April 2012 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[HuskyPup]

March was one heck of a roller coaster ride for me and many others, let's hope they've ironed out whatever it is they've been attempting to do!

[Lame_Wolf]

Would there have to be human judgement involved?

Not really. I once knew of a site where you could test your text. It would then give a result on how easy (or hard) it was to understand.

If you write grammatically correct, with little or no spelling mistakes, then expect to get good results. However, if your text is spammy, or reads like you're a Jerry Springer guest, then the results are poor. (eg: There ain't nobody here no-more)

[Play_Bach]

I'm depressed. :-(

[tonyolm]

Don't be. Adsense is just like life. It has its up and downs :) I would never rely on it as my sole income source.

[tonyolm]

So from the few people that were whinging about their revenue today.... Did those same people add some cool content?

[levo]

I see, Internet gnomes got to our websites and scrambled our content as an April Fools joke. That's why 10+ years of content magically became 'poor' in just one day...

[Play_Bach]

@tonyolm
> Don't be.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, Cry if I want to, cry if I want to.
(Lesley Gore - It's My Party Lyrics)

[IanCP]

@tonyolm

"Did those same people add some cool content?"

Nope and I haven't since 2000 and don't intend to do so. My sites were NEVER made with AdSense in mind [it wasn't invented back then]. I can't change the laws of physics in my genre.

I wrote "folksy' lectures where I took the complicated and made it 101 simple. My only forte.

No matter how many "copycats" since 2000, I'm changing absolutely nothing.

If it gets to the stage it is no longer sustainable? I'll offer it to one of the big linking Australian Universities or close it down. At 70? I don't particularly care.

Fresh content is utter BS in my view and if Google think it is, then they can re-write the laws of physics and daily churn out 1,000 new pages a day on Ohms law as one example.

I never, ever wrote for Google. They weren't even invented when I started out and I'm not about to start now.

AdSense merely embellished my retirement years. Nothing else.

[IanCP]

On my response above. Back around 1999 a colleague, dumped a whole ton of brilliant lectures. All were .txt files.

He had retired, had lecture note files on his then olden day PC and simply uploaded them to some server.

I implored him to let me "dolly them up" to be more search engine friendly.

I was summarily told to get "stuffed".

The difference between those who wish to impart wisdom, experience and knowledge and those who think the internet is merely another "business opportunity".

Which does "modern" society value the most? Which replicates modern society values?

You be the judge. What matters most to you, your family and children?

[sam2san]

Jan & Feb were okay for me, but March and April seem s to be suicidal! Earnings are not even %30 of what it was 1 year back at this time. I have grown my traffic; multiplied the number of posts; and each posts are 1000+ words, regularly posted and 110% original!. My traffic is way better; But the CTR has fallen below 50% and CPC can't be talked about at all :(. My $100 days are gone, and now I'm making myself happy with $15-$20 a day! Pathetic :(

[NomadMan]

Just a thought;

With the Google reading level score [Basic | Intermediate | Advanced] - would adsense do the same for Adwords advertisers?

Meaning - article scores of Basic or Advanced scores would result in less matching Ads or can strike a niche?
(Assuming the majority of articles and ads get the Intermediate score)

Its easy to find out what reading level is associated with articles in the Google Index.

[zarathustra2011]

Lame_Wolf - would be nice if Google could have shed a little more light as to the reason behind a significant drop in traffic. I've noticed a drop on my main website, which seemed to come from top keywords that aren't able to be revealed, so that doesn't help much.

My site is a combination of original material and some guest material, which appears on 1 or 2 other websites at most.
To be honest, if your site is popular and you start googling unique sentences from your site, you're inevitably going to find sites that have ripped you off. I tried it last month, and found all sorts, from the stealing of the odd paragraph or two, to entire duplicate pages, and in two cases - an entire site reproduction! Needless to say I was in contact, and it soon got removed.

[Play_Bach]

@zarathustra2011

My hunch is Google is in the midst of a major strategy change to fend off the threat of Facebook and Apple. How they're going to pull this off remains to be seen. In the meantime, there's a whole lot of collateral damage to website traffic like yours and mine. Google does have a plan, right?

[HuskyPup]

Google does have a plan, right?

That's extremely doubtful seeing what's happening. I seemed to have another data loss day yesterday, Page Impressions were way down according to AdSense, similar to a Sunday, yet my logs tell me I had an excellent day.

The first 3 days of April my earnings are 28.96% v 2011 with my EPC at 72.4% and CTR 69.6%.

AdSense seems to be drowning in its own incompetence right now.

[zaktoo]

Earnings are so dismal I've finally signed up here to have a moan. This month has been absolutely terrible, and that's _after_ the bloody mess that the past 3 months in 2012 have been.

[NomadMan]

Google does have a plan, right?

I'd classify the current situation as 'load shedding';

Turn off the lights long enough - starving "the get rich quick" gold diggers and have them look somewhere else....

[HuskyPup]

starving "the get rich quick" gold diggers and have them look somewhere else

It's a bit too late for that, Google were the instigators of all this with Blogger thereby creating this MFA mess.

Plus just how many alternatives are there for international publishers like myself? Whilst I am in one of the biggest trades worldwide there is only one option for me and that's Google...or I set-up my own advertising network.

I've already removed AdSense from many lower-clicked slots and replaced them with my own ads, how soon I start trialling the higher-clicked slots will depend on what happens over Easter and through early next week.

It is definitely getting to the level whereby I can't see the point of giving them free advertising space.

[Play_Bach]

Another ridiculous AdSense day in the making. :-(

[JCKline]

First three days looked good, but yesterday and today horrible.

[scotland]

I am in the same boat as others with far lower traffic and earnings - via Panda and Adsense.
I just looked at one site that Google now lists above one of mine and found the meta tags very descriptive!

<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">

As far as I am concerned this sums up the Panda updates!

[JCKline]

Well Google ignores these meta tags, as far as SEO is concerned, so that doesn't make difference.

[JCKline]

Impressions keep climbing. Where are the clicks?

[HuskyPup]

Yet another disastrous US earnings' day, clicks down therefore CTR, eCPM etc, even EPC. Two of my worst-ever US days in the first 4 days of April...completely normal metrics eh Google?

What a load of old cobblers...I'm trying to remain polite:-)

[netmeg]

Slow day for sure. Lots of traffic, but people just aren't clicking today.

[Play_Bach]

This is messed up. I'm off to the pub (where a pint is still a pint)

[JCKline]

Sometyhing is really messed up today. CTR and eCPM are in the crapper! Traffic is way up. Either there will be a maga click dump or it'll just remain a dump.

ADSENSE IS BROKEN

[sam2san]

Worst adsense day ever.. CTR is less than 30% of normal and I can't just get my head around that I was earning 10 times more than what I am earning now after investing 10 times more time and money in making the website 10 times more beautiful than it was an year back.. Way to go adsense.. Its just time that I find better Ads alternative; and I won't be coming back.

[Play_Bach]

The squeeze is on. Watching my Google traffic go down, down, down yet my site still ranks #1 for the same keywords it always has. Less traffic equals less AdSense earnings. Why is this happening? That's the big question a lot of webmasters would like an answer for.

I posted earlier that I suspect there is a strategy shift underway at Google as they try to curb Facebook and Apple. I would hope there's a method to this madness that many of us are seeing from Google, as the drops in traffic and earnings over the past year have been significant. Just looking at a graph of my site and the very clear downward trend is all the confirmation I need to know things have changed. Unfortunately, other than just riding this out as if it were the flu is about all I can suggest. Here's to hoping Google gets well soon.

[NomadMan]

About Google Strategy;

I think the days of owning / dominating a search with a particular keyword / phrase are over.
Personalized, local and suggested search have sliced the cake in more ways - not to mention penalties for over-SEO.

Meaning with a #1,2,3,4,5 rank domination for a keyword, it's not always showing up anymore. Thus traffic is (significant) less, it goes elsewhere to different sites.

I've seen traffic go slightly up on pages where ranking is low (and still is). I've seen traffic go down on pages where traffic used to be high due to good ranking.

Is this 'leveling the playing field' I read somewhere?

[HuskyPup]

I am focussing on my USA earnings here which have taken the biggest drop.

As much as I have complained about Google earnings my January to March metrics were actually very similar HOWEVER just look at the first 4 days of April v Jan-Mar:

Impressions 83.8%
Clicks 59.4%
CTR 72.6%
EPC 103.4%
eCPM 74.3%
Earnings 62.1%

Something massive has been changed by Google, not by me, my sites are still the same, if this is:

'leveling the playing field'

then they can go play with their buckets and spades elsewhere since my first four days of April 2012 v 2011 are at 23.08%, are any Google employees earning less than a quarter of a year ago?

Nah, didn't think so, this company is screwing-over a lot of people rapidly.

[Play_Bach]

@NomadMan
Agreed. It's indeed a new Google playing field in regards to search. Simply the loss of screen real estate to Google ads and places have all but pushed organics search results off page one. A few years ago there was a clear separation of organics, with ads on the right. Not anymore.

Instead, now ads are first and foremost and depending on the query, products, pages, local follow. I frequently only see ONE organic these days on page one as opposed to TEN as before, and that's on a 20" iMac! On smaller monitors or laptops? bye bye organics.

This radical shift in page design I see as a big part of the puzzle as many civilians have no idea that the top spots for their query are now ads. They're also too habituated to change their clicking pattern for whatever is on top and so there they go. The notion that Google or Yahoo! (where the ads/products to organic ratio is even worse!) or Bing are going to reverse these layouts to the way they were is simply not going to happen, sorry.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 1:38 pm (utc) on Apr 5, 2012]