Finalized Earnings

[breeks]

Finalized earnings how much did you get zapped. On top of the daily thrashing of earnings how much did you get zapped from last months estimated earnings to finalized earnings? For me its just under $25.00. About a half tank of gas.

[pixar24]

for me it is always 15%, +- last 6 months.
Before it was around 1%, suddenly it changed. Nothing special changed on the site.

[pixar24]

wow, new record. -19.1 % this month....
Thank you Adsense.

[Trueman]

Again, 11% exactly deducted for April like the last 4 months. I start to believe it's some systematic error I have on my page (or a "manual penalty"), because the percentage does not change, the earnings and traffic do.

BTW, did anyone recover from that "angels' share"?

[netmeg]

Three cents.

[ken_b]

Oh my! For me it's minus 15%+/- and that's after taking back 5 - 30% overnite nearly every day!

.

[HuskyPup]

For the first time ever since the introduction of AdSense I appear to have a 2.58% deduction.

This is betond a freakin' joke...a year ago today overnight they slashed my CTR by 50% and since then this entire charade of a system has being going down hill.

I have to say it, Google is a company of crooks, cheats and liars, plus it's about time for Batman to return and destroy that bloody penguin.

I'm disgusted with you Google, this really could be the final nail in your coffin for me.

[Reno_Chris]

I recently went to an Adsense in your City event, and at their suggestion I made my ads more prominent on the most popular pages of my site, blended colors better, etc - standard stuff but it did improve my CTR and the price per click as well. No huge improvements, but very much noticeable and so well worth the time spent as I expected and earnings improvement over the long run.
However I have been used to seeing a deduction to my earnings a the end of the month of less than 1/2 of one percent. After implementing the changes in April, my earnings have been knocked down by over 3%. I figure when I see May and have all the changes I made over the course of a month in the latter part of April in place for the entire month, I am concerned that pretty much all the increase made by implementing the suggested adsense changes will be penalized away to nothing.
I am now concerned that while more prominent ads may lead to more clicks, most of those are of a type that G considers invalid, and not really good business leads that would pay out for the advertiser.
So for those of you considering re-doing your pages to make your ads more prominent and better blended, etc., it may well not be worth the effort, and you should consider that what G giveth, it often takes away.

[ken_b]

Google is a company of crooks, cheats and liars,

That's nonsense HP!

We all get frustrated , but we all signed the contract that pretty much says they can do what they want, when they want, and if we don't like it our option is to take AdSense off our sites and leave the program.

No need to be calling people crooks, etc.

[CentennialEmpire]

-25% this month. Normally it's 1-2%, if that.

We're not sure what the heck is going on but taking a 25% hit on ads that could have been allocated to other advertisers -- and accrued revenue -- is very disappointing. The major difference that I can imagine is we once again placed Adsense into first tier positions giving them first crack at a lot of traffic.

Nice way to be compensated for taking a network from backbench status to firs tier, hey?

[pixar24]

For May: -24%
I suffered from this before, but never that much.
I thought it were my text links, that were blended in well, so ppl could click them accidentally, and quickly return to my site. ( invalid click ).
So in May I removed those ads, and used image ads only. No mistake if they click those.
Result : -5% extra. (April was -19%).

I really do not know what to do about this.
I do not buy traffic, and never did.
My site is no review or commercial site, it's an educational site for children. Maybe that doesn't convert well enough for the advertisers ?
It feels like they slowly push me out of the Adsense program.
<snip>
This is becoming a major problem, and not only for me as I read above.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 12:36 am (utc) on Jun 4, 2012]
[edit reason] pub ID removed, no specifics [/edit]

[IanCP]

$2.69

[Lame_Wolf]

I wouldn't complain too much pixar24. Your site is supposed to have a valid privacy policy.

[netmeg]

Is your site actually targeted to children, or about children? If it's the former, that might be part of your problem, if Google doesn't feel that kids are likely to convert for advertisers.

[martinibuster]

So in May I removed those ads, and used image ads only.

That's to be expected. There's less competition for the ads.

I would urge you to not give up. Add the text links back in to increase the competition and try to improve the earnings with different layouts. Create channels for testing various versions. For instance you can try to separate the ads from whatever's around them with five or more pixels. Another text would be to add a border around them with the words advertisement to see if it improves. Then another with the same border but the word Sponsored.

But also, please research the keywords used to access your site to see if there are any changes, research any buying trends, news trends, anything that may have changed.

Good luck!

[Trueman]

After Google having deducted 11% for several months now from their estimated earnings to what they actually pay, they only took a share of 9% in May. Being in the UPS club, it's a noticeable amount.

Because I had a steady 11% taken off, I was thinking that maybe it is not only quality traffic related (which I can in fact not influence).

I don't want to whine, instead I tried to fix the problem without any hints from Google what the problem is on my site. So I went trough my pages in mid May and checked my banners. On my right column of my project, there are on top a couple of social buttons like Twitter and FB. Due to my implementation, they load after the Adsense skyscraper is loaded below. When these button load, they will push down the skyscraper by a couple of pixels. Now I defined the height of the div containing the buttons in CSS and got a skyscraper that does not move anymore after it has been loaded. My very wild guess (and hope) is, that I fixed at least one problem. Can anyone verify?

I'm also using DFB SB and noticed that there is a difference between the Adsense reporting in Adsense and the Adsense reporting of DFP SB. DFB stats have 12% lower earnings for May than the estimated earnings within Adsense. I thought Google doesn't play with dice. Can anyone verify? Do only DFP users get deducted?

[netmeg]

I have always heard that DFP didn't report the same as AdSense.

(I don't have finalized numbers for May yet; they must not do them all at the same time)

[pixar24]

@ Lame Wolf: I do have a valid Privacy Policy (as far as I know), on the Terms of Use page.
@ Netmeg: The site is targeted to teachers in Primary school. Stuff to use at school, in their lessons.
@ Martinibuster: thx for the tips !

The site never converted really well, but traffic is quite huge, and that made up for it.
The only problem is that like 8 months ago, there started to be a difference between estimated and finalized earnings ( without anything special was changed in the site ), and this difference only grows.

[pixar24]

@ Trueman: I also use DFP.
But on my site on certain pages, someone elses Adsense code is used. He doesn't use DFP and he sees a difference of 40% between his estimated and finalized earnings, for May. So this also happens for non-DFP Adsense users.

[StoutFiles]

I keep telling you all, there's no way Google isn't scraping some off the top to keep shareholders happy. I understand there's some supply and demand, and I understand that internet ads aren't what they used to be, but these numbers don't agree with what publishers should be making considering what they were making not too long ago.

[netmeg]

I myself have seen nothing to support that, but obviously, people who are gonna believe it are gonna believe it.

[Lame_Wolf]

@ Lame Wolf: I do have a valid Privacy Policy (as far as I know), on the Terms of Use page.

I couldn't even find your ToU page. :/

[pixar24]

-> Lame_Wolf and me were talking about different sites, but that is cleared out now.
Anyway, I'm reading reports about simular issues in forums all over the net. Nobody knows exactly where it comes from, or how to solve it.
A lot of guessing, but no 'succes' stories of solving it.

[greatstart]

Lost about $5 which is about 4% of my total income for the month of May. Seems that the estimates and the final earnings are spreading larger each month.

[dcheney]

Final May numbers show a drop of just a hair over 1%

[matrix_jan]

This time the sound of drums ended with taking just about 2.6% from last months earnings. Phewf...

[azn romeo 4u]

Losing 3 digits per month since Jan or Feb of this year. If it hits 4 digits, gonna cry foul. I'm not complaining yet since I'm getting record earnings so far...*knocks on woods*

[WordsnCollision]

Shave, no haircut: lost under 1% which is better than usual.

[deadsea]

Last month they took about 0.30%. More than they have ever taken for me (recently its been around 0.03%). But now it looks like they may have just been holding it. This month my finalized earnings are MORE than my estimated earnings by about the amount that I was missing last month.

[netmeg]

Better than average May; this time they wrote down about 1.5% which is higher than usual, but still not too bad. I still think it's overly aggressive protection of advertisers, but what can ya do.

[tidewatcher]

2% here -- seems more than usual