Google AdSense Revenue Down, And Ads Not Matching Site Content

[egem44]

Ok, this is crazy. I've been with adsense for over 5 years. I run one large site that is about writing and publishing. We are down 50% in rev from last year at this time and down 25% from last month. I haven't seen numbers this low since 2010. There is also all kinds of crazy behavior. The ads are not matching the content. Some ads are junk. The settings in adsense do not match what is showing up on the site. Set to no interests based ads, still showing them. We are also getting those "download this" buttons and all kinds of other crazy behavior. The impression are 1/2 of what they were but our numbers are showing we are double the visitors from last year.

I have a security company that has scanned the site to make sure no malware or other tech is causing the problems. Anyone seeing this kind of behavior from their sites? I'm seeing ads that have nothing to do with the content, and nothing to do with what I have ever searched for. Any ideas?

Also changed some of the locations of ads to make sure they are not by drop down menus. This hasn't been a problem in the past, and I was very careful in the first place. We've removed anything that would even come close to that like "share this." They were not covering ads. Nothing seems to help. Any ideas or comments please...

[Play_Bach]

Welcome to the club, and sorry to hear it...

[egem44]

Do you mean welcome to the club, like welcome to the website, or do you mean you mean welcome to the club of having these problems, and you have seen this type of behavior too? Sorry, I am a newbe lol full of questions

[HowYesNo]

welcome to the club of low earnings :)

there is no solution to our problems because big g is not giving us any answers, but be happy for them because they are breaking a records :)

another billion more for them, another billion less for us...

[JCKline]

What's going on? Who the hell knows! With very algorithm change, there are bound to be bugs and cracks that need to be tweaked. Let's face it, the more you tweak, the more room for error, then you tweak to fix errors, causing more errors and so on. G has MANY cooks in the kitchen. Things will even out, then look a mess again. I';s the "nature of the beast".

[explorador]

Oh yes it sucks, welcome to the club of "trying-to-understand-Adsense", take a look around, this has been happening to many users and now some more.

I've been having low numbers and this week... even more. I'm confused because just finished a big migration of two strong sites, well one that is the most specially productive, but after having recovered from low lows, I reached 50%...... and just this week 25% as you say.


It sucks not being able of figuring what affects what

[egem44]

Yes, I'm getting the feeling, if this isn't a glitch or mistake, that the rules have changed, and I think these are the rules g has been telling everyone for the last 10 years. Where are those heat maps again...

[egem44]

The thing that kills me is that most of the ads that are placed on our sites are there for free. Any other place and any other time in history those ads would pay to be there. Now not only do we have free ads all over our sites, they are TELLING us we have to do it for even less. Magazines with the same circ as our site collect 2500 per ad. On the internet not only do the people have to look at the ad, they have to call the number before you get paid....this is the ONLY game in town, live with it or too bad.

[waynne]

My observations are that I am seeing a drop in CPC, clicks and requests are fairly stable at my end. Had the lowest earning day ever yesterday!

Why do I think this is happening?

The latest updates don't help, by giving people exactly what they want, and not what they need in the search results there is little reason for surfers to click an ad.

Revenues of advertisers are being squeezed. 4 of my clients have pulled their adsense campaigns mainly due to the drop in traffic from the organic results, 3 have pared back their spend.

So we have less advertisers, paying less money and Google sending people directly to relevant sites giving users less of a need to click on the ads.

My personal Adsense revenues are now so low I'm running at a loss and will be pulling the plug on a few sites soon for purely financial reasons.

[netmeg]

A lot of publishers (but not all) are reporting this.

First of all, you could take a look at your traffic. Are you getting the same amount of traffic (from the same sources, percentage wise) as you did in previous years? Traffic amount and quality makes a difference.

Second of all, you should probably read up on all the gazillion changes that have taken place in AdWords (the advertiser side) because many of those could also be affecting you. You can't ever really understand AdSense until you also have a good understanding of AdWords.

Third of all - what about mobile? Does your site work for mobile, meaning do the ads work in mobile too? Check your analytics to see what other devices are visiting.

On the internet not only do the people have to look at the ad, they have to call the number before you get paid....this is the ONLY game in town, live with it or too bad.

Not true, there are other ad networks, like Tribal Fusion and media.net. But for many they don't pay as well as AdSense.

The thing that kills me is that most of the ads that are placed on our sites are there for free. Any other place and any other time in history those ads would pay to be there.

Yep, and I'm sure you know the answer to that too - if you have a large targeted audience, sell your own ads. I just came off my biggest AdSense month ever after eight years, but I'm also selling direct ads - next year I plan to send out mailers to prospective advertisers, in fact. Despite doing really well, my CTR has dropped alarmingly over the years; the only thing saving me is that the EPCs have gone up considerably. So I don't want to rely on what Google does. But of course, direct advertising takes more work.

In exchange for the ease of finding advertisers for you and paying reasonably on time every month (and paying more than many other networks) and ease of implementation (just place some code and forget it) you give up a ton of control. That's the offer that Google makes, and they haven't been too interested in making significant changes to that - because they don't have to. Their focus is more on the advertisers and not the publishers.

[onlineleben]

Did you try to mark the relevant text on your pages as ad-sections? There was some kind of markup (don't remember the syntax) to exclude non-relevant text on pages so the ads get more targeted.

[JS_Harris]

Despite doing really well, my CTR has dropped alarmingly over the years; the only thing saving me is that the EPCs have gone up considerably.

I'm doing well too but have the reverse of your metrics and when one goes up the other comes down.


Anyway, I came to the forum just now after noticing that my text ads are no longer showing favicons next to them. My results improved considerably in one particular unit type/color/font with the favicons, so much so that I was starting to worry that I was sending too much traffic off site. My bounce rate climbed a good deal, until now.

Any word on if something happened to shut the favicon testing down or is it just temporary(or just me)?

[jojy]

@egem44 You are not alone, I am in the same industry. My clicks and impressions are dropped but I am still getting decent traffic from US. I think getting traffic from US means quality traffic isn't?

I had a chance to discuss my issue with Adsense consultant 2 months ago and I asked why in my niche some people have given special ads (premium publishers) and why not me? My website has all original contents and gets decent traffic from search while most of my competitor sites are just junk in terms of design, contents and traffic. She replied "I will discuss with the team and get back to you soon" and since then I never heard back from her.

I am an Adsense publisher since 2005, my whole business model is depend upon on Google and it's products. Now, I am realizing that I made a serious mistake on relying Google. I wish I had chance to go back and fix my mistakes.

Anyway, it's still not too late for me. I am changing my business model and hopefully will never use Google as a business dependent again in MY LIFE!

[netmeg]

Did you try to mark the relevant text on your pages as ad-sections? There was some kind of markup (don't remember the syntax) to exclude non-relevant text on pages so the ads get more targeted.

I'm not sure that's still true. I went looking for that last month when someone asked, and it looked like it wasn't in the help docs anymore; they may have discontinued the targeting code. With so much interest based advertising going on, maybe it's outlived its purpose.

Any word on if something happened to shut the favicon testing down or is it just temporary(or just me)?

No, they're not showing for me today either. Maybe some glitch that they have to fix.

One more thing re interest based advertising - the reason Google is so into interest based advertising is because it works. As an advertiser on behalf of my clients, I know that advertisers *really* like interest based advertising, because it converts like a mofo. I'm reasonably sure that across the board interest based advertising is quite lucrative for advertisers, publishers and Google. But that doesn't mean there won't be some collateral damage, and some sites won't do as well with IBA as they do with straight contextual. That's unfortunate, but I don't see Google reversing that trend. So disable IBA at your peril.

[ascensions]

If it's helpful, I found vodka makes the Adsense "club" much more tolerable these days.

[egem44]

Even though advertisers are the ones paying, we are the one doing the service. My site is one of the largest in my topic, and we are the largest one who uses adsense. All other sites, that do what I do, depend on paying reviews or paying members. So if I stop running adsense a 100 small junk sites will get all those ads. Say what you want, but that matters a lot. I've started running paid ads this morning. We tripled our earnings a couple months back by doing this. I want google to be 1/3 of what we make, but at this point it doesn't make sense even to keep them on the site if the earnings go any lower.

This is like working with a company, the company makes you a 1/2 million or more over a couple year period, and then you decide to change the rules on them? Open your pay check and boom, less money? It's not right. We are going to paid ads too. What we need is a PPT ads. That's Paid per time, just like newspapers and magazines and television. PPC, PPA are like going door to door, it's never going to be stable.

[netmeg]

AdSense is what it is, and it's not likely to change, because for every publisher that drops out, there are a ton more to take his or her place. And those 100 junk sites that replace you might end up making Google more money than you do; if their sites are really junk, people will be more anxious to leave them.

We're none of us as high in the ecosystem as we'd like to be, but that's the product that Google offers, and buried there in the terms of agreement they reserve the right to change the product (and make no guarantees as to the continuing success of the product) as a condition of signing up.

That's why my partner and I take the AdSense money and use it to fund other websites and marketing efforts, instead of trying to live off it.

[carminejg3]

I Agree adsense is sliding down hill, I think its why a search on G ads cover 90% of the page they need to keep up the income.

I do agree ads don't match page, i didn't notice you now could turn on or off user-interest ads in your account. have you tried kontera or chitika might be worth testing. I had a low day because I turned off user-interest based ads but what happens is you lower the bidding for your site, so you get less PPC. My CTR went up, but CPC down.

[nethead]

Ever since they added those silly icons next to the URLs the income has tanked for lot of publishers. On the other hand lot more people are saying earnings are up.

[egem44]

I've tried Kontera, Chitika, Infolinks, Commish Junk (and 10 other PPAs). I've worked with just about every earner on the web. They all have about the same model. They earn 99% of the money while we run free ads. The more you partner with, the more you realize how much they cheat. Everyone of them has the same issues. They don't report impression correctly (wow!) they magically miss clicks, they have rules that work on their side, but not yours. Do you see where g places their ads on search engines and in emails. If we did that they would take away clicks.

It's all the same right now. We are working in an environment where publishers have been told (like Nutmeg) that what we do isn't worth anything (not high on the food chain). It's not true. We are replacing TV, Magazines, how to books, and many more media, and we have been trained to think (everyone has) that the internet should be free and that hard work on the web is nonesense unless you have a Facebook idea.

The only reason it is this way is because we allow it to be. Tribalfusion asks for 500,000 unique visitors per month and, they for many sites, don't pay as well as Adsense! This means the site has a higher circulation than Reader Digest, but they aren't worth millions, they are only worth about 3-5000 per month. That's because the millions are going to Tribalfusion. Those people are still looking at ads and buying products just like if they read Reader's Digest, but the person that runs the 500,000 per month website thinks it's only worth what those ppc, ppa companies will pay. Ridiculous.

How many of you have seen a Full Sail University ad? I've seen 1000s of them. I've never clicked one, but I know Full Sail. I know it is an online college. I know they offer course in writing, media, television, and a bunch more. Never clicked an ad...all of that came free to full sail just for running ads with G, CJ and other PAs. They are getting all the benefits of ads, just like before, but they don't have to pay US for them.

[netmeg]

(netmeg)

I never said what we do isn't worth something; it's worth a lot. That's why I *can* get good money for direct ads. I said that in Google's ecosystem, you are low man on the totem pole - that's the way they designed it (remember at first ads only appeared on their own search pages) and it's working for *them* so they have no incentive to change it.

If you want to make more money, you need to create your own ecosystem. Sell your own ads, or use affiliate ads, or create a subscription model for premium content, or start your own email list and market that way, or sell e-books; heck I've done tee shirts and tote bags for some of my sites. All that takes a lot more work. Google is not going to just hand out money when they find the advertisers, they monitor the fraud (which is WAY more rampant than you probably realize), they collect the money, they pay it out pretty much like clockwork, and all we have to do is grab the code and put it in the source.

ALL publishers have had to work for their ad revenue, ever since publishing began, be it print or be it online. AdSense is probably the easiest money pot in history short of the lottery. And the online ad world of 2008 is WAY different than the online ad world in 2013 (did you read any of the other stuff I said to check on?) That's why it's called Webmaster Welfare.

I realize you're upset and want to rant a bit, but ranting isn't going to put any more money in your pocket. GOOGLE ISN'T GOING TO CHANGE ADSENSE to favor publishers, so you need to change. Honestly, if I felt as badly as you do, I'd take the code off all my sites immediately; why do business with someone you distrust so thoroughly?

[netmeg]

This was where I was ranting and venting like everyone else nutmeg. Why are you peeing in my pool?

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize all you wanted was to rant. We have plenty of that here already. Maybe it's because you waltzed into the forum as a new user with the same sense of entitlement about your rant as you appear to have about AdSense. Maybe because you are deliberately mistyping my username. Or maybe it was because of this:

Any ideas or comments please...

You didn't mention you just wanted ideas or comments that agreed with you. Now that I know that, I won't respond further. Carry on. And way to make an entrance.

[egem44]

netmeg, I'm sorry. I did not mean to mistype your username. I honestly didn't know until you just said that. I thought it was nutmeg! LOL. Yes, it's true I came in to your space, jumped on the board and started ranting, and yes I did ask for ideas and comments. I was rude. It's true. I'm sorry, but can't you just rant a little with me! Kick stones with me and say, yeah man this sucks. I did not mean to be rude to you. I am really sorry. I didn't mean to pee in your pool either. This is your space, you're right. I did come in and track my mud all over. Excuse it please. I'm having a bad week. Adsense is down, hit with a server bug, had dental surgery (so I do have a little pain meds in me lol). Either way, just pump your fist in the air with me one time, don't go away mad. I'm sorry netmeg.

[netmeg]

It's all good, and I'm sorry about your teeth. Look, nobody likes to rant more than I do (just ask!) but it's usually confined to my own playgrounds (my site or my twitter feed) and full of blood and extreme profanity (which is not allowed here).

I got 99 problems with Google, but AdSense ain't one - I do really well with it. At worst, I have some annoyances. But I'm very practical and under no illusions. So I'm a huge advocate of diversification. I'm also a longtime AdWords expert, on behalf of a few clients, and so I get a better look of the entire system from both sides than maybe most publishers do.

If you really and truly want advice and ideas, everyone is usually pretty happy to help out. If you just want rants and commiseration - okay, but we already have plenty posts for that. We're full.

[engine]

Moderator note: Please keep this thread on topic.

Personal remarks will be removed without reference.


The topic is about ads not matching content. Is this a temporary technical fault on Google's part?

It is of no use to Google if the ads are off topic as they earn Google less money, in addition to the publishers losing out.

[Play_Bach]

Maybe the OP is just noticing IBAs? They have nothing to do with content, right? It's a common misconception for years here on this board that changing to not show IBAs somehow does what people *think* it does. It doesn't. Could simply be a misunderstanding (again...).

[levo]

[youtube.com...]

Go to 18:03, Adsense optimization expert talks about this issue. They're (or advertisers) moving from contextual to display advertising / re-marketing.

[explorador]

engine: The topic is about ads not matching content. Is this a temporary technical fault on Google's part?

play_bach: Maybe the OP is just noticing IBAs? They have nothing to do with content, right? It's a common misconception for years here on this board that changing to not show IBAs somehow does what people *think* it does. It doesn't. Could simply be a misunderstanding (again...).

Well I'm intrigued because been seeing japanese and german ads again on some of my pages ? haven't been browsing or searching for anything related and the context surely is away from that :confused:

watching video...

[jojy]

Has anyone seen improvement in earning by disabling third party or interest based ads? I disabled interest based ads few months ago but Google was still showing me same ads but from third party. It seems like Google disabled interest based ads on their side but not from third party ad networks.

[egem44]

What I was seeing on my site, and it seems much better now, was junk ads or something. There were car ads, ads from google that were special offers, "download this buttons" and a bunch of other non-related ads. It wasn't "interest based." These had nothing to do with what I have been searching for or what I was interested in or what the site was based on. I don't know where they were coming from. It was odd. I scanned my site and my computer for viruses, but nothing. It was really weird. It seems to have stopped now. I took off the interest based ads long ago, but I don't think it was related to what I was seeing.