August 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

I'll start it however I doubt I'll be contributing very much!

[azlinda]

AdSense is dead to me. I have had my lowest two days since I began with AdSense way back in the early 2000s. When I mean low, I mean low,...a low one figure income for 41,000 pages, and my traffic has not decreased.

[SEOPTI]

CPA and direct advertising are the key, adsense is dying slowly. US EPC is at 1/4 for most publishers. Advertisers finally realized Google traffic will not convert for them. They advertise at Amazon for selling products, not Google.

Google is for informational traffic only. If you know how to convert this traffic you will be fine.

I believe there is no "radius" for smart pricing any more, there is not enough competition. The concept of smart pricing is dead.

Think as if there is no adsense and you will find another way.

[azlinda]

Think as if there is no adsense and you will find another way.

That's great advice, and that's exactly what I'm doing. Soon there will be no AdSense left on my site. I've already begun the recessional.

[trebuchet]

I wouldn't say that "Adsense is dying", however it has certainly lost its magic and is just another mere mortal with other ad networks. Long gone are the days when you could make a living with a few pages and a bit of traffic. Now you need a biggish site and monthly traffic in six or seven figures. If you can't manage that then fahgeddaboutit.

[Ebuzz]

Think as if there is no adsense and you will find another way.

Exactly, what everyone should be doing. How did people make money online before Adsense ever came along? That's how it should be.

In fact I know personally know many folks who have made fortunes via the internet and never even heard of Adsense....

My mistake was not doing enough much earlier, to diversify income streams AWAY from Adsense. It is just a stand-in and crutch, until you get the hang of monetizing your traffic (in a much more efficient way). Adsense will always be a highly inefficient way to monetize web traffic, at least for most sites out there.

[edited by: Ebuzz at 2:53 am (utc) on Aug 13, 2015]

[ember]

Long gone are the days when you could make a living with a few pages and a bit of traffic. Now you need a biggish site and monthly traffic in six or seven figures. If you can't manage that then fahgeddaboutit.

Good lord, I make a living at it. I don't have tons of traffic and I don't have tons of pages.

[azlinda]

Good lord, I make a living at it. I don't have tons of traffic and I don't have tons of pages.

Then the Google god has smiled on you, and that's good for you. Others are not so fortunate.

[eek2121]

CPA and direct advertising are the key, adsense is dying slowly. US EPC is at 1/4 for most publishers. Advertisers finally realized Google traffic will not convert for them. They advertise at Amazon for selling products, not Google.

As someone who works with multiple clients that use adwords extensively, I can tell you that you don't know what you are talking about. One case that quickly comes to mind, Client A spends $300/mo on google product listing ads. They bring in over $40,000 in revenue per month from those ads. Other clients I've dealt with have similar success.

[Mentat]

Look mom, it's full of spam!

[i.imgur.com...]

[trebuchet]

Think you'd better block s*********.net, Mentat!

[Ironside]

I would say to earn enough money to pay your bills and have a little bit at the end of the week you would be needing to generate 400 clicks each day (approximately). And enough money that would be equivalent to a pretty good job I think you would be looking towards a minimum of 1000 clicks a day, again approximately. That's based on my earnings. At the moment, I'm averaging about 50 clicks each day. I suppose I'm earning enough to keep the car running with some spending money, but certainly not enough to pay the bills.

AdSense is certainly not dead for me. Two months ago I would probably predicted it would be dead by now, but I've actually reached the bottom and am now slowly on my way up again. As to how far it will go, or whether I will go back down again who can predict? But I just take each day as it comes. If AdSense finally dies for me then I will just accept it and try and find something else. Media.net seems to be about the next best thing to AdSense. I've made a little bit of money this month, no one there as much as AdSense. However, I reckon with a little bit more thought into ad placement you could probably do quite well with media.net if AdSense isn't working for you.

[Ebuzz]

In my case, if now I am earning in a day, the same or lower than what I used to earn 5-6 years ago in a day, and my traffic has since then increased like 5-6 times more than what it was before, then what can I say? Except Adsense is dying?

I am very certain that if I had a time machine and could go back in time with this present traffic that I have, I'd be earning at least 3-4 times more.

[netmeg]

I could easily live off mine. I don't, but I could. And dead? I just took on a PPC client who is spending $1000 a day, 40% in the Display Network. He wants to (potentially) double that. They're out there. The higher paying ads may not be in your niche. Your niche may have become a lot more competitive since you started. Your traffic sources may have changed, or more of your traffic is using different devices. But AdSense is not dying.

[RedBar]

AdSense per se is not dying however I do believe that in certain niches, mine for one, that they are having problems retaining existing advertisers let alone attracting new ones resulting, for me, with lots of irrelevant ads.

FWIW my May-August period usually generates similar monthly earnings, my decrease has been unprecedented, my August daily earnings so far have been:

59.6% of May
61.7% of June
79.7% of July and bear in mind my alarm bells started ringing in mid July when it was averaging 69.8%

Is it the summer? If so in all the years of AdSense I've never experienced this before.

Is is that some economies are doing better and some sectors are not finding the need to advertise? This seems to have partly what is happening in my widget niche and especially so in the UK.

Has Joe Public buyer realised that some products just cannot be bought any better or cheaper than local word-of-mouth recommendation? This seems to be happening within my industry.

September to beginning December is one of my widgets busiest times of the year and already our factory production is sold out, it'll be interesting to see what happens with retail advertising.

[ember]

Then the Google god has smiled on you

I know that, and believe me, I count my blessings every day.

[netmeg]

Also, not every niche is well suite by AdSense, even niches that were *formerly* well suited by AdSense.

[SnowLeppard]

People visit forums in order to bitch

Not on Warrior Forum

[breeks]

Looks like they renamed Adsense in Google Analytics to "Publisher" Was looking all over for it :)

[trebuchet]

The last few days has seen CTR slide even further, while EPC has increased some. Probably down to the constant barrage of rubbish ads, with the occasional good ad fetching a reasonable price.

Also, I blocked google.com last week but I'm still seeing Adsense/Gmail ads on my sites. Not sure why.

[netmeg]

Right click on one of ads, copy it and paste it into the text file to fish out the URL the ads are using, and block that URL. Google has a bunch of em.

[trebuchet]

Ah OK, thanks netmeg. Didn't realise that, I thought google.com would catch them all.

[SnowLeppard]

Right click on one of ads, copy it and paste it into the text file to fish out the URL the ads are using, and block that URL. Google has a bunch of em.

Are you meaning the part that says:
adurl=https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/286988753%3B113947661%3Bd&nm=24&mb=2&bg=!8_BEexjqOulK1J etc etc ?

[azlinda]

SnowLeppard, no, it would be like the URL I set apart in the following; in this case shopathome.com. It's normally about halfway through the script.

[googleadservices.com...]

shopathome.com

/discounts_and_coupons/default-brand.aspx%3Frefer%3D1066660%26src%3DSEPDSE%26vendor%3Dgoogle%26Distribution%3DContent%26keyword%3Dwhole%2520foods%2520recipes%26MatchType%3D%26AdId%3D64512463355%26placement%3Dxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx%26device%3Dc%26network%3Dd&nm=1&mb=2&bg=!w8BEuTEH8ob7nIgCAAAAPFIAAAAQKgEdQq-9EoN-LPAmBpGtF57jifJk1jz_NjJq-ujvEhjKwUC0Af3QTSbWQOrpN-TW4fh4kW7Z4YcHDnMn_3DCZYQEHK5vAdyVctndjFp7spJUWeHI7CWqomKTS2LIH0EaGctxBDtZzItJ2o4yGMeVzpSQn7m28uuvlJnvV_Bk8n6zWp5oIKQvya8TlOgJ-NAtIrfUrIhQQ55SDoilfYQ3PHYTOrTIR4Rm_aLuds-NbbtHL_g0eV2cEEoH3ZP83vLFhLiL4Yl1B0zb6unV4M_a3yS1jfpGDAINdf6d4_eZyfXthcBjObP3Imp7g7qzkZ5MqlU_HngHuc45yKh42bDRadW0dbxU3Jhk4mpqIoHMCMZaP5wQXnmwDTkZmuWFEpv4

[SnowLeppard]

Here is the code from an adsense ad for adwords from my site (i changed my client id for privacy)

http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CzwGsVTjNVbGaCNS28gXQiKPQBdKG6PtC2rGJyOIBr8nkiIwCEAEgpOnyCmCr3LKF5BigAaaNmeoDyAEBqAMByAPDBKoEjAFP0G97XfGI7720LKbUzUqJnm_NPum_whMBDG8Vfu0Ve073hprtwtzau0DFpvnOqnjJKmtEl3Becyof45GDPEvcEQKTpXoAo1XhcMfVQY-XCHgaV1i_xonHE5UlzA1cHPexFoix_2xThilTsoUXPTAuM5oA6B6Jy_arz6ddyIooCFsflWsDsUQ9svrm7YgGAYAHwvLmFagHpr4b2AcB&num=1&cid=5GjzYV4WVczPAF4zHw-YG_In&sig=AOD64_2UoBjXs64k01tWElrS7y94n4wDeg&client=ca-pub-1486804033395630&adurl=https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/286988753%3B113947661%3Bd&nm=43&mb=2&bg=!R0REexjqOulK1JACAAAAHlIAAAAcKgD1h2Kc3HUFL3zZVnX7VkvjV54FZ815TlQi5Ry5ukD4-XlFfJKayFSMsVL7JP0tinodFcgdn1YyPEkZP3Qoj-fB8tzpmgR2w0UpYGmVxOK2O7_6VtwqXQehring7OsBjdu_uxM90GcQw6i_uvoV8SSzxW7GSPUYbhh_eBierrRxSCoIEiJM7O2c05CFXIWaiW7At6G4PxZ6YnmtoqtVoewveVRqukSUm0hMiSuE834_TcRINEybw2kxvubfR5DeM4X1tSBCVCLAFzVzhwiiUzmyy56DN6egd4KUHFO5MKJcmttLnIm3G8sQ7saARtTyDW_MhX6ifWY

Which url should I block?

[Ebuzz]

@snowleppard

That should be the [ad.doubleclick.net...]

To the others, I think setting up a separate thread to discuss on what URLs to block in Adsense seems like a good idea to me. This will be like an ever-growing thread on useless/abusive ads which ought to be blocked.

PS: Is ad.doubleclick.net something that should be blocked?

[netmeg]

Well I think if you block doubleclick you might end up blocking a bunch of good ads too. Lots of big advertisers use it - that's the D in DFP and the corresponding advertiser side. Rather than that, I'd probably go look in my Ad Review Center first and see if I find them there.

[breeks]

You never really know what ads visitors see. Depends on the last time they deleted cookies, if ever. What sites they visit, location, time of day, videos viewed on Youtube, and so on. I try not to block any ads, but when I do its Google :)

[netmeg]

Oh the other thing you might try is installing the Google Publisher Toolbar extension in Chrome and then viewing your site - you can block the ads you're actually seeing right on your site with that extension.

[Portland79]

Worse month ever. The crash started in May.
Traffic increased immensely, impressions increased.
CPM went from over $10-$15 to $2 max on a good day.
CTR tanked as well.
I know it has to do with mobile and G taking clicks away. I see it happen a lot.

Meanwhile my Amazon has skyrocketed to record breaking numbers because the increase in traffic is a positive thing.
Amazon has gone so much higher it made up for the entire loss of Google which was a lot but if only Google didn't tank so hard.
I'd be doing great!

[SEOPTI]

Portland, the first wave started in January, the second wave started in May, that's true. I wonder if they keep the money under the pseudo name of "smart pricing". They might smart price and keep the difference. You know where greed (money) is there is no truth. All those companies are greedy as hell. Trusting them is like trusting someone who comes like a thief in the night.

The transparency they offer is non-existent. Without transparency they can do what they love to do and live their life full of greed.

Their status symbols, positions and powers is all they love in this world and this is what keeps their greed alive. Therefore they have to take away from the mass.