February 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[Mentat]

January 2015 was not a great month for many.
February it's a short month.
On 2nd of February in US is the NFL Super Bowl and we all know that dreaded 14.02... :(

First day of February had a very low payment for me, the second seems to be worse.

Let's home Springtime is near...

[avalon37]

Mentat it HAS to be stuck. That said, we'll in all likelihood be out the earnings. I've never seen a day that starts so badly (like today) ever rebound enough to come close to an average day. Google's up to something. In the last 24 hours I've earned enough to purchase a postage stamp whereas typically it would be enough for dinner. This is ridiculous.

[RedBar]

Mentat it HAS to be stuck.

If it's not stuck then it's utterly fubard beyond belief.

[avalon37]

Utterly ridiculous. Just removed AdSense from my site. I'll monitor here to see when/if Google starts paying publishers fairly again.

[SEO2Go]

If it's not stuck then it's utterly fubard beyond belief.

I'm afraid this seems to be the case. I've been a publisher for eleven years and Adsense has taken a nosedive over the past several months. I am only running it on twenty percent of my page views at this point. I suspect I'll be removing it completely soon.

[nascomedia]

Looks like mine are exactly the same, my adsense within GA is showing 4 times more pageviews than the adsense dashboard!

[netmeg]

First two days of February were pretty slow, but I'm good now.

[ian_D]

My adsense day started off pretty poor too and cpc sooooo low I even considered removing ads from my sites for the day.

I suppose I could spend all day trying to figure out why CPC drops at random like this, and I have many times. I look at things like: Is it due to a major news item or world event? Has the stock market collapsed? Is today a holiday somewhere? Is someone bad mouthing my site? Is there a network problem affecting advertiser bidding?
Facebook kerfuffle? Celebrity having a baby? etc.

I still have the usual advertisers/ads/traffic/pageviews, no change there.

I can only ~assume~ that a couple of news events yesterday and early today (taiwan plane crash and terrorist crap) may have had some impact, distracting advertisers from bidding this morning, but that's a real stretch.

Smart pricing might explain it, but there's no evidence of that and no reason for it. Nearing the end of the day, cpc appears to be coming back up. Why?
My traffic is 90% from US and focused on regular 9-5 users throughout the states. Most sales are finished and buyers offline by 3 pm west coast time so I should see a higher cpc in morning or midday. not 6pm west coast.

So what causes this? And why doesn't a company the size of google have someone explaining these things to us?

They don't know?
Bullsh*t! It ain't voodoo, they track everything.

Thing is, they're losing money when this happens too so it makes no sense at all to constantly alienate publishers and partners by keeping them in the dark.

[jbayabas]

From bad to worse here. I never imagined my earnings will get this low. Totally flabbergasted. I just hope it's just stuck. This just can't be real.

[avalon37]

AdSense is officially broken/changed as of yesterday Feb. 3 as far as I am concerned. I am fairly certain this is a date we will refer back to for years to come. The most dysfunctional that I've ever seen. And Google and their arrogance could not care less.

[nubchai]

My numbers are actually getting better, although not as good as what I saw in the 4th quarter, 2014. Like Ian, my sites start off slow each morning, with CPC being the best later in the day. Things still feel slow though - like filters are delaying reporting or something. I haven't seen any clicks taken away, although maybe that's happening before I see the numbers.

[MrSavage]

Dreadful.

[Munix]

On my side, since Jan 1, I only reached my all time average RPM on one day. All other days were way below. That's crazy.
Also like some of you mentioned, few days ago I woke up to unbelievable high numbers, hoping to have the best day ever... but it ended up perhaps the most frustrating adsense day ever, with pageviews climbing, revenue standing still, and of course - RPM dropping

[RedBar]

What a bizarre 6 days starting last Friday for me with my US EPC compared to 2015 average so far:

Friday 57.1%
Saturday 64.3%
Sunday 46.4%
Monday 64.3%
Tuesday 135.7%
Wednesday 250%

For Wednesday my clicks eventually arrived and delivered my third best day of the year...where to next I wonder?

[Mentat]

Today seem to be better for me (nothign special), but in terms of traffic I think that the silent Panda killer is back...

[7_Driver]

Earnings are way down this year.

There are lots of different factors on our various sites - but the one thing that seems consistent across most of them - in different niches - is that CTR is WAY down.

Since EPC isn't benefitting (it's mostly down too) - obviously EPM is badly down.

Looks like Google simply aren't showing ads people are interested in. Whether that's lack of demand from relevant advertisers, or just woeful targeting and ad designs that aren't appealing, I don't know.

Online publishing with these EPMs isn't really viable any more. Especially now it's so much harder to drive organic traffic.

Already exploring alternative business models.

[netmeg]

So here's what's pissing me off now. I have been using AdSense for almost ten years, and I have a lot of sites and therefore I have created a ton of ads over the years. Most of which are retired - meaning they are INACTIVE. Some were for testing, some were live for a while, but they've all been inactive for over a year.

For the past two days, AdSense has been showing me nudge after nudge in my account, that I should take ads from 2007 or 2009, and make them both text and image, or replace them with a responsive ad, or whatever. These are ads that haven't been used in YEARS (and you can't delete ads, all you can do is Hide them)

I could turn off the notifications, but then I might miss one that actually might be useful. But meanwhile, they're going through a couple thousand old ads, four at a time, and telling me my income might improve 10% if I just implement the suggested change.

Google be trippin.

[ken_b]

For the past two days, AdSense has been showing me nudge after nudge...

Yeah, me too. Ads from a domain that is not even online anymore.

I'm a gonna jump right on up-a-datin those ads!

:)

[fumanchu]

This has been a horrible month for me. I just removed two Adsense ads from my sites. At this point the ads have become nothing more than spam on my pages. I have kept one ad in a prominent position under the title of the article, but I'm almost at the point of dumping Adsense altogether.

I've been running Adsense since 2004, and I've never seen it this bad before now. It's sad to see what was a great program go into such a precipitous decline. I envy those of you who are still doing well with it, but I'm close to saying goodbye to it forever.

BTW Netmeg, I too have gotten a lot of notifications lately from Adsense recently. They tell me to do this or do that, and they are citing old ads I don't run anymore anyway.

Avalon37, I am forced to envy your postage stamp earnings. They are beating the hell out of mine today. Yes, it's that bad! I could probably afford 1/8 of a postage stamp based on today's earnings so far. Ha!

I wonder what the heck is going on inside of Google right now with Adsense? It seems like the part that deals with publishers is adrift and nobody seems to know what the heck is happening for us.

Oh well, all good things come to an end and I think for me that Adsense' days are numbered now.

Edit: Screw it, I removed the rest of the Adsense code from my sites. I'll revisit it if it seems like Google ever fixes the program. Right now they are just spam that clutters up my pages and doesn't generate any significant money. No doubt I'll get some stupid emails from Google telling me to put three giant ads on my pages to "increase my earnings, blah, blah, blah."

[RedBar]

WTH, Thursday's US EPC was 103.6% and today, so far, 46.4%!

And shouldn't we be having a red bar, my metrics look way behind?

[Rasputin]

take ads from 2007 or 2009, and make them both text and image

I just got these messages for the same situation, very old ads, but took a look because they suggested a 10% increase in revenue - this caught my eye because the ads are on a site that used to get thousands of PVs a day until successive pandas left it with about 25 PVs a day*

So I had a brief hope that the site might be back from the dead. Of course its not, and in any case I can't even find the ads live anywhere (and its not worth spending any time looking for them as a 10% increase in zero is stil zero).

* I expect this site to return one day because while I have other 'half-abandoned' sites that deserved their panda demotion, this one definitely didn't and I'm confident (if not optimistic) that it's a 'false positive' waiting to be revived.

I hope they are not relying on the improvements from these messages for their next quarter's 30% increase in results!

[cabbie]

Sorry to be contrarian, but my adsense revenue has never been better and I have been doing adsense for 10 years.
My rpm is down 20% this month but I am putting that down to my traffic increasing 25%.
I have over 100 active ads but not getting any notifications from google.

Long Live Adsense!

[breeks]

Amazing RPM today so that means tomorrow worst RPM of the year :)

[icedowl]

For the past two days, AdSense has been showing me nudge after nudge...

Another me too! The nudges I've been getting have all been about making the background and border the same color. Yep, ads that I might've never used or only experimented with.

What we really need is a way to just delete these old things.

[rd167]

My experience: I used to earn a lot from text ads between 2008 and 2013. That’s probably why I had an amazing CTR those days! However, after 2013, my traffic started to increase and my CTR started to decrease steadily and constantly. The worst CTR drop ever happened exactly on 1st of January this year and not yet recovered. After checking performance reports->ad types, I realized that appearing less text ads is the main cause of this. Even choosing text-only ads didn't improve things, maybe because there is no more text ads in the market and people tend to spend much of their budget on display ads. Display ads have lower CTR but higher CPC (logically or ideally!), but unfortunately, the resulting RPM and earning is not comparable to golden text-ads age.

What about you? Are you experiencing the same thing? I’m especially interested to know if you have experienced such a drop in your CTR from the first day of this year.

[Lame_Wolf]

I just got these messages for the same situation, very old ads, but took a look because they suggested a 10% increase in revenue

I've been bombarded with these messages all day. All old and unused adverts.

Also, one account has been stuck on 1p all day. No idea why, but something is wrong.

[AlexB77]

Few days ago, I have received an email with all usual things from G. For the first time in 11 years I have actually followed their suggestion about changing placement of the adds, but guess what's happened. My CTR dropped from 6.8% to 1.75%, my RPM has been dropping for quite some time, but increased traffic has been covering the difference in revenue. After making changes Clicks are also declining, so I guess it's time to make a switch again. I cannot really complain about Adsense and in fact I am happy for cabbie, who has posted here about his addsense performance, because if Adsense is still makes sense at least on some sites this means it will soon be making sense on those that are in no such a great position since beginning of this year. As I said I cannot really complain, because my traffic is increasing as well as earnings, but obviously not in the same way as they use to in 2007, 2008, ... , 2014. I am sure it will all be coming back to normal very soon.

In relation to the old type adsense and old adsense script, I have had all of the units saved in one of my very old and forgotten project, so to experiment, I have used few of these units here and there on my site, I have to say, those old units are actually outperforming my new units all together, well at least today.

There is only one logical explanation for all this, may be just may be G is trying to tell us that they were not really able to fix the problem with spamy redirects in the new adsense and therefore informing us to switch to the old units, at least for now. Again this is just a theory.

[dethfire]

I'm now getting the recommendations to improve ads I haven't used in years.

RPM is improved today, but traffic is down for the weekend. Hopefully it sticks around for monday.

[RedBar]

Not too sure what's happening today, Saturday, however UK clicks and EPC excellent, I hope the USA follows through with similar.

[nubchai]

CPC and RPM surprisingly good today.

[sabrebIade]

Sigh
Not me.
Traffic really good for a weekend, CPC and RPM really low.