March 2014 AdSense Earnings and Observations

This May be my Last Month

[JCKline]

I'm starting the March earnings thread as it may be my last month with Non-Sense.

[gogu258]

I'm using old Adsense interface since it gives me more info than the newer one. Not using GA too much, just to check number of clicks on a specific page(s).

[ember]

Question here is, are you seeing the clicks come and go in the old Adsense interface or the new one?

I've been using the old interface but I've now switched to the new one to see if that makes any difference. BTW, according to Google, I've made 5x my normal earnings so far today.

[mike73]

What are your impressions like?

I was averaging 1,000 impressions per day, then March 1 came and *BLAM* less than 200 impressions per day. Of course CTR and earnings also plummeted.

[RyuUK]

My main site had a record breaking day for traffic, but the Adsense CTR is horrific. Then you have clicks getting removed all the time. Got a feeling that the Adsense glory days could be a thing of the past. May have to go full on Affiliate. Will give it a few days.

[wa desert rat]

What are your impressions like?

It's interesting. Beginning on February 28th the visits and pageviews (along with the unique versions of each) began a rapid climb upwards according to the analysis utility I use (Piwik). In fact, that climb is still going on. I expect over 700 visits today; about double what I would have seen two weeks ago.

But when I look at Google Analytics it's not so much.

On March 8th, for instance GA said I had 391/1557 while MY system (which has zero filters of any sort) said 553/1947. Which one do I think was accurate? I'm pretty sure that my analysis program gets the same data that GA does. What GA does with it between my site and their report is something I have no control over.

How can there be a difference of 162 visits and 390 pageviews? Can these all be attributed to bots?

I dunno.

WDR

[mike73]

WDR,

GA can only record visits with javascript activated. Your webserver records everything, including crawlers, like google.

[wa desert rat]

Piwik is also javascript. I haven't tried to analyze either (I'm an old C programmer, after all) but it doesn't look that different to me.

WDR

[wa desert rat]

After a bit of thinking it over, I realized that they way Google counts users and pageviews could be quite different from the way another system does it. For one thing, without Javascript enabled on a visitor's browser they cannot see the ads and thus would not be counted for "impressions". Moreover, if a visitor has ad blocking enabled then that visitor, too, would not see impressions. And anyone who navigated away from a page before the ads loaded would also not be counted.

So this could account for a lot of the disparity. Although I have not yet tried to understand exactly how Piwik counts visitors.

Thanks for the tip Mike73. :)

WDR

[jrstark]

Google Analytics now has a Reports add-on for Google Sheets. I managed to install it, am reading the docs now. Is this something we can use to track anything?

[Gunfur]

I also have a remarkably high disapproval of clicks and so are the revenues. Since the beginning of this month almost daily I see revenues dropping by 40 to 50 percent. It is awkward that I use Adwords but never see money coming back from G, G earns easily money and let publishers suffer. It's not reliable as before and I'm considering to quit Adsense.

[jbayabas]

Same here. The downward spiral started since the beginning if this month.

[wa desert rat]

mike73

GA can only record visits with javascript activated. Your webserver records everything, including crawlers, like google.

Turns out that Piwik also tracks via javascript so, barring some tracking errors, it should be pretty close to GA.

WDR

[jrstark]

I think there is still a difference between how the various programs determine what is a bot and what is a real person. Having the code in the header vs. the footer can affect numbers too.

Adsense is definitely behind on reporting, it should have switched to Wednesday by now but I am still seeing Tuesday's numbers.

[RedBar]

I don't know how true it is these days however in the early days of AdSense if there were no more new ads to be shown it would show a repeat ad but that would not add an extra PV.

I see lots of pages these days with the ads repeated plus when comparing G's PVs to mine with known genuine visitors on a site, sometimes G's numbers are way, way, out.

Maybe things have changed, I don't know, but it certainly makes more sense to me knowing the above than trying to wonder why they do not match up more closely.

[Chris13]

As I said earlier I have removed the worst (for invalid clicks) ad unit (for size read long and slim) ad unit from my pages and replaced it with Criteo / affiliate ads. The question she asked was how was the ad block doing on Criteo (now referred to as C)? The answer is that it's now performing exactly as I would expect on C. That I find interesting.

Well that sort of indicates that the adsense adunit was being targetted. You replaced it with different code, so the adsense adunit can no longer be found on the page, hence, click rate returns to normal.

It's not the position on the page where the ad is, but it's the actual adunit or ad from adsense that is being clicked.

Once the iframe containing the ad loads, its content is visible to a person or bot. If the clicker is looking for a specific ad to click, then it will continue to re-request the page until it sees the ad it's looking for, then it clicks. I've seen this type of behaviour from a person who had a grudge against an advertiser. This person saw an ad on my site for some advertiser and clicked it. Then refreshed the page again and again waiting for that same ad to show up, then click. The behaviour became obvious rather quickly.

Personally, I'd find the ip address that is making lots of page requests of that specific page from my logs and block it at the firewall to see what happens. That way you can leave the page alone and continue to receive income from legitmate visitors.

[Lame_Wolf]

Well that sort of indicates that the adsense adunit was being targetted. You replaced it with different code, so the adsense adunit can no longer be found on the page, hence, click rate returns to normal.

I think you'll find that it's the page that is being targeted and not the actual advert.

I thought it may be the advert, and as I have access to another account, I replaced the one on the page with this one. Still being hit. :(

[jrstark]

I think it's more than one page, just found a URL channel that seems to be getting more clicks than usual, but not enough to account for everything. I added some more URL channels to see if I can narrow things down.

[Lame_Wolf]

I think it's more than one page, just found a URL channel that seems to be getting more clicks than usual, but not enough to account for everything.

It is. I have 100's of pages with Adsense on, but it is only affecting a couple of them.

[wa desert rat]

I think you'll find that it's the page that is being targeted and not the actual advert.

I think we have more than one set of click-fraud-bots at work here and they are using different methods.

If a bot is clicking just any ad that shows up on a specific webpage then it seems to me that has to be an attack of some sort. I cannot see how they can profit from clicking on just any ad that shows up on a specific page.

There are several different motives for click-fraud at work here.

1)The profit motive where someone, somewhere, receives more money than he/she would have without a click;

2) The revenge motive where they just want to get back at a publisher or advertiser; and,

3) An advertising attack against a competitor trying to eat up that competitor's advertising budget.

Most of these require that the clickbot have some idea of what ad - specifically - it is clicking on.

WDR

[Lame_Wolf]

I think we have more than one set of click-fraud-bots at work here and they are using different methods.

Three of my pages are being targeted more than others.

One of these said pages, only has one advert. (middle-right)
The other two pages have more than one advert, but appear to be hitting only the bottom one on the page.

[jrstark]

I haven't narrowed it down to page yet, but the channel that seems to be affected is an above-the-fold leaderboard. Does it take a day to see new URL channels? None of the ones I added earlier are showing yet. I have three AdSense ads on most pages.

[Lame_Wolf]

Does it take a day to see new URL channels? None of the ones I added earlier are showing yet. I have three AdSense ads on most pages

They should show up within 30 minutes max.

Even if you do not get any clicks, it will show impressions.

[gogu258]

I was thinking if Adsense system is overheated because of those clickbomb attacks as many reports, and also others reports lower and lower incomes even without being attacked.
If the system is incapable to manage funds, practically attacks will drain the money from advertisers accounts very quickly, so even if my website will receive valid clicks in the same time, there will be no money to be added into my account. It's just a quick idea not fully developed (it's about 4 AM here, Eastern Europe).

[gogu258]

Some publishers report that they made 100x usual income.

[productforums.google.com...]

"I have earned thousands of dollars in last 10 days. I would be a millionaire by the end of this month. No response from Google yet. I am just scared to login to my account to see 100 times more than usual earnings. Yesterday I earned over $5000 in just 6 hours and thosands more are still there without adjustment.

Don't tell me to report invalid activity to Google, done that twice in last 10 days."

[jrstark]

The new URL channels are listed as active, but are still not showing up in reports. Sheesh, I never changed the default date range, can see them now.

Hardly any takebacks today, only one that I've seen early and another for a couple cents.

[wa desert rat]

After a day of up and down I had exactly 1 click left. THen, at 2305 I had 5 clicks and an extra 30 cents in "estimated" (that's a joke, right?) earnings.

What's even better? I bet that by 2400 those extra clicks (and the 30 cents) will be sucked back.

[MrSavage]

I've been watching and participating in this Adsense forum for some time now. Never have I seen such bizarre reports and issues. Considering it's not just one or two people, it's pretty convincing that there are some serious issues going on right now. That's something never before seen. I think it's been pretty smooth sailing up until recently.

Earnings wise, decent and average day yesterday. Although stats have crawled at various times during the day, I'm happy that most earning stuck through the night into today.

[webcentric]

Just trying to get into the Adsense interface which is showing an message

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

Meanwhile the status bar text says something like "connecting to google-analytics.com"

So that is pointing at Analytics integration into the Adsense inferface. It may just be tracking my visits to the interface or may be more detailed than that. One point here is that I think something just changed in the adsense environment because now it's loading again and I have more revenue than a few seconds ago and the report was pretty locked up for several hours prior to that.

[webcentric]

now it says "waiting for IH3.googleusercontent.com"

It's like something is rolling out across a variety of systems, causing adsense to hang at different stages of the loading process.

[webcentric]

And now, just to follow up, a click dump seems to be rolling in. Funny, my stats seemed hung for several hours this AM but no Red Bar.