July 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

The start of the summer holiday season for many often with huge ups and downs in traffic.

[SEOPTI]

RedBar, if your traffic is fine try selling some leads. Use a form on your site and when people submit this form you get up to $300 for a single form submit.

[ember]

RedBar, if your traffic is fine try selling some leads. Use a form on your site and when people submit this form you get up to $300 for a single form submit.

It's not quite that easy.

[kireb]

July a lot better than last year. Only today, 31st, I see a shockingly low RPM from the US. Wonder why?

[Mentat]

For me, July was a historical minimum, and the fist day of August is the same.

[robzilla]

CTR seems to have recovered today, and July topped June by 38%. Looking forward to August!

[glitterball]

Big message from Google when I login to Adsense telling me that my earnings on the 31st of July were more than 50% less than forecast and that I should investigate.
Traffic all looks normal - the ads on my sites don't though - either bad targeting or (I suspect) few relevant advertisers.

[hftushar]

Another start of a bad month :(

[RedBar]

The 31st ended with my lowest-ever metrics except for PVs which were completely normal, AdSense is utterly fubard for me however I did predict in January that I thought come May/June time it wouldn't be worth me displaying it any longer.

if your traffic is fine try selling some leads.

Thanks however no need to, I'm B2B, I am simply replacing AdSense with our own and customers' ads promoting our products leaving one Google ad on each page to see if anything happens to encourage me back however I very much doubt that is going to happen, Google couldn't give a damn about anyone.

[Ironside]

Haven't had my finalised earnings yet, but I will certainly be quite a bit up on June's earnings. It would be nice to think that earnings will keep going in this direction but we all know how erratic AdSense is so you really never know where you stand when it comes to how much you will earn each month.

[nyc863]

I looked back for kicks at the identical period last year. RPM back then was much more stable. It was up and down randomly of course, but within a narrow range.

However the same 30 day period this year, ending today, RPM is like a yoyo. The volatility range is so much wider. The only predictable thing is the unpredictability. It can vary by 30% day to day, yet impressions and page views are stable.

[Ironside]

What I find interesting is the look-back to when your earnings were at their absolute highest. Find a particular day when earnings were very high and have a look at which ad units did really well on that particular day. If you changed your layout dramatically since that time then it gives you a good idea of where you may have gone wrong. One of my highest earning days was £38,. Since those days I think I have only come close to earning even anywhere near half that amount on a few occasions in a single day. But things have definitely improved this month, don't know whether it's down to my new layouts or not. I may find that August is a complete washout.

[RedBar]

My "earnings" yesterday were merely 1% of my high earning days a few years ago. Obviously it was also my lowest RPM ever and 13.25% of my highest RPM for July and 34.1% of the month's average.

All my lowest July RPM days have been in the past two weeks.

[Ironside]

Hey guys, how can I use Google analytics to look back at a particular day and see how many hits I had? Ever since Google changed things I got totally lost.

Like many other people, my earnings have taken a huge hit in the last year or so. However, I think that some of you should look back and compare a few notes. I've compared my highest earnings day from July 2015 to both my highest and lowest paying day in January 2014. And you can clearly see that it was the amount of page views and impressions that made the difference. Now what puzzles me is that the amount of hits I get hasn't decreased, in fact I would probably say they are around the same, maybe even slightly more. I really don't know, however the last two months have definitely started improving, whether it will stay like that we will have to wait and see.

July 2015

Page views 4906

Impressions 11,366

Clicks 67

Page RPM £3.22

Impressions RPM £1.39

January 2014

Highest day

Page views 8288

Impressions 18,308

Clicks 140

Page RPM £3.82

Impressions RPM £1.73

Lowest day

Page views 6508

Impressions 14,348

Clicks 64

Page RPM £2.12

Impressions RPM 96p

[bhukkel]

My final earning are now reported in Adsense. They cut off about 2% which is normal for me. I am still in a long term up trend. About 3% higher then july 2014 and 20% higher then july 2013. For the short term the growth is less high then two month ago. I do not have a stable daily earning anoymore.

[EditorialGuy]

July ended up being a pretty decent month for us (about like June).

[threesixandnine]

Had 4% Invalid traffic clicks in July. Too much...

Also earnings + invalid traffic does not equal total. Strange...

Any one else with these issues?

[robzilla]

Invalid clicks were ~0.5% for July. Sum of earnings + invalid traffic comes out very slightly higher (~0.2%) than the total shown in the performance report. Don't know why, don't really care either :-) Invalid clicks for June were ~1%. 4% seems high in comparison, but I wouldn't worry about it.

[Ironside]

Finalized earnings were only £1.97 down on the estimated earnings. Happy here

[threesixandnine]

I find it very strange since to-date I always had around 1% invalid traffic clicks.

I did test interest-based vs non-interest based ads in Experiments so this might have something to do with it.

[netmeg]

I had WAY fewer invalid clicks for June and July than I had adjustments for June and July 2014. Maybe their anti fraud technology is doing the job.

[bradleydrake]

I am still working on it. Google Adsense has been one of the longest running revenue programs of all time. However, they're very strict nowadays. In order to make the most of Google, you should be able to know the rules of their game. I can't wait to see my results in a week or more.

[hftushar]

@bradleydrake

What rules are you talking about?

[magician]

Maybe their anti fraud technology is doing the job.

Not for me. Invalid traffic claimed about 4.5% of the revenue in July and it was similar for June as well. Prior to that it never went above 2.5% for me.

[Ironside]

This month I started off quite well, if it carries on like this I will exceed July's earnings.

Google seem to be really jittery about adult content. Of all the warnings I've had over the years most of them have been due to so-called adult content on my websites. However, some of the warnings they have issued are a little bit questionable and I would probably say they are being rather pedantic. For instance, would you really class a photograph of a woman's backside wearing some beachwear, albeit quite skimpy as adult content? They sent me a warning a few weeks ago regarding a post on my forum that was made years ago, don't know how they came across it, can't believe somebody actually moaned about it. Thing is, they allow dating websites to create AdSense and I've seen all sorts of women with hardly any clothes on in the adverts. However, they make the rules and we have to abide by them.

[smilie]

RedBar:
>> if your traffic is fine try selling some leads.

Thanks however no need to, I'm B2B, I am simply replacing AdSense with our own and customers' ads promoting our products leaving one Google ad on each page to see if anything happens to encourage me back however I very much doubt that is going to happen, Google couldn't give a damn about anyone.

What RedBar said.

I moved on from Adsense, it is peanuts that Google can keep. We went a mix of B2C/B2B, and going more and more B2B as Google keeps stealing our B2C traffic and sending it to completely unqualified places such as big brands and Amazon - and we have access to people with advanced STEM degrees to answer questions. Yet, Google keeps sinking us. At least in B2C world, where they presume they know everything (yet first page of SERPs is a bunch of clueless brands and some consumer report , again, paid-for article written by someone unqualified) and they are completely CLUELESS. At least in B2B they don't even pretend yet.

Good luck everyone.

[EditorialGuy]

Our July "invalid clicks" deduction was about 4 percent of the total (down from June, which was a bit higher). I've got no problem with that: Advertisers shouldn't have to pay for invalid clicks.

[nyc863]

@Ironside I bet nobody reported that.
I've seen that google employs Indians probably for pennies, and their job is to search for content and flag it. They appear to work from lists of possibly problematic publishers and keep coming back to them. I've seen from referer logs they work from case files on some kind of internal google system which appears to link to a previous doubtful page within your site so you can see them when they're active. Then they run google image searches or other searches and flag anything they can find, which generates the scary warning. (Knowing this, you can actually screw with them). Stuff like NSFW and youtube downloader and #*$! keywords and so on, attracts their attention.

Their interpretation of adult content would not make a victorian grandmother blush. In fact I read in the news one of these boiler room contractors kicked out a gay bar listing from google maps and someone with brains had to reverse the decision. But that's because that got publicity. Nobody is going to stick up for you if you get a "remove or else" warning over a swimsuit model.

As far as I can see google made some decision a while ago that their long tail publisher network was a potential liability and needed cleaning (forget that big $ publishers get a free pass with #*$! and bums content) and they're paying bottom dollar to poorly trained third world workers to do this cleaning.