June 2014 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[incrediBILL]

The continuing saga of statistically insignificant daily up and down AdSense earnings as reported for the month of June.

[webcentric]

Perhaps the opening post should have read...

"This thread contains random observations about Adsense earnings from an extremely small sampling of webmasters from around the world...this is not a scientific analysis of Adsense and probably shouldn't be taken as such. The tone of this thread may or may not be dominated by people who are or aren't doing well which could possibly skew the reader's perception of the program's effectiveness and/or viability. Comments are provided without warranty and may be taken with a grain of salt if you care for salt."

[Lame_Wolf]

@webcentric Why not start your own Adsense forum/site. Makes sense to me.

[RedBar]

Personally I prefer sea salt on my vine tomatoes with a nice fruity virgin olive oil...then again YMMV!

Anyone else hit the buffers today? Clicks have completely stalled for me, I don't suppose Friday 13th with a full moon has anything to do with it whatsoever...BTW, the next occurence of Friday 13th with a full moon is not until 2049.

I'll be mega impressed if I'm still posting then:-)

[webcentric]

@webcentric Why not start your own Adsense forum/site. Makes sense to me.

Come on Lame_Wolf, why not just acknowledge the fact that there are limitations to what you can deduce from the information in this forum and move on. I can come in here day in and day out to report my ups and downs like anyone else does but what I report is still "statistically insignificant." It's as simple as that. There, I slammed myself but I'm not taking it personally. Keeping things in perspective is an important discipline. Taking things personally, especially when they weren't meant that way causes problems.

Right now Adsense is performing beautifully for me across all devices with a great increase in mobile. I say this even though traffic is down this month (which is another topic). Still it's insignificant information without some additional details such as I've spent months tinkering with ad and content layout, responsive design, and content organization (we're talking millions of pages here).

For the traffic I'm getting, Adsense if performing beautifully! Moral of this story is that ad format changes caused a significant disruption in my operation (and I suspect other operations as well) but a detailed re-organization process is now beginning to pay off. As others have mentioned, Adsense is not a set-it-and-forget-it program any more. Just as we have to adapt to the changes taking place with the SE's, we're having to adjust to the changes in Adsense. Change is constant!

I could have gotten really bummed out a few months ago as I started to see a decline. Instead, I focused on the reasons and have shared that focus here on many occasions. I don't just come here to spout out my misery or gloat about my successes. I'm genuinely interested in sharing information and having a productive conversation. But I'm also a complex person and can't help injecting wit, sarcasm and intuition into my commentary as my creative juices see fit. I'm fairly certain that will continue until the day I'm banned on this site. Point being, don't take what I say personally. Take it for what it's worth to you from a productivity standpoint or ignore it if you like.

[RedBar]

(we're talking millions of pages here)

I feel as though I've personally wriiten millions of pages over the past twenty years however, as a matter of interest, from where do you get the information for all these pages?

[webcentric]

from where do you get the information for all these pages?

That's a sensitive question for sure but no sensitivity here. Just caution. First, I'm a DB develop so I know how to work with data to produce dynamic pages and assimilate various pieces of data in ways that pull it together in new, targeted configurations, thus taking tired, over-used content and elevating it to specific contextual purpose in a unique context. Next, I allow users to lay their own content over this structure and third, I am constantly producing original content (photography and writing) that binds it all together.

Just to be clear, I don't scrape or steal content from other websites and I've paid for plenty of data in my day. There are also sources of free or low cost data available such as census information that complements both functionality (latitude and longitude information for example) or ads breadth to other original information.

I'm not a blogger but there are aspects of what I do that resemble blogging. Other times, it's pure DBA. Other times it's member content management and other times it's about channeling the muse and creating purely original content.

[RedBar]

Wow, great, fabulous explanation however within which industries/trade/whatever are you able to do this, generically?

My widget industry has 100% technical specifications, that data cannot be changed/altered however could be presented "differently/in another format".

Allowing "users" to "lay" their own content I feel used to be an issue for most webmasters, and I certainly had a whole load of that crap, however you seem to be suggesting that is not so much of an issue now?

Right or wrong?

I shall not condemn you either way:-)

Ok, here's one for you all, I stickied this to someone you all know:

Honestly I think Joe Public uses The Net just like any other utility now, the novelty has worn off, in general they know where everything is that they require. I'm not saying that they're bored with it simply that they do use it as, when, how and wherever they like.

In other words for many publishers we've simply become Joe Public's amateur Wikipaedias, Brtiannicas etc, we're of no use to them most of the time unless there's a little bit of intrigue.

Good/bad/correct/wrong? In your opinion!

Tonight, again, I've been to my local music/drinking pubs, and now there are no laptops nor tablets, smartphones are now only being used other than for "clarification" ponderings...mostly historical rock band crap....conversation, for some of us, has returned...in the UK!

YMMV...No, I am not in London:-)

[webcentric]

within which industries/trade/whatever are you able to do this

A wide variety. Locality is the common factor.

Allowing "users" to "lay" their own content I feel used to be an issue for most webmasters...however you seem to be suggesting that is not so much of an issue now?

UGC (and I'm not talking blog comments or forum posts) has always been a challenge when trying to maintain the quality of information on a site (including spam prevention). People don't care to spell check, use complete sentences or proper (or at least passable) punctuation and they still love typing in all caps or all lower case for seemingly no good reason. On the spam front, I think many comment spammers are currently learning their lesson the hard way.

Many would be contributors don't know what a paragraph break is and others think everything should be in bold (plus upper case and in 24 pixel sized font). So, it's a constant chore if you give people free reign. 0ne key is to control the data-entry environment and keep options to a minimum. I don't let people choose font colors and sizes for example because that gets, well, just too damn colorful.

Regarding your comment about Joe Public. For the most part, the novelty is wearing off in many ways I think and the Internet has really become a tool or a pasttime. People (even me) still get into simply exploring but my normal Internet usage is based on getting information I need now, and quick. I see plenty of people glued to their smart phones but many are just playing a game or checking their Facebook feed or texting. When you have something like the Internet in your pocket, it becomes something you pull out when you need it or when you're bored or when someone reaches out to you. That's my take.

[jrstark]

Traffic is down a little, Adsense down a lot. At least I can see in this thread I'm not the only one.

[Ironside]

How many of you have a policy of blocking certain categories? I went through some of the categories yesterday to see what percentage I was earning from each one. It seems that either earn some money from all categories, obviously some a lot more than others. However, my website has absolutely nothing to do with certain categories, including airline tickets, dating, and website hosting, so I've blocked various sites which I know were displaying ads on my site. I more likely to damage my earnings by blocking too many, or blocking the ones that are of no relevance, leaving ones that maybe earn a little bit more? I also made some of my most popular earning channels targetable, so people can maybe bid, I don't know whether this will help or not.

[netmeg]

The less I fiddle with the knobs, the more I make. YMMV.

[frankleeceo]

Blocking categories will almost always hurt your earnings in the long run. With advertisers splattering high paying interest based ads from time to time, you would miss out on those $.

On the other hand, blocking categories that are not relevant to your visitors can boost overall CTR's, which can still potentially net your higher average payout, but then lose out on some of the higher interest-based paying ads.

It's give or take really. However, I find that my information only with non-paying intent sites function better with no categories blocked. Whereas I believe that buying intent sites may work better with categories blocked due to targeted traffic that are willing to click on ads more often than not.

One thing for certain though, fiddling it too much can hurt your earnings in the long run. Everytime you fiddle with stuff, google puts into experimental mode to calculate ctr and payout stuff, or at least that's what I experience.

[jrstark]

I only block categories that I do not want serving ads on my site. I know it costs me money, but I don't care. I only wish they wouldn't keep sneaking in under other categories.

[MrSavage]

Damn. I saw a massive clawback. One ad unit in particular had huge earnings in a short time, those were just removed within 15 minutes. Not this again. Click bombing? I haven't seen this in quite some time actually. I guess I need to send an email into Adsense.

[ian_D]

June started off way better for me than April or May, CPC was 4 times higher the past 2 weeks but now it's tanked again and traffic, almost exclusively from Google search, is all over the place. Same with CTR. I'm getting the same advertiser on all 3 ad units sometimes too and I don't know if that's good or bad. I guess either they really like that page or adsense has a problem.

I block a few categories where the impressions far outweigh the earnings but I'm in a pretty specific high CPC niche right now that I'm not sure google understands. Some of their category definitions are a little too broad and the ads sometimes focus on a vastly different type of user than those I serve so getting rid of those ad sub categories usually works for me. It's a constant game of back and forth to maintain relevance and CPC though.

[AvaP20]

I see a bunch of people here who are having problems with AdSense or not earning a whole lot. Has anyone thought of using an alternative?

[RedBar]

Has anyone thought of using an alternative?

Nah, I don't think anyone has, ever #-o

[netmeg]

I'm doing very well with AdSense, but I have still tried a number of alternatives, most of which I've given up on, because they don't pay as well or as reliably as AdSense. The exception being a handful of affiliate sites, which are targeted around specific affiliate offers.

Still using one media.net placement, not because it pays much, but it fills a blank spot in the design until I get around to putting something else there.

[RedBar]

I'm at a standstill, the only clicks I've had are a few from India and that's it, nothing from anywhere else, PVs absolutely normal.

What have they broken now?

[MrSavage]

I had a crazy dump of revenue for one ad unit which was taken back after about 30 minutes. The day stalled pretty much from that point. That's hours and hours of time with no added earnings. What I'm seeing is a bit bizarre in that same site, one ad unit is going great and the other ad units aren't showing revenue or basically next to nothing. I'm going to read the click bombing thread now and see what to do.

[RedBar]

PVs normal, CTR 50%, EPC 35%, eCPM 23.7% ... nah nothing wrong whatsoever!

[avalon37]

CTR is TERRIBLE yesterday and today.

[Saffron]

My CPC is about 30% down on the norm.

[Mentat]

yep, low eCPM, very low...

[azlinda]

I'm doing far better since I unblocked everything that I had blocked (which was quite a bit). PixFuture has also been doing well for me.

[avalon37]

My account manager confirmed an ad relevancy issue starting yesterday. No word they said if it's a "strategic" decision or an ad serving "bug". But they are hearing from publishers how bad the last 36 hours have been.

[netmeg]

All good here.

[Saffron]

That's "kinda" good to hear avalon. Hopefully it means they're onto it and it will be sorted out. This is going to be my worse AS day in years.

[Ironside]

I only made £7 yesterday, today isn't looking much better. At some point, I'm not going to be making anything. I was looking back at December's earnings, over £700 for the month, oh well, it's a nice memory to have.

[EditorialGuy]

Yesterday was my best AdSense day in a long time. (Not great, but better than usual.)