October 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

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

[ThirtyThreeAndAThird]

Okay, I'll be the first to jump in. Appallingly low CTR -- less than 1/4 of 1%, though perfectly fine CPC, and estimated earnings taking realtime clawbacks, over and over again. It's like, "Here, here's ten dollars. Whoops, I'll take five back. Nope, nope, here's three. Oh, here's another four. Wah-hey, whoops, let me take back those ten!"

Here's to a big improvement!

[nubchai]

Well today I seem to have returned to a more normal earnings and click throughs than the last 2 days of September.

[Ironside]

Let's hope this month is going to be good. At the moment my page RPM is £4.15 ($6.20), and my impression RPM is £1.30 ($1.96)

[trebuchet]

After a booming last week of September mine has slumped back to slightly below average. But in my experience that's typical for the first day or two of a month.

[LuckyD]

On September 30th my PRM suddenly tanked after a 20% drop in CPC. From my understanding, there is no way for me to control that factor. I see that a lot of people are ditching AdSense, however I couldn't find a more profitable network for my site. With 85-90% of the traffic being organic (approx. 60% US/UK/CAN/AUS) my RPM is pretty high, and I'm actually afraid to do much testing after reading recent posts here.

I feel blessed by big G, so I will stick around for now and hope for the best... and preparing for the worst

[RedBar]

At the moment my page RPM is £4.15

Until the end of June I was 179.2% of that, today I am at 38.1%, utterly fubard.

[IanCP]

Well given the fact that historically my traffic in the good years, or the bad years has always been cyclic - that's over the last 18 years - the northern hemisphere summer is always my worst. Taking that into account, my September [30 days] compared to August [31 days]?

Page Views +2.6%
Impressions +10.33%
Clicks +18.6%
EPC +40%
Revenue +65.94%

I fully expected a big claw back in finalised earnings. No, it was only minuscule. Not all is doom and gloom then. This is not to say halcyon salad days are back again. These earnings are still a fraction of yesteryear. That has absolutely nothing to do with AdSense, that is simply the impact of SE's relegating my sites - a whole different topic which so many of us have an intimate personal knowledge.

Reflecting upon that CTR and EPC, those figures are nearly consistent with the better months over the prior years, only SE traffic is impacted. Returning visitors and inbound links have become the back bone.

[vegasrick]

Usually the first 1-2 days are really low, especially when the new month starts at mid-week.

Huge drop from September figures to October

I've also noticed a steep drop in clicks today. Maybe the ads are not that appealing.

[eek2121]

I'm good. Earnings are up. Had a great end to last month. Hope it continues.

[glitterball]

Traffic numbers as reported by Adsense look wrong today and earnings are now less than half of what was reported earlier today.

[frankleeceo]

I actually did not experience the huge drop in earning from the end of month and end of quarter historically this month. October first was actually comparable to september 30.

Maybe it's a great sign and hoping for a great 4th quarter this year and maybe it'll save me.

[ruip]

4 Oct, worst day since 2007 ..... something is very wrong ... traffic is 30 times higher. Adsense... what's up?

[Adsenseguy123]

My main income is from Adsense, I'm doing pretty well. So needless to say I've established a pretty decent baseline on what to expect.

That being said,

October entirely has been terrible for me. Traffic still on par, But RPM/Earnings continue to decline daily. I have no idea what's going on but I'm not happy.

[Mentat]

2-3-4 October is a disaster.

Very low traffic and incredible low CPC especially for US!
It's like a big holliday !

[magician]

First 4 days of October have been really really bad. No decline in traffic but the earnings are almost down by 35%. Hope things are back to normal from Monday.

It's like a big holliday !

Yeah! I am not from US but majority of traffic on my website comes from US. The first thing I checked is - if it's a holiday in US when I saw such poor earnings. After that, I checked if there is any decline in the traffic. Found out, no holiday, no decline in traffic, only poor CTR and poor CPC and thus even poorer RPM.

[darthtoon]

I'm seeing the October decline here as well - had a really good September then the first 4 days of Oct RPM has literally been cut in half.

[trebuchet]

Another month and the rollercoaster continues. RPM down here too in the first four days. Not horrendously down but certainly below average.

CTR is back in the doldrums. Also, my RPM for impressions is a full dollar better than my RPM for clicks, which I've never seen before.

[RedBar]

Extremely low earnings from my remaining AdSense slots, ad targetting is utterly abysmal, US EPC average at an all-time low.

Yesterday I had 1,000+ PVs from Saudi Arabia for 10 cents, I had an entire site's widget images copied for 10 cents, WTF?

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Something happened to Adsense earnings yesterday Sunday afternoon. RPM started to decline and it looks terrible right now. At the same time, my Adwords campaign isn't recording the costs for serving ads outside of the U.S. Perhaps Google has a reporting issue going on.

[filbiz]

This month is the worst earnings since January. But I'm wondering on Oct 1st, my earning is normal but it slides down to 30% less on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th day. One thing I notice is an ad "placeholder creative for core" that has a very high impression on the ad review center which I've already blocked. The ads is from google.com. Do you guys have any idea what it is? I've search the internet about it and found a german forum. I translated it using google translate and someone says some adwords advertiser might have released an unfinished ad. So maybe those ads are showing in our sites but since there were really no ads so we don't get any earnings.

[Ironside]

Everybody seems to be obsessed with CTR but nobody seems to know what's going on. I don't get why everybody is so obsessed with the click through rate. Either people will follow through, or they won't. I suppose it's a little bit like how the supermarkets rearrange their goods and move things to a new place. It's darned annoying because when you expect to find something where it's been for a few weeks, it suddenly moved. However, they seem to think that it works and makes them more money. So surely if some of you guys are finding that ads are not working any more, why don't you just try different positions, colours, styles?

[trebuchet]

I don't get why everybody is so obsessed with the click through rate

Who's "obsessed"? CTR is one metric among many, to be considered and discussed along with the others.

As others have noted, the fall in CTR seems to be the result of (a) poor ad quality and (b) aggressive clawbacks. Shifting ad positions is probably not going to make much difference to either.

I don't mind if CTR falls provided RPM stays somewhere around the mark - which so far it has.

[Ironside]

My page RPM seems to be improving quite a lot, but the impression RPM hasn't moved much. I just looked back to around March April May and I can see that that's when my earnings took a real nosedive. Since then things have been slowly improving.

[magician]

Everybody seems to be obsessed with CTR but nobody seems to know what's going on.

Exactly. I don't know why my CTR has dropped all of the sudden and hence want to know if this is just for my site or others are also noticing the same thing. Also, CTR is one thing which is partially in webmaster's control (size, position, style, colors) and partially in G's control (quality of ads, relevance etc.) and hence it is important to figure if it's them or you? You may call it obsession but I would say it's the right way to go about it.

I suppose it's a little bit like how the supermarkets rearrange their goods and move things to a new place.

As far as your analogy is concerned, I think you have misread the statements here, most comments are about sudden drop in the CTR on first 3-4 days of Oct and not gradual decrease over time. Gradual decrease does require trials with different positions, colors, styles but I wouldn't experiment unnecessarily for sudden changes which may be attributed to platform's problems and are generally very short term.

[Ironside]

It all boils down to whether someone clicks on one of your ads or they don't.

One of my best performing ads used to be a 336 x 280 unit placed at the bottom of the article. That dropped off so I changed it to a 728 x 90. For some reason the ads at the bottom don't really do much nowadays. I've not really taken much notice of the CTR because to be quite honest it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. What makes more sense is the £££s that I earn each day. I also keep a very close eye on how many clicks each unit does. Okay, you may get one unit with a very high CTR, but it only gets five clicks each month and it's not really worth having in my opinion.

Is there any way of finding out whether anyone is paying for ads on my website? Let's say they are paying me very little for each click, is there a way of me disabling their ad campaign so that they either go elsewhere, or pay more?

[dethfire]

Sept was good, but Oct has been really poor. This is concerning because historically Oct has been my best month and I'm off about 15% from last month and 20% off 2014 Oct.

[avalon37]

Google's constant tinkering isn't worth the stress for me. Pulled all ads and now almost have enough ad inventory (sold direct) to match what I've been making on AdSense. Here's a tip for people looking to sell direct ads (I can only speak for U.S.) Obviously target the companies you think are a good match; lot's of time the ads Google shows is a good way to build a prospect list. Now how do you contact them though? Well I've tried a lot of different ways over the years, but now that LinkedIn let's you email say company X's manager of digital marketing direct (through their paid monthly service) it's a game changer. Gone are the days of spending countless hours emailing any email address you can find on someone's website. Seriously, give the paid LinkedIn access a try if you are looking to sell ads direct. Of course some window of free ads (say a week or two) to "prove" the quality of your site rarely hurts and I recommend considering that as well when just starting out.

[Martin45]

Revenue in August was 75% of average
Revenue in Sepember was 50% of average
Revenue of the first days of October seems up to now the same as September.

While there is no difference in my Dutch or German sites.

The last months a tried everything, other banners, other placements but nothing had results.

I hope to have reached the bottom, so I can look up

[breeks]

Removing Adsense ads slowly. I am giving way too much ad space to a program that returns very little.

All other revenue channels are doing good, Adsense swirling around in the bowl. And I don't mean the cereal bowl :)