June 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

Here we go again!

[Jaideemaak]

How low can it get? I removed my Adsense ads a few months ago because my earnings had dropped to almost nothing and they were no longer worth having. However, last month I noticed that my unpaid earnings were about five UK pounds below the payment limit. I put the ads back on 17 May with the intention of reaching the payment limit, getting my final Adsense payment, and removing the ads again once and for all after I had been paid.

Well, it's now 7 June and I still haven't reached the limit. When Adsense was going well a couple of years ago I would make this amount easily in a day, or even half a day. Now, it's taking well over 20 days to make what I used to make in half a day. It could even take a month at this rate. The last two days have made nothing, and today I am sitting at one UK penny. I put in a lot of effort last year just to try to please Google, including converting to responsive, but all to no avail.

This board seems to be divided into two camps - those who are still doing OK with Adsense and those whose earnings have dropped dramatically. I am well and truly in the second camp. Never mind, it was good while it lasted.

[Jaideemaak]

To add to the conspiracy theories, there are some interesting comments in the 'Google updates and SERP changes' forum about a recent Google algorithm change that has affected conversion rates, but not necessarily affected traffic.

[webmasterworld.com...]

From what i can see, this is the biggest drop in conversions ever. Traffic is looking normal. But no sales at all, not even from GSA. I guess this last update was aimed on ecoms, to kill the last converting traffic. And i see it on different ecoms, i have

My brain has been in overdrive trying to work out where it all went wrong with Adsense. There are many possibilities, but I don't know for sure what caused it, if indeed it was one thing. Most likely, it was a combination of lots of little things over a period of time.

[RedBar]

Firstly it's almost impossible for me to comment whatsoever insofar as Saturdays are now concerned, yesterday was my third lowest-ever PVs since the inception of AdSense, only beaten by January 1st 2015 and December 13th 2014. Both Xmas Day and New Year's Eve were higher which is freakin' unbelievable.

New Year's Day earnings were triple yesterday, even my "low point" of Easter was double yesterday.

What's happening? I have absolutely no idea, my rankings are fine, in fact many have improved upon already very good positions, therefore why, especially on Saturdays for the past couple of months, have my PVs tanked along with earnings so dramatically?

Yep, I know, there are many of us wanting to know the reason for/answer to this and I certainly do not have one other than for my widget supplies Joe Public is no longer trusting nor using the www to source/compare my widgets.

I cannot come up with any other sensible reason since my realworld business widget supplies are rocking! :-)

[Ironside]

You are not alone Jaid, a year ago my earnings were approaching £700 a month, Mays earnings didn't even reach £200, I think this months earnings will be even less. I'm receiving just as much traffic, if not more. However, my clicks have halved. I have tried so many different AdSense positions, none of them seem to make any difference whatsoever. I think I'm probably averaging around 32 clicks each day now. And I can earn anything between £4 and £7, absolutely diabolical. Honestly, it's laughable, I'm just waiting for the day when my earnings remain at zero but I'm still getting 3500 people visiting the website each day. That's how it is going.

[avalon37]

This month is a total mess. GREAT never seen as high earning days and then all-time lows. I don't believe any of it. Their reporting/algorithms are not accurate on a daily reporting basis. I don't ask much of them, but at least make mention that stats are subject to change and estimates more than anything. But this is the best yet. Friday and Saturday AdSense reporting says I had the same exact number of pageviews, the same exact number of clicks, and if you have a 5th grade math level then you know my CTR (according to Google) was exactly the same too. And you know what? It was a great day in terms of earnings. With 1,000+ pageviews there is NO, absolutely NO way all the 3 major states could be the same. There's no way. I believe Google less and less each day, but luckily my earnings really aren't up or down.

[RedBar]

What?! Even the US and UK are paying pennies per click now, WTF is going on?

[Rasputin]

What Trebuchet said, and:
- competitor ad platforms (if a big company can pay less through media.net etc and still reach their target audience they will, and will reduce their adwords bids
- slow loading ads mean ads at the top of a page that are highest paying don't load until the visitor has already moved on (adsense in their visibility notifications tell me that 'ad x' is only seen by 18% of visitors, but 'ad x' is the one that appears above the fold)

[Ironside]

I've just got nearly £7 from one click, what is the betting that when I go back in half an hour it will have disappeared :-)

[AlexB77]

@Ironside, I have had 4 clicks each of which is in double figures, they have not yet disappeared, but it is to early to say anything, will wait until the end of the day and see if they will remain.

I have started to notice that AdSense script was actually blocked by my antivirus several times yesterday and today. I have Trend Micro Security on my computer so I went and checked the same page on another computer with McAfee on it, to my surprise the same thing happens there too. I am checking one of my own pages which is basically clean and when I am removing adsense from it than everything is perfect. Anyone else is seeing this or its just me?

[Ironside]

It's still there, 2 1/2 hours later. Normally when I get one of these big clicks that isn't going to stay around, it goes pretty quickly. However, I'm not going to hold my breath, let's see what happens. It must have been something very special in order for someone to pay that much money for one click. Mind you, it was a responsive unit just above the first paragraph of content, and underneath the heading.

[Ironside]

I'm not sure why today is so different. These are the figures:

Page RPM £3.96
Impression RPM £2.08

Yesterday's were £1.07, and 56p

So you can see there is a huge difference between yesterday and today

[jbayabas]

I just received an invitation from Vertoz. Alright, I'll give them a try. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

[RedBar]

Apart from PVs and almost CPC, I had new record lows across the board, earnings were 30% of Monday.

I have never seen such peaks and troughs with AdSense and I've gotten to the point whereby I don't want to see them any more. If it doesn't stabilise or improve by 30th June it'll be gone.

Their ad targetting for my sites is completely shot to pieces at the moment.

[trebuchet]

Yes, this month has been woefully inconsistent. Most days 30-50% below the average, a couple of days 10-20% above it. Ad quality is woeful so CTR remains abysmally low. Clicks are coming in fits and spurts but not very big spurts. Clicks are also being shorn with a ferocity I've never seen before.

June to August are my weakest months of the year so I wasn't expecting much to begin with, but now I'm expecting even less. I'll reserve judgement until the end of the year but things aren't looking great.

[netmeg]

It must have been something very special in order for someone to pay that much money for one click.

There are niches where advertisers are paying up to $100 a click, so ... Unfortunately, I don't think most of them are relevant to fish. More in the legal, medical and financial sectors. (That's why there's so much spam in those areas)

As for Vertoz - I'm pretty happy with them so far, but I did have to ask them to turn off video ads for my sites, because I noticed they were really slow to load. So pay attention to that.

[HymnSite]

Ten days into the month. RPM over the past 28 days is down 43% compared with the prior 28 days, and drop in revenue tracked it. My traffic remained steady (within 1% of the prior 28 days). My performance yesterday compared with the same day in the prior week was pretty flat, as was my 7-day revenue, so it looks like I am just waiting for time to stabilize at the new, very low level. Media.net has remained flat. With the RPM from GoogleAds moving down so much, Media.net now earns about half of GoogleAds (GoogleAds used to earn over six times as much as Media.net). Moving the needle to avoid having June 2015 become my lowest monthly earnings ever (since 2005) will require an uptick. Google has really put publisher earnings in the tank.

[netmeg]

Stats seems to keep sticking and then unsticking with a click/impression dump today.

[MrSavage]

Not looking good for the past couple days. Today looks like a dud also. No need to check again, I know it's going to suck. That first morning check tells me what type of DS my sites must be serving up.

[nubchai]

Yeah this is a pretty dismal start and the month is 1/3 over.

[Ammalgam]

Yeah, I do about 16,000 + page views a day and have to say that something is wrong.

As a publisher for over 10 years, it's obvious that something is broken somewhere in the system. Nothing can be normal and this inconsistent.

[Ironside]

Apparently if you can get a good ranking for search terms such as "diamond engagement ring" you can earn a lot of money for each click, up to £50 I heard.

That big click I had yesterday was obviously valid because it didn't disappear. However, I only received one unfortunately. It seems that the responsive ad units that I placed at the top of my content and just below the heading seem to be working quite well. I think I will leave them there. If you are looking on a desktop then you get a 728 x 90 banner appearing, if you're on a smaller screen than you get a small rectangle, so that's obviously perfect. I'm also getting quite a lot of activity from the same sort of unit at the end of my content. However, I'm not sure why Google are displaying a message in my account telling me that this unit at the end of my content is only getting something like 30% of viewing, not everyone scrolls right down to the end of the article. There's not much I can do to make people see it.

[nubchai]

Ironside by "heading" do you mean the post title? I'm willing to try anything at this point.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

There's an interesting article in the most recent Economist magazine about the increase of ad blocking software and what companies like Google are doing to offset the impact.

[RedBar]

Wednesday not only had my lowest CTR in ages, earnings turned into a very poor weekend level, fortunately my EPC was ok otherwise it would have been another new record low.

What a mess they seem to have created.

[Ironside]

Earnings have improved slightly in the last few days, let's hope it carries on like this. And the fact that I won £450 on the National Lottery last night, I'm feeling quite happy today :-)

[netmeg]

Congratulations!

[trebuchet]

Well done, Ironside. And well done to the National Lottery for providing a more viable revenue stream than Adsense.

[HymnSite]

Oops. I spoke too soon. Anticipating that we are at a new low, I said I was waiting for it to stabilize at that level. Yesterday's RPM was a new low, and was less than 50% of my average for this month. Good grief! An RPM of $0.24 in a 24-hour cycle on ~9,000 views? That can't be right. I design my site for visitors to see the content, knowing that my RPMs will be relatively low. But this is off the charts even for me.

[EditorialGuy]

So far, June is looking okay for us. Nothing to inspire depression or frustration (or excitement and joy, for that matter).

[Dave_B]

Anybody else getting a click bomb this am?