January 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

I have something I want to post!

[nubchai]

I can't wait to get that warning message that my monthly revenues were less than projected lol.

[Play_Bach]

Worst. Month. Ever.

[RedBar]

Strangely much lower traffic than normal today, EPCs still in the gutter.

[RedBar]

What an amazing Friday...USA CTR zero, again, top earning country, Kosovo, what?

[netmeg]

Last two days were pretty nasty, but today's good.

[AG4Life]

Yeah, it's been a really weird month with AdSense. For one particular geo, our CTR dropped by 94% from December 31st to today. Basically no click throughs for thousands of ads, which defies believe (I mean there should have been at least a few accidental clicks). I suspect this may be related to over-enthusiastic bot blocking.

But it's the US geo that's suffered most revenue wise. CTR is still fairly steady, but CPC/page RPM has dropped by 40%+, despite higher pageviews and a relatively steady CTR (so overall revenue drop of 27% comparing the last 28 days with the previous 28). Other geos, except for Canada, are not as bad, but still pretty bad (UK down 17%, but Canada is down 47%!).

[shri]

but CPC/page RPM has dropped by 40%+

I suspect changes in real time bidding (RTB) algorithms on the AdSense side of things, on the 1st of Jan. Have yet to confirm this.

Have spent a fair bit of time over the last week reading over various programatic buy side algorithms to understand how tags, user and site data gets passed to the various exchanges.

I also suspect this is the new normal and requires deeper study than just blaming bots, users or your own site (don't get me wrong, all the changes made with thought and serious A/B testing on these aspects will impact positively over the long term).

Get ready for a fairly seismic shift in how ad inventory is being evaluated (a lot of it began several years ago ... but something changed on the 1st of January).

Unusual silence from Google contacts says a lot more to me.

Have to put a lot of thought into HOW to study our reports, developer documents, talk to agencies and hopefully a couple of public exchange contacts on the buy side and then come up with some evidence based or atleast informed speculation to work with.

Hope to share in a week or two.

Here's some initial reading material for those who want:

[developers.google.com...]

[mikeonads.com...] (note the date on when this was published - 2009)

[RedBar]

What can I say about Friday?

Clicks up, they were ok, overall CTR ok but many sites with absolutely zero clicks whatsoever, however if it had not been for smartphone EPCs at 200+% more than desktop it would have easily been my lowest-ever EPC day. As such it was my lowest-ever but thankfully only by 0.01

The lowest to highest spread of my USA EPC values this month has simply been unprecedented, I simply find it too much to believe that the programme is working as intended.

[eeek]

Been having a lot of periods with massive unmatched requests. Seems like they broke something again.

[Mentat]

Yuk, very bad Saturday as payment (-25%)!
Maybe is the end of the mont and tomorrow is the Superbowl, but February is not starting very promising.

[ian_D]

Another record for highest earnings month. :)

January was up 5% from last month despite the slow start.

[BillyS]

January was our best month in nearly two years. RPM steady throughout the month.

[AlexB77]

OK before I move on to the February 2015 post I wanted to finish it here.

Conclusion:

January 2015, I am over December 2014 by 45%, but down January 2014 by 35%.
My personal conclusion in regard to the traffic patterns for the same periods, looks like China has plaid very negative role in my traffic and especially traffic that converts into adsense clicks. Traffic from China was somewhat unusual, so I went to check my logs and what I have found was the key turning point for me. First it has dramatically reduced the bounce rate from 0.35% to 0.06%, mainly because most of the traffic recorded in logs was to the non-existing pages on my site, I mean pages that never existed on my site at all, with User Agent BitTorrent. I have had to block most of the IPs and the result of the hard work that I have done actually paid off. Now my adds are much clear and lot more related to the content of the site, I cannot see the parallel between this at the moment, because I actually never thought that there may be any connection between the two, but it looks like there is.

So this is really all for now and I will see you all on February 2015 Earnings post. Good luck to all in February

[netmeg]

January hasn't finalized yet, but as of right now it's 154% of last January. I'm okay with that.

[eek2121]

Hard for me to complain as well, even though CPC has definitely taken a hit (as well as RPM), I have 4X the earnings this year compared to last year. You also have to be wary of the country your visitors are coming from. My drop in CPC is due to increased visits from low paying countries like india. Did the US grow as well? Sure, but not by 400%. Looking forward to an interesting year. I have a feeling more and more companies are going to start introducing competitors to adsense.

[RedBar]

My lowest finalised earnings' reduction in months/years at 57 Cents, mind you after that awful month anything more would have been an insult.