October 2014 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

What will the Autumn/Fall bring us all?

[ember]

CTR fell off a cliff today, and now I can't access the site. Something is up.

[edited by: ember at 7:41 pm (utc) on Oct 7, 2014]

[KaseyM]

CTR and Pageviews up.

CPC has absolutely tanked. Roughly a quarter of what it was this time last year.

[RedBar]

PVs and clicks looking much more normal now however EPC is dire.

[Saffron]

Mine is down today too, but traffic seems to be normal/slightly higher. Yesterday was down too, despite increased traffic.

[ember]

Adsense usually records 85% of the clicks that statcounter does. That is after statcounter repeat clicks are taken out. I assume the other 15% are invalid for whatever reason Adsense says they are. Today, Adsense is recording 47% of what statcounter says.

[ember]

Figured it out. I'd added a link ad to one of the popular pages. Got a lot of clicks, but I was only being paid for about 25% of them. I'd forgotten that users have to double click for those to pay out. Explains why my CTR had tanked today. No more link ads, needless to say.

[ian_D]

Average traffic, but CTR and CPC are rediculously low.
Earnings today about 25% of normal.

[jbayabas]

My depression sets in. It just keeps on getting worse even if I work harder. Is the economy this bad?

[jbayabas]

YOu know what's interesting? Even though a lot of us are suffering, Google shares remain consistently solid. It's like they were never affected. Unbelievable!

[Mentat]

Something is broken @ adsense! Very bad payment, very bad ads and poorly targeted!

Very low revenue. I believe that this is the first time when Tuesday revenue is almost equal to Saturday revenue! Traffic is stable.

[radix]

CTR and CPC both down on my main channel for Tuesday. The main culprit is CTR -> CPM is only 63% of the average of preceding 30 days.

[RedBar]

For me Tuesday ended with average clicks and ctr however my epc was slashed even further meaning yet another low earning day ... it seems to be a race to the bottom for click values.

This does not help whatsoever:

very bad ads and poorly targeted!

[whyohwhy]

I’m UK based and I was expecting a slow start to October as it is always the way with companies sorting out their budgets for this quarter and then holding off to start their campaigns till the second half of the month. But I have never experienced such a poor start to October as this one and it literally feels like World Wide everyone has pulled their advertising campaigns and I am scraping up the adverts from the bottom of the barrel which have nothing to do with my site. This is especially frustrating when month on month I am seeing a steady increase in search engine traffic and clicks.

I am just hopeful that October will run to form and in about 7 days I will start seeing the new advertising campaigns kick in or else this could be the start of a very miserable few months.

[MacroDean]

Hi I'm new here.

Historically, my blogs have seen AdSense increases each quarter, then at the beginning of the following year, things go down a bit. But by Q4, they've always completely recovered. Not this year.

This year, Q1 was better than any other Q1 we've had, but each quarter since then has actually gone down! Our traffic is stable, increasing just slightly. CPC is what's killing us I think. Not sure what to do...looks like others are having similarly difficult times with AdSense...

[Mentat]

Each day I review my Adsense Ads for some unwanted advertisers.
Each day I had at least 10-20 pages of new ads.

In the last 2-3 days, I only have 1-2 pages of ads to review, so no new ads in the system! WTH ?

[avalon37]

Ad targeting terrible. If AdSense was a mom and pop store, I'd predict closure in the next 6 months.

[eek2121]

Wow, i actually broke revenue records today, been almost a year since i did that ;)

[zero_nomore]

I'm a new bie. I'm Vietnamese
I hope, my traffic will increase

[CentennialEmpire]

I'm UK based and I was expecting a slow start to October as it is always the way with companies sorting out their budgets for this quarter and then holding off to start their campaigns till the second half of the month. But I have never experienced such a poor start to October as this one and it literally feels like World Wide everyone has pulled their advertising campaigns and I am scraping up the adverts from the bottom of the barrel which have nothing to do with my site. This is especially frustrating when month on month I am seeing a steady increase in search engine traffic and clicks.

I am just hopeful that October will run to form and in about 7 days I will start seeing the new advertising campaigns kick in or else this could be the start of a very miserable few months.

We experienced literally the same thing as you have. Q1 was great, Q2 was as well, then in Q3 CPC and RPM plummeted, only rising a little bit by the time the end of the quarter arrived. Then the start of Q4 saw the same plummet, albeit from the lackluster Q3 high's (which barely met Q2 lows).

Something is amiss here. We're a big publisher and it doesn't take a long time to start seeing trends. Overall our Adsense earnings have dropped by 20% from previous months and despite Q1 and Q2 recording 15-25% revenue lifts over the same months last year July-September flatlined and now October is looking like a reverse trend has begun.

I do have to wonder whether this has more to do with 3rd party networks via Adsense pulling back. In a given month we'll see revenue from about 550 networks via Adsense and collectively they make up about 50-55% of total revenues via Adsense. If these networks pulled back their investment in specific niches or have targeted their ads in a way that impacts some publishers I can see quite a few of us having to deal with declining revenues.

[Mentat]

Today figures are horrible low :o

It's like a movement to get out of adwords? It's worse than a week-end day and in Week-end I'm very low!

WTH google, what is happening ? Panda is eating my traffic each day in the past 400 days, now very low payment? This is like the perfect storm for me :(

[ian_D]

In the last 2-3 days, I only have 1-2 pages of ads to review, so no new ads in the system! WTH ?

Interestingly, shortly after you posted this, I had 1000's of new ads dumped into my ad review. Normally I only get 4 or 5 pages of new ads each day.

Although there were also many of the usual junk ads in this review, a lot of the new ads were very relevant. so I was optimistically expecting to see a noticeable improvement in performance over the next few days.
Well that didn't happen.
I don't know who's seeing those new ads. I'm not seeing them here or when using a proxy.

Looking a little closer at some of the new ads, I see that many of them are already marked inactive.
Some of the "new" ads were for Labour Day sales. (I think Canada and the US Labour days are pretty close together? Like about a month ago).

If AdSense was a mom and pop store, I'd predict closure in the next 6 months.

I've thought that myself a few times.
CTR now is half what it was the past 3 or 4 months, same content and layout, similar ads, same number of new organic visitors each day.
I still think there's a problem with their targeting cookies that shows users non interest based crap ads rather than the site's contextual ads.

Seeing duplicated ads every time I check my site is frustrating too. Adwords, despite seeing the screen shots and ad codes, tells me it doesn't happen, can't happen, their state of the art network would detect it and alarm bells would go off.

They blamed it on each unique ad unit being a different auction and said it's fine for each unique ad unit to show the same winning ad on all ad units on one page.
So instead I used a single ad unit in 3 locations to try and get rid of duplicate ads. That change made no difference at all to the duplicate problem, but it did create a very sharp rise in CPC for all ads on that page that still continues.

I would have thought that a potluck ad position would result in lower CPC bids? Go figure...

[CentennialEmpire]

Have any of you considered that the reason why advertising values are in decline is due to ad blockers becoming more and more prevalent, leaving a smaller pool of users that the ads are being displayed to? With some publishers having to deal with upwards of 50% of their traffic blocking their revenue source the remaining 50% of users may not necessarily be the target market 60% of users may have been, or even 75% (volume aside, just more individuals appealing to a wider range of advertisers).

I'm going to chalk up a lot of the issues being experienced as just that, fewer individuals being targeted and the quality of users dropping or becoming much tougher to target given the smaller sample.

Regardless, adblockers DO impact publishers and they DO have a pronounced affect. I virtually guarantee you that if you ran an adblocker checker you'd see anywhere between 15 and 35% of your pageviews are blocked from displaying ads.

[ian_D]

Although ad blockers are certainly a problem, the numbers we see in adsense have already filtered that out. Adsense impressions are from non ad blocking users or they wouldn't be counted. That leaves ad serving and display as the prime suspect when so many publishers are reporting a similar decline. (with the same traffic)

[londrum]

i think its the same every year (maybe a little worse this year)
if i look through all my stats, going way back, i have made more money each year, but it takes an increasing amount of traffic just to stay at the same level.

you really need to ramp your traffic up substantially to get even a little bit ahead

i am still blaming the economy. everyone tells us that it is getting better, but i dont see it myself.

[Saffron]

I'm seeing the same number of ad impressions as I was 2 years ago, but my CTR has dropped by 40%.

[RedBar]

A good CTR for me today however desktop EPCs are well down again, tablet EPCs are 50% more than desktop!

It doesn't surprise me whatsoever people use ad blockers, some sites are so loverloaded with ads and even on desktop can take an age to load with the page bouncing about all over the place.

Do that to me and I'm away never to return. Some companies/webmasters really need their bumps feeling and a semblance of common sense knocking into them!

They're the ones who have been ruining it for all the sensible publishers.

[whyohwhy]

I don’t believe ad blockers is such a huge issue, yes those of us making a living on the net know about them but do the majority of the general public who surf the net, buy online and do their banking. I got in touch with some of my relatives (15 which is a small group) who are average internet users and most had never heard of ad blockers and those who had couldn’t be bothered as they just left sites which took too long to load because of advert stuffing.

[netmeg]

Do not discount huge changes to AdWords over time. Without AdWords, there would be no AdSense. In order to really understand AdSense, you need to make a serious effort to keep up with AdWords.

[ember]

What I know about Adwords is its gotten a lot more complicated to use. You can't just throw an ad up. Or make a nice ad, place a bid, and, heaven forbid, expect your ad to show. I would think fewer advertisers are using the service.

[netmeg]

Possibly. But also, more advertisers are not using it to its best advantage, and more advertisers, having been burned by the complications, are using it a lot more cautiously.