December 2012 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[HuskyPup]

Let's see if this post remains!

[netmeg]

Gonna have a record breaking December, which is good, but I notice my EPCs have dropped way down - I suspect some advertisers turn down or turned off their holiday budgets right at Christmas. I know I did, on behalf of my PPC clients. Either way, it's all good, and if the changes from this last Panda stick around, next year will be even better.

[JCKline]

I need a stiff drink...again. @netmeg, you make my a$$ twitch. :)

[Lame_Wolf]

you make my a$$ twitch.

Giggitty.

[netmeg]

Dude. You just put me off my dinner.

[JCKline]

:D Sorry netmeg, I can't afford dinner thay way my earnings have dropped. I'm puzzled.

[ember]

First year since starting Adsense that December has not tanked. Something has changed. Hope it continues, whatever it is.

[HuskyPup]

Horribly low EPC today, even the USA is at 5.45% of December average!

[Play_Bach]

Very low click count stuck nearly all day. Unchanged for over twelve hours. Four minutes left, don't think it's going to move. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

[Pepito]

This month is going to be my best month in five years. Still half of my top month in 2006, but three times highers than my lowest month ever that was March this year. Everything changed in October and more in particular after the 12th of Decemmber with continuous diary gains unknowns for years.

Nothing to do with changes in my site, or increase of traffic, that is currently the opposite. Much more clicks and for a wide variety of countries. As usual the USA clicks give me more money.

I hope that 2013 continuous in the same line that this month. Although we never knows if my roller coast is going up or down in the next days.

Happy New Year to all and good 2013 AdSense to you.

[jpch]

I shattered my previous month's record already due to higher traffic and Page RPM's. I can only hope this continues into 2013 as it truly will be a Happy New Year!

[Lame_Wolf]

Everything changed in October and more in particular after the 12th of Decemmber with continuous diary gains unknowns for years.

Well, milk it for all its worth. [boom boom]

[ember]

Everything changed in October and more in particular after the 12th of Decemmber

About the 12th or 13th of December is when the ugly arrows started showing up all over my sites, and I think they're actually helping. I'm having the best December ever.

[Pepito]

Ember, ugly arrows? From now on they will be the most beautiful arrows in the World, at least for me :-)

[jpch]

About the 12th or 13th of December is when the ugly arrows started showing up all over my sites, and I think they're actually helping.

I compared the first 13 days of December to the days since. My Page RPM is up 31%. It could be due to more than the arrows but kind of hard to discount the effect entirely. If it stays as high as it's been into January I'll believe it has more to do with the arrows and less with Holiday and End of Year advertising spend.

[JCKline]

And yet for me it's getting worse...worst December ever!

[super70s]

Best month since Feb. 2011.

[jbayabas]

Best month of the year as expected. Considering Ive been on holiday for over 10 days now and earnings still above average. I'm quite happy. I can't wait to be back with my usual site updates on the 3rd of January. Big thank you, Goog!

[HuskyPup]

For what has been for many AdSense years my lowest earnings' month, this has been my third best month of 2012 after January and February and completely due to a much higher EPC.

It will be interesting to see if this continues!

[JCKline]

It will be interesting to see if this continues!

I'll be interested to see if this STARTS! December is ending so badly for me it doesn't make any sense. AdSense is NonSense...or should I write NonCents this month. WTF changed? Traffic is steady, ctr is normal, yet EPC is in the crapper!

[HuskyPup]

My December figures were better than November 2012 but with a caveat v 2011:

Earnings 113.66% before finalised deduction
EPC 128.57%
CTR 118.10%
ECPM (RPM) 151.06%

And compared to December 2011

Earnings 106.91%

My caveat, overall my Page Views and actual Click Volume is way down compared to December 2011 and it is entirely due to my trade widget directory gallery being hammered again by Google for a reason totally unbeknown to me other than a suggestion that Google may view Coppermine galleries as a source of spam/crap/whatever.

Page Views to that site were 64.05% v 2011

To get views back up, and hopefully earnings would follow, I now have to decide whether a re-build effort would be worthwhile or conclude that G's algo is so screwed-up that no matter what effort I make it would be fruitless therefore should I just walk away from it and do something else altogether?

I reckon a re-build would take me about 200 hours on a completely new platform which is a helluva lot of time to waste if unsuccessful however I'll be doing this for my industry, not the Gorg!

[netmeg]

I had a great December! But G took about 2.5% off the top.

[Pepito]

In my case G took 3% off the top. Not bad comparing it with previous months.

[HuskyPup]

Surprisingly no new lows set yesterday whatsover, in fact nowhere near!

Finalised earnings took 0.343% ... Excellent:-)

[jpch]

I had a record month and looks like G took 2% off Estimated Earnings so far.

[Automotive site]

Adsense just isn't working for me on one of my sites. Until the beginning of November the site was doing very well for the last couple of years. But since the beginning of November, earnings from the site is down by around 60%-70% even when the traffic is similar.

I do get this warning in my account:

'We have analysed some of the pages on your sites that serve the most ads, and have detected Page Speed problems that create a highly negative user experience for some users. Frequently viewed pages on your site would see large performance improvements if HTTP compression of responses were enabled'

When I actually visit the site and various pages, it load in very good time. And even the pages Adsense suggests are slow, seem to load fine.

I am thinking about giving Chitika a go, but Chitika throws up non relevant ads for several days before they can start showing proper ads.

[netmeg]

Use some speed measuring tools like pingdom to see if there are any changes you can make to speed up your page. If Google thinks it's so slow they have to send you a warning about it, it'll probably affect your earnings AND your organic traffic.

[jpch]

Google Page Speed and you'll find the Page Speed tool from Google which is also very useful in addition to Pingdom's Tool.

[jbayabas]

December broke all records for me.

@HuskyPup: are you sure you calculated your Finalized earnings right?

I calculated it this way:

Finalized Earnings (multiply) 100 then (divide) Estimated Earnings then (subtract) 100.

Mine, G took off 3.5%. Still good for me as my earnings is quite high.

[Automotive site]

My site speed is around 75 to 77 according to various tools and 3 seconds load time.

Is there anyway I can contact the Adsense team to look into this? Otherwise what I will do is let adsense run the rest of today and also tomorrow and see if its gets back to normal. If not, I will put Chitika on the site from Saturday as the weekend is quieter. Chitika can take two days before showing regular ads.

Its very bizarre how earnings can fall 60-70% without good explanation.

I had a coder do some extensive work on the site a couple of months ago and I thought maybe some of revenues perhaps was being stolen, but then I can see my adsense code, and just to make sure no foul play, I replaced the code several times in the last couple of months.

[HuskyPup]

@HuskyPup: are you sure you calculated your Finalized earnings right?

Yep, it's only the last few months that I've ever had any deductions whatsoever, hopefully it'll go back to zero again however I doubt that.