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.

[ken_b]

Not counting the daily clawbacks They reclaimed 17% from me. The daily clawbacks were less than in April, but still reclaimed another few percent for the month.

I had hoped they had this under control, but maybe not.

AdSense TrafficTeamGoogle Employee

May 22

Hey all,

This is Andrew from the Ad Traffic Quality Team at Google. We're aware of a problem with a third-party crawler in the network that is generating invalid activity across a number of different publishers. We've recently made some changes to our filtering so that this invalid activity will be excluded more quickly from your earnings reports and the discrepancy between estimated and actual earnings will be smaller.

Andrew

Invalid clicks problem - Possible solution [productforums.google.com]

[PeteLong]

I don't know what's wrong with mine last month 29% difference!

I Read this thread, and realised I did not have a Privacy Policy (Which I've rectified today).

That's a huge difference and I don't know why?

I don't have too many adds, I'm not hosting duplicate content, I update the site regularly. Why I'm getting penalised I don't know?

Pete

[netmeg]

Look at your traffic first. Where's it coming from, and what's it doing once it gets there?

[jinxed]

Mine is less than 0.5% - which I would judge as acceptable.

[PeteLong]

>>Look at your traffic first. Where's it coming from, and what's it doing once it gets there?

For last month
Average CTR 1.15% CPC 0.16
I can see which ad units are getting hit? There seems to be no metric to view that explains why Google "re-adjust" the figures though?
I do have ads on the site, on You Tube and results from Google Search as well?

If I'm dong something wrong/stupid, that,s fine :) But I don't know what it is?

[netmeg]

I mean, where is your actual traffic coming from - is it from the right country or countries? Coming in from Google or somewhere else? On the keywords you would expect it to come in on?

I think that these changes are tied to traffic quality. The example I use most often - if I have a site that is pretty tightly focused on Michigan, and I suddenly get a wave of users coming in from China - that's unusual. And if they click on ads, Google probably will think they're not like to be good for the advertisers, or likely to convert for them. So they will discount the clicks to the advertisers, and I'll take a hit on earnings. If it happens once in a while, well, it is what it is. It happens. If it happens over and over again, and in large amounts, then I could possibly have a problem. AdSense doesn't want to put the advertisers at risk, and they'll happily toss out a publisher, even if he hasn't done anything wrong, if he presents a risk to advertisers.

So you want to keep an eye on your traffic. An occasional anomaly is not a big deal, but sustained anomalies - if I had, say, three months in a row where they took back a significant amount of money when it was finalized - then I'd probably be temporarily turning off AdSense till I figured out what was going on.

That's my strategy, anyway.

[JCKline]

They seem to take off around $10 no matter what I make.

[PeteLong]

Thanks

It a tech site so traffic comes from everywhere, most of the traffic comes from the states. Traffic growth has been very steady for the last few years, there no 'spikes'

60% traffic comes from search traffic of which 97% comes from Google
Direct traffic and referrals are steady as well.

Ill see what happens this month, if there's a big discrepancy again Ill get in touch, Thanks for the feedback

Pete

[HowYesNo]

11%

[Trueman]

With a new month comes a new chance. Finalized earnings down 8% from estimated earnings for June.

[pixar24]

May was -24%, June -21% difference between estimated and finalized earnings.
Blocked Amazon Crawler in June, but with no big effect.

[netmeg]

You guys must get your finalized earnings a lot earlier; mine don't ever show up till around the 7th of the month.

[jabas]

-10% for June

[fanboy]

I've been averaging about 5%, which is way higher than I like. Waiting to see what happens to June. :(

[netmeg]

Well I lost 2.8% this time, which was still well into three figures. Not terribly happy about that, but it was also the biggest month I ever had (until July) Could have been worse, I guess this is the new normal.

[dhaliwal]

$40 reduced here.

[ken_b]

Well the adjustment for June was about 10%. That's a big improvement over the last couple of months.

Also I didn't see the daily adjustments like I had in previous months. Doesn't mean they didn't take money back every day, just that I didn't see the difference in the overnight numbers. Maybe they got faster about it so you don't see it unless you check the numbers every hour?

Still, June was a pretty good month, up a modest amount overall.

[JCKline]

I was able to keep my $23+ click! I was sure they'd take it back. In fact, this is the least I've ever had taken back. Only a couple of bucks! I'm surprised.

[IanCP]

-0.915%

[supergml]

Just 0.56%.

[tidewatcher]

Around 2 per cent taken off here. Almost the same as last month.

[breeks]

Less than .5%

[WordsnCollision]

Just over 1%, not much but more than usual. Hope it's not the start of a trend.