October 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

My AdSense life is almost over, good luck to those who are still earning.

[EditorialGuy]

Do Americans sleep or rest on Saturdays and Sundays? Just curious because the traffic and earnings are just at 25% for years on these days across several industries.

Saturdays are usually slow for us (Fridays often are, too), but Sundays tend to be strong. In any case, "slow" is a relative thing: Earnings certainly don't drop to 25 percent on our slow days.

My guess: What you're seeing is the result of advertiser behavior, not just of user behavior. (Maybe advertiser behavior varies by industry?)

[SEOPTI]

Look into this thread, it seems as all of them wake up on Monday sleeping all weekend LOL

[RedBar]

Judging by what's happening in my town UK, I don't think you're far wrong!

And bizarrely yesterday I had my best day in a month, confused, you bet I am.

[regiborg]

Gains very low with adsense!I think only premium publisher gain with their !

[eek2121]

I'm not premium. Not yet anyway. Planning on taking my site growth to a whole new level in 2016 so we'll see what happens next year. Regarding weekends, my saturday and sunday both have 50% of normal traffic (that is, both saturday and sunday have about the same traffic combined as monday). This does typically mean a reduction in earnings, but sometimes not. Sometimes you'll get several people clicking a $3-$5 ad.

[magician]

My October RPM is almost down by 20% w.r.t my usual RPM. Yesterday morning, I blocked all 'Ad Networks' except top 50 performing networks (with good RPMs and good number of impressions).

Though it's too early to say anything, my RPM is again back to normal (even slightly better) for yesterday. CTR has dropped but significant improvement in CPC so overall increase in RPM.

Hope things remain better.

[Mentat]

Something changed again since this weekend.

For me, there was something very strange that on certain periods I have the same # of clicks/CTR.

When they change something, I see a new level on CTR/# Clicks!

Again, I'm going down!

I can tell you that now, the most popular ad on my site is for... Adsense Links!
Just visit Allow & block ads - Ads (Ad review center) section, and the ads are listed decreasingly by the # of views!

[imgur.com...]

Also, since the moment that they disabled Flash ads, for some reason Image ads are very, very rare.
Text ads are very strange/bad, like no authoring is required. Made by chimps for chimps!

November has Veteran Day and a 4-5 days weekend!
Thanksgiving is Thursday, so I'm scared of the first months of the 2016 year, when I think I will close the site.

This was a top 500 Alexa site a few years ago, with 100 people working on it!
Now is a ruin, but scrapped content is ranking better than original.

[Ironside]

I'm still not sure how anyone can gain any meaningful information from page or impression RPM. I can see that the higher they are the more money you will earn, that's been my experience in the last few months which is nice to see. My website went down for two or three days last week. However, before it went down I managed to gain three clicks for the whole day. When I look at the statistics, I can see that the page RPM for that day was £7.52, the impression RPM was £3.89 and the earnings were less than £1.

I don't take any notice of these figures now. I have a figure now that I'm happy if I reach for a day's earnings. If it exceeds this figure then that's brilliant, if it doesn't then I consider it to be not such a good day. But I am certainly not going to get obsessed over RPM figures. The only reason why I think that my earnings have recovered in the last year is because I've rearranged all my AdSense units, cannot think of any other reason why they started rising again. I do believe that the amount of people using mobile devices has got something to do with it. Finding that layout that works with mobile devices is the key to keeping your earnings up.

[magician]

I'm still not sure how anyone can gain any meaningful information from page or impression RPM.

Woah! RPM is a very meaningful number for daily tracking along with total earnings. It basically tells you how adsense is doing on your site, irrespective of the quantity of traffic on your site. - that's pretty meaningful, right?

It tells, if you are making less (or more) money because of fluctuations in adsense or because of traffic on your site. Thus, if you should fix things on the traffic side or CTR side (by ad position, color experimentation).

I can see that the higher they are the more money you will earn, that's been my experience in the last few months which is nice to see. My website went down for two or three days last week. However, before it went down I managed to gain three clicks for the whole day. When I look at the statistics, I can see that the page RPM for that day was £7.52, the impression RPM was £3.89 and the earnings were less than £1.

Your example clearly shows that RPM is independent of the traffic on your site. You lost earnings because of traffic and not because adsense wasn't doing its job (as you have good RPM).

I don't take any notice of these figures now. I have a figure now that I'm happy if I reach for a day's earnings. If it exceeds this figure then that's brilliant, if it doesn't then I consider it to be not such a good day. But I am certainly not going to get obsessed over RPM figures.

Well, that's a simpler approach - if you not considering traffic on your site. I think you are using 'overall earning' and 'traffic on your site' to pretty much draw the same information which RPM provides.

The only reason why I think that my earnings have recovered in the last year is because I've rearranged all my AdSense units, cannot think of any other reason why they started rising again. I do believe that the amount of people using mobile devices has got something to do with it. Finding that layout that works with mobile devices is the key to keeping your earnings up.

Well, it means you've worked on to improve your RPM :) (which is traffic independent metric)

[Ironside]

I suppose the way I look at things is that I pretty much know how many people will be visiting the one site that makes the money for me. Visitors would probably range from a minimum of 3000, up to 4000 on a really good day. Obviously if my visitor count suddenly drops dramatically then that would be the reason why earnings also dropped. However, if my hit count stays exactly the same then these RPM information isn't really going to help me is it? I think sometimes it's a little bit like supermarkets rearranging all their goods, if you've had your AdSense in the same place for a long long time and things are starting to drop off then maybe it's time to start experimenting with different layouts. After all, you are trying to attract people to click on your ads, none of these RPM information is going to tell you why people are not clicking, experimentation is the only way to improve things in my opinion.

[RedBar]

I'm still not sure how anyone can gain any meaningful information from page or impression RPM.

Yesterday my mobile RPM was 0.03 Cents, that tells me AdSense is utterly fubard on my sites.

Whatever they did at the beginning of July has had an adverse effect across all my sites. For me from the beginning of the year mobile & tablets were taking a higher and higher percentage of earnings, since July that has been reversed, mobile/tablet from January to June were 40%, September 36%, so far this month 35%.

Basically tablets are earning 25% of earlier in the year and mobiles 50%, it's an utter mess over which none of us have any control and if you are doing well just believe me, you do not have the control you may believe you have.

Overall with the same PVs, last month had 60% of the clicks and this month it looks as though it will be 50%.

This all means that my RPM is now about 48.3% of a few months ago and dropping further.

[regiborg]

I think that is hour of change,why adsense is dead for me,Yesterday I won 0,50 com 10.000 visits!

[Ironside]

:-) I don't need to look at the rpm to tell me if I've had a bad day at the office, all I look at is the £££s.

If a website is getting several thousand hits a day then there is no reason why it shouldn't be earning next to nothing on AdSense. If you're in this position then I would advise you to go slightly more aggressive with your AdSense advertising. Okay, you may not want and AdSense unit plonked right in the middle of the content at the top, however if you want to earn money then that often the best place to put one. The way I look at it is if my content information is interesting enough and it's what people are looking for then they are not going to be bothered with aggressive advertising, they will put up with it. So I might as well get aggressive with my advertising because I know people are going to come back.

[frankleeceo]

repeat visitors tend to get ad blindness. changing units around can get some what temporal boost before the ad blindness kicks in again, I say a week tops. constant shifts does not work neither, truly loyal visitors get used to the various ad shifting locations, and they end up getting annoyed.

I end up keeping things consistent where ads get the most visibility. if visitors choose to ignore it, they will. Especially for my sites with loyal followers.

rpm by itself is useless. rpm without any sort of experimentation or testing is just a simple number and nice graph that shows how much advertisers might or might not be spending. comparative rpm tested with different setups is priceless. it grants you all sorts of insight about your own visitor behavior, visibility, and onsite usage.

comparative rpm against itself vs past result without experimentation is somewhat useless. All it does is to reinforce the idea that both visitors and advertisers are changing.

with that said, google does control site wide rpm by determining the type of traffic and demographic that they give to you on the organics side. In this regard, they "sort" of control CTR as well as certain demographics tend to click on ads more often than others. And finally, the traffic itself is also a basis of CPC, since advertisors pay a bit more for traffic demographic that tend to convert for them, especially in the case of interest based ads.

In conclusion, there is nothing else to be done other than creating the right content to attract the right traffic. And do your best on comparative RPM/CTR combination to determine optimal ads setup to tailor to your site's customers. But just note that Google can decide to change your customers through manipulation or adjustments of the SERP, which can mess up with traffic demographic. Different demographics tend to click on different things at different locations, and that screws things up from time to time, especially during major serp updates.

Lastly, google can control and take it all away if they want to. It is what it is, especially if your business is dependent on the organic traffic. I have changed my perspective during the past couple of months with the whole business. Save when the time is decent to carry on through the storm, and adapt to change and move faster than the big boys is really the key to be in for the long haul..

First half of october is a bit lower than september probably due to end of of month/quarter combined. earning is steady for me now and rpm appears to be picking up. Have good hopes for november.

[frankleeceo]

@Ironside, Ditto on the aggressive advertising. I tried it a long time ago with one of my past popular site. It remained top for a good 2~3 months with good earning. Until a competitor took me over and the entire visitor base shifted to the competitor's site.

That particular site pretty much launched me into the business and got me started on this path, but it also gave me some perspective on the aggressive advertising path.

Do it if you think you can get away with it, just be willing to lose your followers when the competition does come along. No one is unreplaceable.

[glitterball]

RPM looking very bad for me since yesterday. About half of what it was a week ago, everything else looks consistent.

[glitterball]

Something seriously wrong at the moment - seeing very irrelevant ads that are of no interest to me nor have any connection with the site's content.
Can't imagine what could have triggered ads that make google think that I am an accountant.

[Mentat]

I have a shock!
I'm now forced to use the new adsense reports.
I hate this, BUT what is incredible is the fact that for my TOP of the page channel they only report between 15-50% of active views depending on different domains, but I'm using the same template!

This is Madness!

1. If the page is loaded, is impossible NOT to load that channel, it sould be 100%!
2. Why such big differences if I use the same template?

[PaulPA]

Today I received my 11 Years Adsense Achievement notice from Google. Should I be happy with this? No, not given what has happened to revenue over the last 6 months or so as revenue has continued to drop despite relatively stable traffic. Should I blame it on ad blockers? Maybe. But that cannot be the only reason. With 80% visitors still coming from desktops it seems something is not right.

[eek2121]

I mean really, seriously? People talking about killing themselves? Over money? Forget Google, get yourself a damn shrink. It's only money folks. Seriously, I've been homeless in the past (no joke and long story, won't tell you about it because I'm probably going to write a book lol)...if AdSense is your lifeblood, you need to rethink life. There is far more to life than money.

Not to mention, unless you get a few million visitors a month (enough to dictate your own direction), your site should be just a hobby anyway (doesn't matter if it earns $25/mo or $25,000/mo). If you have less visitors and you've been living by the grace of Google, you probably should have had a plan B. You were never guaranteed a living for the rest of your life by the grace of sipping from the toilet of billion dollar corporations. You probably should have been building your own toilet for others to drink from instead (increasing traffic, developing other revenue sources, etc.) It's not too late...do it now.

People have a right to complain of course (hell, I often complain on this forum myself), but I personally encourage those that are complaining to stop complaining and start providing some details of their situation so that others can possibly help out (that's what message forums are for after all. If we all complained and no other posts were posted...nobody would visit since they don't want to come to read complaints.) Google isn't mysteriously targeting your site and no other and causing revenues to fall. You have an internal issue, and yet most peoples' complaints show that they refuse to admit that. Where is your traffic coming from? More importantly, where does ADSENSE say your traffic is coming from? What percentage of that traffic actually saw your ads? What percentage of that is mobile? What about a ballpark for your CTR? What about location? What percentage of your traffic is from the US? Are your users in buy mode (mine aren't)? Complaining won't solve anything. It won't change your earnings by a single penny. Reach out, be constructive, start a thread, and provide details. I'm not by far the biggest earner here, but i'll do my damnedest to help and find out what the hell is going on (within reason obviously since this is volunteer time) and I'm sure others will as well. You just have to reach out. You may be surprised. As an example, the answer could be as simple as your website not loading within 2-3 seconds for visitors more than 1,000 miles from you or on slower connections. Fix THAT issue and you could quadruple your earnings. I switched DNS providers last year and my earnings doubled due to the decreased DNS latency. You never know what could be holding you back ( especially if you use godaddy for anything ;) )

[vegasrick]

I'm earning more than I was last year, day to day but like others I've noticed a click decline. I don't know if it's because of IOS, cell phones or what.

I know in the last few days for the first time in a very long time my desktop revenue is consistently beating out my mobile revenue, which isn't hard when desktop revenue is paying three times as much (but mobile generating three times as many clicks).

[RedBar]

AdSense has almost completely and utterly stopped for me, gone are the thousand+ clicks a day, now I'm down to single digit clicks with 2-10 cent values, based upon the last few days this November will not even generate a minimum payout.

PVs are still there and realworld enquiries and orders are still there,

Yesterday AdSense couldn't even serve enough Ad Impressions for one site, it managed about 30%. When I look at my own sites, apart from irrelevent ads, I see the same ad on page after page after page.

My trade widget advertisers have gone, period.

[glitterball]

it's looking very bad at the moment all right - unbelievably bad CTR.

[EditorialGuy]

No big changes here. We're having our usual autumn downward trend (which will bottom out between late November and late December), but with occasional revenue spikes. Overall, I'd expect to be down a third or more from our summer averages in another month or so, with a slow but steady recovery in the new year.

[Ebuzz]

October is on track to be the worst month of 2015, worse than even May.

[EditorialGuy]

October is on track to be the worst month of 2015, worse than even May.

A more useful comparison would be to October, 2014, assuming that your other factors are mostly the same.

[trebuchet]

Google isn't mysteriously targeting your site and no other and causing revenues to fall. You have an internal issue, and yet most peoples' complaints show that they refuse to admit that.

Yeah I agree @eek2121. Google certainly has an agenda but I doubt they target specific people/groups, particularly if they are genuine publishers. If claiming the opposite makes people feel better, they should fill their boots. Personally though I would be looking for solutions, adaptations and improvements rather than venting, which is really wasted energy.

I'm earning more than I was last year, day to day but like others I've noticed a click decline. I don't know if it's because of IOS, cell phones or what.

Same with me. RPM is holding steady, CPM earnings are increasing but click rates have fallen and continue to fall (despite raw clicks remaining much the same). Google seems to be paying more for impressions but is being even more aggressive with click pruning.

[Mentat]

Sunday - the lowest payment figures ever!

[Sillysoft]

Am I the only one or is anyone else seeing extremely low numbers today? I mean ridiculously low numbers today. Traffic is there but hardly any clicks. Never seen this before.

[EditorialGuy]

I never pay much attention to the current day's figures because AdSense reporting isn't always in real time.