January 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

I have something I want to post!

[nubchai]

We've noticed clicks being taken away hourly too. It seemed to start the second week in January. In talking to others I know who have sites with Adsense, they are reporting the same thing. Sounds like an audit bot or something. I'm more diversified this year so I'm a lot less stressed out about this. Hopefully Adsense will rebound, but it acts like a network in decline. I also don't think it's seasonal since last January was very good compared to this.

[Mike343]

Yes compared to last January something is very very wrong.

[netmeg]

My bot activity is through the roof right now, and I suspect some of them are responsible for the hourly clawbacks. Haven't seen this many since last March.

[ember]

Yes, this does feel like last March. I'm not seeing the huge spikes and drops in earnings with clicks being withdrawn, but I am seeing the epc being shaved practically in front of my eyes. I hope Google gets this under control soon.

[nubchai]

I'm seeing withdrawn clicks and erratic reporting. I wasn't watching for a while and when I checked, my pageviews had gone up by 200, clicks up by 19, cpc up by .13 and an $8 increase in earnings. An hour later I have 120 more page views, 1 click taken back, cpc dropped by .12 and earnings went down $13. Nonsensical.

[MrSavage]

A bit of sizzle in my earnings today. Glad to know it's not completely dead and that there is a chance of a turnaround from the dismal past week or so.

[MichaelP]

CPC still sucks. Funny, just had a $2 click reported 5 minutes ago and of course, it is now gone. I think Google has started cheating us, taking away more expensive clicks.

[Mentat]

-15$ shaved in my last hour of the day.
- 80% of the new ads in the Ad Review page are "realtime bidding", like Adwords is down!

[kireb]

The stats are completely dysfunctional now. Earnings up an down and only lesser clicks seem to stick. No fun and the same behavior as last year. What is a relieve is reading that I am not the only one.

[RedBar]

Have they fixed "it", whatever "it" was?

My Saturday earnings came back to what I would have expected and were 300.6% up on Friday but US CPC was still way down at 69% however clicks were back to average.

[Munix]

Hello all,
This is my first time here... and I got here after googling "january adesnse cpc low"... :)
So just to join the conversation and give my own short update: my cpc and revenues are also down since Jan 1, cpc down by about 50% or more, while page views is actually up whilst keeping same ratio between visitor's locations.

The issue is still relevant today... I was hoping too it was a post-holidays thing, or "advertise budget not set yet" thing, but it's been going on for 2.5 weeks...

[avalon37]

Roller coaster ride continues. Terrible Saturday after a very strong Friday. Regarding dropping CPC prices, I'm also and Adwords advertiser in multiple industries; one of which is the consumer industry of my main site that I run Adsense on. Guess what? Not seeing any dramatic CPC drop in what I am paying for clicks - just what Google is paying me. Funny how that seems to be the recurrent theme for me in the last 1.5 years.

One things for sure in 2015, daily reporting is pretty much useless. There is no way this data Adsense is reporting is clean. Meaning I am definitely getting click credits on certain days which I am convinced happened the previous day. These huge spike and conversely extremely LOW days are not believable to me.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Munix

Guess what? Not seeing any dramatic CPC drop in what I am paying for clicks - just what Google is paying me.

The thing is I am actually seeing some very good paying clicks and I have a suspicion that they are IBAs since my average EPC for those is 152.3%. I also get the occasional excellent click value from my AdLinks, excellent for me is anything over USD 1.50 these days.

[avalon37]

RedBar I hear you that interest based ads tend to pay more for me. And quite frankly I'd run just IBA's all day if I could. But so far today (basically 4-5 hours) I've made more than yesterday. The click CPC are through the roof and NOT IBA; contextual text ads...Odd, but hardly surprising.

[silentneedle]

Ad-targeting is still messed up (especially geo-targeting). Since friday I'm seeing those green-arrow download-now ads less often, however, we currently hit the lowest revenue since 10 years. In my opinion this doesn't have to do with the new year change, we never noticed any big differences in the last few years.

[tidewatcher]

Not sure if this has to do with anything regarding the strange action we are talking about here, but this is an announcement on the Google's Adsense Forum:

"AdSense Help Forum
Jan 15


Google's ads quality team is investigating a new type of spam that uses Flash to auto redirect users to a different site once loaded on a page.

We've identified the cause of the issue, and have addressed the problem on our network. We're working with impacted publishers and improving our screening to protect against this type of problem in the future.

Thanks,

The Google AdSense Team"

[MichaelP]

Clicks have doubled today but, why am I not surprised, they are all worth only around 10cents. Nice, Google, nice. As if I am going to believe that suddenly everyone has started paying 10cents per click, no more in adwords. All those $1+ clicks that w got in the past have suddenly disapeared in January.

[MrSavage]

Upward trend continuing today.

[kireb]

Still a lot of claw backs here. Very frustrating.

[7_Driver]

It's not just me then!

Yesterday was another terrible day - a perfect storm of very low CTRs and very low EPCs are decimating earnings.

I think some major advertisers may have abandoned AdSense this year - which is part of our problem.

Dodgy targeting, and too many "interest based" ads, is probably also in the mix.

Starting to think ad-funded information publishing may not be viable in some niches any more.

Ok - off to do something positive: Looking at other models to replace AdSense.

[antonnb]

kinda crazy actually..i dont know what is going on...all my site stat show there is nothing wrong..i have double traffic and click this January but earning so unbelievable ,ussualy my site generate at least 900$ per month,but until this date 19-01-2015 ,its only generate $150

[nomis5]

An upward trend here as well for the site I am concentrating on. Normally the season of interest starts late February but this year it has started early January.

[RedBar]

Sunday 18th January, the most PVs and highest-earning day of the year for me!? What, on a weekend? I have to say they are the kind of numbers I would have expected but the entire programme seems to have been shot to hell recently therefore this was a very nice surprise.

What is noteworthy for Sunday:

Second highest earnings' country - UAE

And here's a first for me, 40.6% of earnings were from mobile, 32.8% tablets leaving 26.6% desktop...wow!

Mobile CPC 140.9% of desktop
Tablet CPC 131.8% of desktop

Also interesting is that the single biggest earning site is not responsive BUT all my responsive earning sites' CPCs were well above average CPC, 160~220%.

@tidewatcher - Interesting.

[dk385]

antonnb,

Same here. Record visitor count (6000 per day-> €2.0) but lowest ever CPC,RPM.
Most visitors are from Croatia.

I have implemented bootstrap3 and responsive adsense units in saturday.
Can this be problem?
I did it because adsense recommended 336x280 unit to be implemented.


What are your experiences?


Please help.

[dk385]

@RedBar,@tidewatcher


my desktop revenue totally sinked. Does this have to do with flash bug?
Mobile revenue is up or unchanged.

Mobile devices generally don't support flash (android,IOS).

Can this technical error (redirect attack) be reason for this?

[antonnb]

@dk385

mine mostly from Asia,i didn't implement anything to my site,just adding around 40 new article .cpc and rpm drop started at 31 Dec 2014,my daily cpc went down to just 0.02$ - 0.03$

daily site stat
5,364Today
6,335Yesterday
6,185Before Yesterday

weekly site site stat
5,126This Week
44,085Last Week
39,703Previous Week

3 Month site stat

109,712This Month
167,439Last Month
175,488Previous Month

[Mike343]

Still seeing a lot of clawback and horrible rates.

[shri]

Yep. Same here. No improvement over the last week.

This is not related to the redirect problem as our page views are normal. Would be happy if that were the case.

[dk385]

@shri

I don't think that flash bug is a problem with driving your or our traffic away but changes in Adsense engine (reprogramming) and checking/evaluating whole pool of ads for spam attempt.
As a consequence , i think' ad delivery can be slowed or stopped.
Profit-wise , first top sites get clearance and then small/tiny ones.

My site is in croatian language with croatian audience and I am seeing polish,spanish,asian(Chinese/Korean) ads plus lot of cheap-lose-weight/stop smoking ads.

Something is wrong.

I hope it is not fault of new responsive ad units.

Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks.

[filbiz]

@dk385
I think you are right regarding the "checking/evaluating the whole pool of ads for spam attempt" because when I'm checking my ads review center, most of the expired/inactive ads are still there. Seems they are not updated with the new ads coming. Maybe as you've said, "that ad delivery is slowed down". That is why we are experiencing this horrible CPC. And about the responsive ads, maybe I'll also check in that area and test some non-responsive ads.