July 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

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

[pmf123]

Me too

[rlopes]

Things have improved but only just. Comparison between Adsense and Analytics/Statcounter over the last couple of days shows that only 30-40% of ad clicks are being paid in. One worrying trend is that double clicks (i.e. by the same IP on ads on the same page) are being discounted altogether. Someone please tell Google that a double click is unlikely to be accidental, nor can it be considered a click bomb by any stretch of the imagination.

How do you know which clicks Google is discounting? I don't know how to check this in my reports.

[nyc863]

Yeah, how do you know and count clicks on ads? I thought that was the unknowable holy grail.

[trebuchet]

You can't see this in the Adsense reports. First, I use Statcounter (which records IPs, content paths and exit links) as well as Analytics. Second, I have my channels and ad units well organised and labelled. A bit of cross matching and I can work out which ad was clicked when and by whom. You can probably do all that with Analytics too but I find Statcounter easier.

[RedBar]

Back to 10 cent clicks from the US today ... 3 days to go to the end of the month therefore if this continues loads of Google ad slots will be replaced with my own advertisements. I would need a 1,000 clicks a month simply to get to the minimum payout of $100, that's not even decent beer money for a night!

[Mentat]

Things are getting desperate :(
The payment is incredible low!

[RedBar]

USA still continuing at 10 cents/click for me, Google's making my removal decision very easy with this collapse.

And is anyone else noticing slow logins and jerky page loading?

[nyc863]

" A bit of cross matching and I can work out which ad was clicked when and by whom. "

I still don't get it. Looked at statcounter and looks a bit primitive. Unless you have added a javascript event layer that intercepts clicks and records those that were within ad area real estate, all without disturbing the chain of event handlers or adsense, an exit page can just be .. an exit?

[RedBar]

Utter and complete collapse for me, when I write collapse I mean clicks so far today have not even reached double figures ... Ohhh how I remember those 1,000+ per day!

Fubard, utterly fubard!

[nyc863]

For me, # clicks have been constant in the last 7 days, CPC took a deep dive on saturday and sunday (they usually take a dump on saturday and sundays -- but not a 30% dump) but monday/tuesday is back to normal.

The 30/70 split between view earnings (CPM), and click earnings (CPC) remains.
The page RPM is the highest it has been for some time starting on friday. It could be Panda sending different traffic or it could just be nasty click-bait ads that I have not reviewed and removed.

The last five hours of the day still remain fairly worthless though, earnings crawl, RPM drops. This effect starts earlier on when days have healthy traffic, and never happens at all on days with slow traffic.

[trebuchet]

I still don't get it. Looked at statcounter and looks a bit primitive. Unless you have added a javascript event layer that intercepts clicks and records those that were within ad area real estate, all without disturbing the chain of event handlers or adsense, an exit page can just be .. an exit?

No Javascript required. Statcounter provides data on exit links, not just exit pages, so you can review where users click out of your site (including Adsense links). If your ads/channels are discretely named then you can identify when/where each IP/user clicks on an ad. Yes Statcounter is fairly basic and the same data is probably available in Analytics, I just prefer it.

[RedBar]

Incredulous ... so far in the first hour today I have had one USA click to the value of not only 3X all my US clicks of yesterday but also more than my entire earnings for Tuesday.

Interestingly it is an IBA.

[SEOPTI]

They won't click today, they are busy downloading win.

[ember]

Something is going on today. Nobody is clicking on anything.

[child please]

I didn't feel like creating a new topic for this, but thought some of you may find this interesting...

Got an email from AdSense the other day, a "warning", for violating a content policy. The wording of the email was ambiguous and I didn't believe I was violating anything so I contacted Adsense. They took it away to a specialist and then a few days later, I heard back saying the error was on their end, I was not in any violation and they gave me a goodwill credit to boot! Never heard of that before, especially a credit.

[capulkit]

Changed the replacement yesterday and not a single click today. Something wrong with adsense. My average CTR is 1-2%, but not a single click.
Anyone else witnessing it? India

[Ironside]

Best day yesterday, earnings are already well ahead of June. I'll tell you, if you haven't implemented the small link units, such as the 200 x 90 then you could be missing out big time, I would say that more than half of my earnings have come from these small link units placed above the menu in the left-hand column. I've also implemented a 160 x 600 skyscraper unit on many of my articles, directly underneath the link unit and that seems to be paying off, I got some good money yesterday from these ad units.

I've started adding a few media.net adverts to some of my articles and I'm really blown away with how they look and perform. I've started making money already, okay $2.30 is not an awful lot, but that is just from one page as far as I can see. Also, I've got to get some of the units so that they display properly on mobile devices. But initial indications look as though this could be a really good way of earning some extra revenue. What I really love about media.net is all the advert seem to follow the subject of your page. I don't want to tempt fate, but I may have found a little gold mine in media.net

[avalon37]

Ironside - these small link units (200x90) are they working best on mobile or tablets/dektop/laptop?

[RedBar]

Anyone else witnessing it? India

Something strange happened for my main Indian website on Tuesday with not only a first-ever 0 clicks but also PVs at 42.9%, and yesterday PVs were 37.4%, my previous lowest was 68% which is a huge drop.

[smilie]

Close to the worst month of the decade.

I've been protecting myself from this for 5 years now, building non-adsense related sites such as ecommerce. And going for direct advertisers on our main site that's using adsense. Direct and non-adsense ads now bring about 50% of monthly advertising revenues on that site, too small to do any modifications or hire staff... and enough to not want to kill the site completely. All competitors except one have already folded because of staff expenses. I also have several big travel names contact us for affiliate relations ... not really happening until I see Google release it's website and affiliate death grip.

I am laughing on our B2B how Amazon and a bunch of idiot big brands are above everybody on the first SERP page. Clueless, just clueless. I actually had a privilege to yell at Google's ad sales agent for about an hour about this. We get phone calls from people buying at Home Depots, screwing things up and then call us for guidance. We also get phone calls "because it is $10 cheaper on Amazon" - and we are not matching any prices, good luck with support. In one small niche a chinese-made cheap widget that technically DOESN'T WORK is an Amazon bestseller. Another "bestseller" is a chinese guy who runs his business out of his basement and has fake pictures of his "factory" on his "website".

And Amazon keeps emailing us with a bunch of question-answers where they want our help to fill that so they can get all our sales. AND we can't do links to us.

It is a crazy world.

[RyuUK]

What a joke today has been. How long can this go on for? Many publishers will surely be losing patience.

[Ironside]

@Avalon to be honest, I'm not entirely sure, I'm not really that sure how to check that kind of thing. Having said that, when I check my statistics, especially in real-time I can see that most of the time people are browsing my website from a mobile device. Going to try and send you a screenshot so you can see what one of my pages looks like on a mobile device, you will see where the link unit displays and why I think it gets a lot of clicks.

[RyuUK]

Today's RPM: £4.89. All time is close to £27. What you playing at G?

[breeks]

Sites like the above soon to be removed link are the reason why advertiser shy away from using the Display Network and stick with search ads.

[netmeg]

You can't get any kind of accurate reading on AdSense clicks from StatCounter. Google has always said so, and my own testing bears it out. Sometimes I get no AdSense clicks when StatCounter reports them, and sometimes I get lots of AdSense clicks and crickets in StatCounter. Across many many sites. People will believe what they want to believe, but don't rely on StatCounter.

[breeks]

All in all July was a good month. Adsense played a part but is no longer the leading character.

[glitterball]

Very bad day yesterday - presumably monthly budgets are running out with low CPC and lower CTR.

I also have a bad day every time Google introduces a load of new Gmail and Adwords Ads. As soon as I block these earnings go up again :-).

[robzilla]

Somewhat lower CTR today. My text ads are usually transparent, but (at least for me) Google is now adding a light grey background to them so that they stand out a little more as ads. Could be a sign they're suspecting "accidental" clicks, will have to keep an eye on that.

[RedBar]

It's completely gone for me, unbelievably low CTR and EPC today, gawd knows what dentistry has to do with my specialised construction widgets other than if I met someone from Google they'd probably end up needing them the utter fubar they've created across my sites.

Of the very few clicks I have had Hong Kong is leading the way, I never thought I'd write that.

[dan3s]

July is worse than June.