May 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[incrediBILL]

Continuation thread from April:
[webmasterworld.com...]

This thread is for discussing AdSense fluctuations only.

This thread is not for discussions of bot blocking, ad placement, reporting to google, or anything other than it's express intended purpose, the fluctuations of adsense.

All other other topics need to be taken to a new thread
Off topic posts may be deleted without notice.

[oliversk]

Some here say they have like 3000 uniques per day. Unfortunately that is not enough to see "stable results", you will always experience a high volatility. You need at least 10,000 for more stable revenue.

But it is true that CPC went down not necessarily due to responsive ads but due to other factors. The more people switch to responsive ads the more sites will deliver ads targeted towards mobile users, the more competition the lower the prices. Adsense does follow a supply/demand principle but of course many other factors play a role

There can be a thousand other factors: Page template changes, server changes, placements, etc etc

You need to inspect everything on your side first before blaming Google. Also possible: lower traffic to high revenue pages

[ember]

Some here say they have like 3000 uniques per day. Unfortunately that is not enough to see "stable results", you will always experience a high volatility. You need at least 10,000 for more stable revenue.

Not true. I have many fewer uniques per day than that and have very stable income month after month, year after year. I also have a very healthy RPM.

[avalon37]

There really is very little one can do in terms of "figuring things out" when it comes to AdSense. Yes, there are things you can control, but way more things you CANNOT control or changes/algorithm issues AdSense makes that we have no idea about. Until today, I was starting to close to being convinced that one of my sites had been hit with some penalty because all the top brand advertisers in my space didn't seem to be appearing on my site since the beginning of the month. Today, all those brands are appearing again plus what I would consider even more luxury brands appearing now. There is essentially no making sense of what ads show up Tuesday compared to Monday. It's the middle of the month so advertiser budgets shouldn't be playing much, if any part, of ad serving. Personally, I think Google has created ad serving algorithms that are way more complicated than their inventory can support. And as a result, there is rampant issues of double ad serving, totally unrelated advertisers (not remarketing/retargeting either), slow ad load times, different fonts, arrows combinations of ads on the same page, etc. They've just made it more complex than they can support. Think of it as Adwords vs. Bing Ads UI and functionality. Microsoft has always tried to rollout functionality that doesn't work or is overly complex. It's as if AdSense is run by Microsoft :)

[frankleeceo]

My income variation on a daily basis can go +/- 10~30%. It averages out monthly at about +/-5~10% month over month.

But more than half of the days witihin month ~15 days is roughly at about average.

for this month obersvation...the cpm has dropped to last month's average dispite earlier uptick this month

[jbayabas]

Good yesterday then really bad today. Inconsistency is the norm now. I'm not surprised anymore.

[netmeg]

Yesterday was kind of meh but today more than made up for it. I don't expect consistency (specially not day-to-day) Too many factors and I still to this day don't believe that all clicks are accounted for in (close to) real time.

[AlexB77]

Yesterday was solid and today is almost twice as solid as it was yesterday. US clicks are very strong followed by UK, Canada and Australia the rest is usual.

[oliversk]

Best day of the month so far. The reason for me was a ranking shift that resulted in my favor.

[jbayabas]

I'm happy for your success guys.

Today, I'm on track to my lowest earnings in years. Heartbreaking.

Damn, I love my job so much. Every day I wake up excited about writing new content for my loyal readers. I try not to check my earnings during the day to not feel discouraged. It's the end of the day now here so I thought I should see my reward. Sigh, it's like getting slapped and spit on the face. "Here's your measly paycheck, bitch. Go work harder!"

Oh well there's always another day.

[Ebuzz]

Change of ad color brings no improvement. Still very bad. But it seems that Google is reporting a decline in ad profits for Adsense since this year. Also, I read a link that said ad spending for mobile is only 25% of desktop spending. Meaning low quality ads are the norm for desktop? This is one of the reasons why I think people are reporting big declines after changing to responsive ads/design.

My earnings are as bad now as they were 3 years ago. And all along May was one of the best months of the year for me. And that is bad. It's like you work hard but get a pay cut back to square one. Those of you who say they have no change are those with many hundreds of thousands if not millions of impressions per month. And your traffic has increased, correct?

What I am pretty sure is happening is that it takes a lot more traffic now to make the same amount than it took years ago. It's like digging to the bottom of the barrel.

[azlinda]

It didn't do me one bit of good to go responsive. I'm now going to go UNresponsive. It got worse when every page on my site passed Google's mobile test. I know one webmaster who went responsive, did very poorly, and has now gone UNresponsive. Things have improved for him! It's worth a try.

[ken_b]

It didn't do me one bit of good to go responsive.

Are you talking about switching to a responsive web design, or switching to responsive ad units, or both?

Switching my static html fixed width table based site to a minimally responsive design (passes mobile friendly test) has worked out well for me. But I'm not using responsive ad units. I'm still using the fixed size ads on my pages, mostly 300x250 and 120x600.

[Ebuzz]

I just took a look at one of the ad unit data that always generated very good earnings for years, with a good CTR, for the month of January 2015. The ctr was as high as 1.5%.

Now, I am using a Responsive Ad unit in its place, but still maintaining its size and shape on a wide desktop screen (due to using a separate div for it).

No changes except my site is wider now. The old site was 780 pixels wide. The new site is 1200 pixels wide. The Ad size/shape is the same except it is responsive.

Now, my CTR is 0.20% for the same Ad unit. It is a Responsive unit, so the square block gets smaller and smaller depending on your mobile screen....No cut offs, no truncations. It definitely looks good on ANY mobile screen.

Unreal.

It's either the Responsive ads suck so much until people don't click it anymore, or some other reason I cannot figure out.

[azlinda]

@ken_b I'm talking about a responsive site. I have not used mobile ads. The regular ads looked good on high end devices - mostly 160x600 and 300x250 ads.

[Ebuzz]

What I am suspecting is that there is a lot of shuffling going behind the scenes inside Google, regarding this whole "responsive" campaign by them, and they can't figure things out and resort to dumping the useless ads on the Responsive units. The result is many publishers are seeing earnings tank. But Google doesn't care.

I can buy that, but I am pissed that there is NO address by Google on this issue, just as on the PII issue, which happened at about the same time as this great big push towards getting the web "mobile friendly". Until today, not a single sound from Google about the mysterious emails that people were getting about the PIIs. And their bot was disabling people over this, even long time publishers.

Something is going on inside Google, at least with regards to Adsense. Not a good thing.

[Ebuzz]

@ azlinda and @ken_b

The 300 x 250 ad units will not look so good on the smaller mobile screens that are below 300 pixels wide. They will get cut off.

Only if you use the Responsive units and your site is responsive, then your site will look good on mobile.

But Responsive design/ads just SUCK as far as earnings go. No question about it, for me.

Right now, all kinds of conspiracy theories are floating around in my head....Is Google "discounting" a lot of the clicks? I know there was a major clickbomb campaign hitting many publishers in April last month.

[azlinda]

@Ebuzz - I was caught up in that click bombing campaign in April resulting in 20% being deducted from my earnings.

[Ebuzz]

@ azlinda

Yes, and maybe after that, Google dialed up the algo that determines if a click is valid or not and applying more of it for the Responsive ads to avoid accidental taps, etc....

Before this, I already assumed the algo was quite strong, and thus was surprised to see people reporting huge jumps in their "earnings" due to the clickbomb. They must have reassured plenty of Adwords advertisers that such an incident won't happen again.

Who knows.

[glitterball]

My best performing Ads on High-end mobile devices were the 728x90 units located under the article.
Obviously this was before I moved to a responsive design, when the pages were rendered on mobile as the full desktop layout.

Users on mobile don't seem to click on the 300x units, even though they are located in the same place (just under the main article).

So either this whole move to a responsive layout has been a mistake, or perhaps there are not enough compelling Ads in the 300x sizes to match all of the new inventory?

[Ironside]

The problem is that people are moving over to mobile devices more now, so whether we like it or not people will be looking at our website from their mobile phones and tablets. I don't think there's any doubt that you have to you have a responsive AdSense layout nowadays. If you don't then the ads will just break the page and look horrible.

[jbayabas]

The good news about me is that the alternative networks are now surpassing my Adsense earnings. Strangely, if I run Adsense exclusively in one site I still see the same results when i add 3 alternative ads.

[bigicebear]

@avalon37 "It's as if AdSense is run by Microsoft :)" haha exactly!

@jbayabas - can I ask what alt. networks you like?

My results yesterday were back to what I normally see in May. Hope it holds up!

[Broadway]

Hasn't ken_b suggested the right test for determining whether there is something inherently lacking with responsive Adsense ads?

1) Test site = A website that is already responsive.
2) Test venue = A single adsense slot that only makes use of ONE size of Adsense ad for both desktop and mobile formats (i.e. 300 X 250, 160 X 600, or whatever).
3) Run an A/B test where the Adsense code served is either responsive code or code for a fixed size ad (although either way the exact same size ad will always be shown).
4) Compare each code ad's rpm and be done with the conjecture.

[Broadway]

jbayabas,
I'm under the impression that netmeg has repeatly implied what you report.
I have been in the process of adding media.net ads to my main site.
I've compared the first 13 days of each of the last 3 months:
May - heavy implementation of media.net
April - 50% implementation of media.net ads
March - minimal or no media.net ads

The Adsense "impression rpm" for all three months is nearly identical.
(The lowest, by a hair, is actually March, a time when I had little media.net competing with Adsense.)

Rpm-wise, Media.net seem to earn only 2/3rds of what Adsense does. But without detracting from Adsense earnings.

It also seemed that Netmeg was stating that you had to give media.net time to perform.
This is exactly what I found.
When I initially placed the ads, the performance was very lack luster.
Then bam, two weeks later things took off.
As I added more ads, things plateaued again, then jumped up more later on.
Right now I'm hoping to experience another bump (I've just added media.net to a lot more pages).
If it happens, it seems likely that impression rpm will be as much as 80% of Adsense. (It was at that level before adding the last batch of ads.)
I don't know if it's machine learning or oversight from a media.net account executive that causes the jumps, but so far they've happen.

[RedBar]

Red bar anyone? My stats haven't moved in a least a couple of hours.

[netmeg]

They're definitely slow today.

I'm under the impression that netmeg has repeatly implied what you report.

Not sure which you're referring to. But yes you definitely have to give media.net time to take off; in my case it was near a month. Both media.net and Vertoz seems to run some Google ads too, which might be why you may see what looks like AdSense.

[ianmacdon]

I'm a YouTuber, and the real-time stats are really slow or bottled up. Its showing almost no views, yet the adsense numbers seem correct...

[glitterball]

Yesterday was reasonable, however today is looking very bad.

[avalon37]

My week long stretch of all-time lowest earnings appears to be over. Today things are back to normal CTR and earnings; no guarantee it will last, but still a sign that there is hope.

[MrSavage]

I have one pony that has emerged and is hauling ass. Overall, things are reasonable terrible, but I do have some hope left. Clearly it's quality over quantity. That's one conclusion I have. I'm just wondering if now, more than ever, a sucky site is really going to take a hit with ads. Meaning that site quality will fetch bottom of the barrel rubbish ads. That might make sense, but I don't feel that it was as pronounced as it might be now. No way to explain the trend I see from within my madhouse.