I worked full time on the projects again.. I'm sure we could make the revenue from Adsense climb, however it is quite concerning seeing other seasoned professionals experiencing similar drops even though traffic levels remain the same if not better.

[zarathustra2011]

Earnings were looking bad last night before I hit the pillow, but I've woken up to another above average day. That's three in a row now, having only had one previously in the month. Could it be from unblocking sites - seems like a bit of a coincidence if it isn't.
Since unblocking them, it does pain me to see some of the irrelevant rubbish advertised amongst the more relevants ads. I really had to check myself, not to start blocking them again. Strangely I've had an increase in clicks and not a decrease as a result.

[Mentat]

The last week was good/promising.
Today started with a abysmal eCPM, so I need a miracle...

[HuskyPup]

OMG!

Vodafone ads everywhere and a 0.26% CTR.!.!.!

I need to delete image ads immediately.

[HuskyPup]

Just checked today's country performance with zero clicks from the UK and 2 clicks from the USA...Fubard again.

[clearvision]

I've actually seen money disappear! I had a smile when I saw it. Logged in a couple hours later and they took the money away...do they take money if they thinks it's more than you are worth?

[netmeg]

They're doing more "real time" adjusting for invalid clicks and clicks that the advertisers default on paying for and such like. That's why we see some crazy back and forths that we might not have seen before. azlinda seems to be a special case though. Sounds like something not quite right going on there.

[HuskyPup]

How long is it usually for image ads to disappear when deselected?

3 hours so far and still crappy Voda ads everywhere.

[azlinda]

My experience is that the change has always been made well within 30 minutes, HuskyPup.

[zarathustra2011]

Unless they take money back off me, today looks like another great one - four excellent days in a row can't be coincidence, so a BIG thanks to Atomic for convincing me to maintain my unblocked list for more than two days.

[HuskyPup]

Hang on, am I going to have to change ALL my ad units' codes etc?

Under Manage Ads it shows them all as "Text and image ads" however under AdSense for Content I have selected "Text ads only (default)".

Obviously the on-site coding is google_ad_type = "text_image" ... should that be google_ad_type = "text_image" or google_ad_type = "text_only" ?

Anyone know?

What a ridiculous system, I'm getting royally screwed by the crappiest ads in the world and now it looks as though I'm going to have to generate all new codes!

[HuskyPup]

Obviously the on-site coding is google_ad_type = "text_image" ... should that be google_ad_type = "text_image" or google_ad_type = "text_only" ?

Sorry, meant to type:

should that be google_ad_type = "text" or google_ad_type = "text_only" ?

Is my only option to generate new code to resolve this?

[HuskyPup]

I've gone with google_ad_type = "text"

That seems to have sorted my leaderboard problem.

[ThatsBoBo]

Yesterday was amazing. Today, blah.

[jmccormac]

For some reason the targeting has insurance ads all over a domain history and stats website. These people took a perfectly good contextual advertising network and banjaxed it because they were under the illusion that they were smart enough to predict what the user wanted.

Regards...jmcc

[HuskyPup]

Fubard...totally SNAFU...what the hell are they doing?

Easily my lowest CTR day ever, 50% of post-panda 2.1...a complete and utter screw-up...my customers had mobile phones before Vodafone was even thought of!

Utterly incredulous, NOW I'm getting angry!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I wanted to ask my question in the original category blocking thread ( [webmasterworld.com...] )but it's locked so this one will work :-)

Adsense category blocking...
I earn most of my money from one Category and I have categories with up to 2% ad impressions yielding just 0.1% earnings. I'm inclined to block the category BUT doesn't that mean I will also take the ads out of the epc calculations too? Fewer competing ads = less per click?

It would seem counter-intuitive of me to block 2% of my ads and lose more than 2% of my earnings from OTHER categories from the drop, ya know? They might not earn me money in THAT category but they are competing against ads from other categories which drives up click value.

or am I way off?

[JCKline]

After a discovery I made, my earnings yesterday and so far this morning are up to normal. I saw a ton of ads from a site I blocked years ago in the competitive ads filter. The banners never performed well, and looked spammy (plain red text with "click here" kind of junk). I checked the adurl and sure enough they are now using a third party ad display network, so I blocked it (not the network), but the ad url (company.com/somefolder). It worked like a charm! So look closely at the contextual ads on your site, and make the appropriate adjustments.

[Play_Bach]

Stuck, again. Click count hasn't moved in several hours.

[Play_Bach]

Still dead. Anybody else?

[azlinda]

Dead as a door nail.

[zarathustra2011]

Completely dead here, and showing plenty of clicks, but the poorest pay out ever. From past experience, I think it will all catch up with itself eventually, but it's pretty late in the day, and normally is a little more accurate by this time. Won't worry until I see the results in the morning.

[jmccormac]

Deepsixed the entire Third Party network as an experiment. Stats are moving and earnings seem to be up. Perhaps some of the delay seen on reporting is due to the stats from the TP networks being integrated with the main Adsense stats. The TP networks might on batched reporting rather than near real time reporting.

Regards...jmcc

[netmeg]

I think the internet melted.

[m0thman]

Deepsixed the entire Third Party network as an experiment. Stats are moving and earnings seem to be up. Perhaps some of the delay seen on reporting is due to the stats from the TP networks being integrated with the main Adsense stats. The TP networks might on batched reporting rather than near real time reporting.

Considered that once. Please keep us posted on how this experiment goes on. Panda aside, I too have seen my income go way down more than it should have based on the traffic loss.

[zarathustra2011]

Picking up a bit now - couple of reasonable jumps in the past hour.

[azlinda]

I also deep sixed the certified ad networks, and I have been doing somewhat better since doing that.