December 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

I'll need more than good luck this month, maybe a miracle about the 25th?

[robzilla]

I tend to keep an eye on the day's earnings, but I never take them too seriously until well into the following day.

Keeps me sane.

...dead, flatlining for me, Sunday saw my lowest-ever AdSense Page Views.

You've been saying this for months on end. Didn't you remove AdSense already? I know I would, if it was flatlining.

[RedBar]

Already removed it completely off several sites, my two biggest sites I am still running a couple of ads per page, all html5 sites are only running one ad at the end of each article.

Strangely last week was above average and if earnings were to be as in previous years I expected things to bomb this next weekend until after New Year, then I intended to wait and see what happened, if it were to go any lower then it would be pointless continuing, then again if it were to recover a little it may just be worthwhile leaving the ads.

The problem now is that of traffic, all my sites are ranking well however worldwide in my widget industry traffic has declined dramatically, Google images has been the main reason but also Joe Public no longer trusting/using search engines preferring alternative recommendations!

[MrSavage]

I've had a few stellar days this past week. But then wild downward swings over the past couple days. I just can't find any consistency to my earnings these days.

[RyuUK]

It has not been a bad few months for me. Things seem to have improved since I switched enhanced text ads on, blocked Google ads, as well as running frequent blocks in the review centre. Can now just focus on scaling pageloads.:)

[Mentat]

It's 15 December and It seems to be a competition to lower the CPC each day!
Christmas shopping season?
Anyone?
No more $ after black friday ?

Traditionally the first tree month of the year are lousy, but now will be horrible.

[LuckyD]

Mentat, for me it's the exact opposite. The past three weeks I have broken three weekly records consecutively. CPCs are up by 50%, which is an absolute blessing on my end. This December will outperform November by at least 20%, and 30% compared to October. I love the holiday season!

[EditorialGuy]

Slow here, on the whole, but with some days this week higher than corresponding days the week before.

This is always our slowest time of year. That's been true since the mid-1990s, before Google and AdSense were born. When January arrives, the floodgates will open again, just as they do every January. I'm not going to get into a tizzy because people are out buying Christmas trees or getting drunk at office holiday parties.

[Selen]

User (December): Why are my Adsense earnings low?
'Expert': It's holiday time. People buy postcards in their local stores.

User (January): It's freezing here; my earnings are as low as the temperature outside.
'Expert': The daylight hours are still in short supply - don't you see a strong correlation here!?

User (April): My earnings are still low?
'Expert': No surprise here - it's Easter time.

User (July): OK, but it's still low.
'Expert': it's vacation time, people don't check the Internet.

User (September): No change for better here.
'Expert': Don't be surprised, it's a national holiday in Sri Lanka.

User (Nov): Ok, I hope it will change for better after the New Year.
'Expert': From my half-century experience, fluctuations have always happened, and they always will.

[EditorialGuy]

Cute, but the fact remains that obsessing about short-term dips and peaks is a waste of time. Long-term trends are what matter--and if your AdSense revenues have been declining over the long term, the smart thing to do is (a) figure out what you're doing wrong, or (b) if you're not doing anything wrong, look for more rewarding alternatives.

[frankleeceo]

@Selen

Yeah you pretty much got the gist of it. Follow the users and their habits and needs. Ie. I would love to be in fitness kind of niche for new year resolution as January is upon us. But fitness probably really sucks right now during the holidays.

It's common sense and no expert experience needed. You know your own users the best and no expert advice can replace that.

I love holidays as I score highest pageviews with highest RPM value during this season.

Seeing lowering of the RPM's as Xmas is drawing near. Maybe one more wave of RPM push right before the holidays and dies down.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

I was recently getting a bunch of crazy redirects thanks to two 336 width ads on my home page and a 160 vertical ad. Has anyone else noticed these redirects? I use pingdom to check my site once or twice a week, so It must have just started happening in the last day or two. So I took the ads off and put one responsive ad on the home page above the fold. Suddenly, the clouds have parted way. Adsense can really slow down a site.

[piatkow]

I have had a "double whammy" with RPM down and overall site traffic down about 40% this month. The latter is expected in my niche and, if like previous years, will recover after the holiday. I just hope that when they come back they start clicking on the ads again.

[vegasrick]

Like many others, I finally took the plunge and mobilized my site.

Despite not having a mobile site in this day and age, my traffic was still strong and I was making a killing from Adsense.

We are using dynamic, not responsive. I never had complaints from tablet users.

Current Observations.

We had a ton of site related issues today with the new framework we crossed over to, so most of our content was not posted during our very strong early hours.

Now I feel the pain of many of you.

We had more clicks today, more ad views per impressions - and made about 35% less than yesterday. Still a good amount of money, but still a decent amount below yesterday.

Luckily, I have a feature that I made the developer build (which is why its not responsive), where I have the option to turn off dynamic/mobile serving at any time and bring the site back to full desktop . I'll use that feature if my earnings continue to decline heavy over the next few days.

A buddy of mine had the same problem, but much worse than my issue. He went responsive two years ago. There were days when he made over 1-2K from adsense. Now he's lucky to make 1-2K per month. He was forced to get a real job after the Google rep he was friends with pushed him to go responsive and it killed him.

[MrSavage]

Dreadful. Shocking to me leading up to Christmas.

[londrum]

I'll use that feature if my earnings continue to decline heavy over the next few days.

You should be careful in the run up to Christmas though, because my site always sees a huge drop off in earnings around this time. I would find it very difficult to judge whether the drop was due to any changes i made

[EditorialGuy]

A buddy of mine had the same problem, but much worse than my issue. He went responsive two years ago. There were days when he made over 1-2K from adsense. Now he's lucky to make 1-2K per month. He was forced to get a real job after the Google rep he was friends with pushed him to go responsive and it killed him.

The advertising business has changed a lot in he past several years (even in just the past two years). I suspect that responsive ad units have been the least of his problems.

[RedBar]

Very surprisingly I have had an above average week however today, Saturday, looks like that's more or less it until January with extremely, extremely low PVs across all sites. Much of my "western" widget trade is now on holiday for two weeks, those still working normally don't usually need my sites, their enquiries will arrive as normal.

At least it should give me the chance to play catch-up!

[RyuUK]

I'm glad the first half of December was good, because now the seasonal period is underway it isn't enjoyable looking at the poor stats that are likely to stick until the New Year. Just waiting on Google's Xmas payment now ha ha.

[RedBar]

An interesting weekend for my widgets with the USA obviously still using the Net and Europe with it seemingly switched off!

Nearly all earnings on both days came overnight when they were looking to be the lowest-ever with them endeding up average. Saturday's PVs were average yet Sunday's were my fourth lowest-ever. It's inevitable that I shall see new lows this week however the amazing thing for me is that I am actually 10.7% ahead of the same days in November!

[dan3s]

Compared with earnings at the same last year, my current Adsense earnings have tumbled by two thirds. Cool......

[RedBar]

I refuse to look at previous years since I know I'm now at about 1.5% of my peak!

Monday had surprisingly average earnings again, Europe's flat on its holiday back for me therefore overall PVs well down ... I'm having my own private bet for Friday's PVs!

[LuckyD]

As expected, as soon as December 20th hit all RPMs dropped. Christmas campaigns are over folks.

[breeks]

Halfway decent day yesterday. Today rainy day so it will probably dampen Adsense earnings.

[RedBar]

Tuesday was again surprisingly average however today so far, Wednesday, the plug has been pulled, PVs for 5 hours in total not my regularly hourly rate, I guess that's it until next week for me?

[Ironside]

Not quite sure what has happened in the last few days but earnings seem to have really shot up. So far today my earnings are on par with a whole day's earnings on several days this week. However, I've only had 17 clicks today whereas it took at least 40 clicks to earn the same amount of money in a whole day on several days this month. The majority of the money is coming from for individual units. A 160 x 600 skyscraper unit in the left column above a menu. 300 x 600 unit placed within the text in various articles, 200 x 90 link unit placed at the very top of the left column, and finally a 970 leaderboard placed in various positions on my community forum.

[RedBar]

As expected record lows for me today, 20 cents in earnings and PVs, well, what PVs?

It's been no surprise other than by actually how low it is.

[Juniya]

@RedBar -- It started out like that for me too, record low PVs, clicks, RPM but somehow some way, a few hours later, things bounced back...I don't know about the rest of you but I am thinking about January and February. What will our rates be then? Hmm.

[RedBar]

Xmas Day was entirely as predicted, lowest-ever PVs and earnings however that did not surprise me one little bit.

PVs were actually 35.7% of 2015 average and 43.8% of December average, today so far, is even lower than yesterday, those sale sites and shops must be getting some hammering!

[robzilla]

Surprised to see the highest RPM of the month yesterday (Christmas day), but not too many pageviews obviously. Might see an uptick after the weekend until New Year's, but it's been a good month regardless (+33% compared to last month).

[Ironside]

Yesterday was quite good. 3244 page views, 11,093 impressions, 56 clicks, page rpm £4.11, impression rpm £1.20.

[Ironside]

Yesterday was my highest day's earnings this month. The 300 x 600 unit seems to have taken over as the highest paying unit. Aggressive advertising is definitely the way to go, I put this unit on quite a few of my main articles. I have located it wrapped in text either on the right or left in various paragraphs of text, but mostly right at the top where you can see it straightaway.

[robzilla]

Aggressive advertising is definitely the way to go

Sounds like a ticket to Panda habitat, but YMMV, keep us posted :-)

Having said that, the 300x600 works well for me, too, on some sites, but I only use it in sidebars.

[Ironside]

When I say aggressive advertising, I don't believe I am ruining my visitors experience when they want information from my website. I've merely decided that large ads in the first paragraph of text seem to do quite well. In fact on various articles I have a 160 x 600 skyscraper add in the left-hand column above the menu, and I have text wrapped around the 300 x 600 unit on the right-hand side of the page. So that's my take on aggressive advertising. I actually think it looks all right, it does bring some colour to the page, especially ones that don't have many photographs on them. So really you could look upon some of these ads as making a boring page look a little bit more interesting, even if they are only advertising units. But then again, you may find that many of the people who are landing on these pages are being presented with AdSense units displaying their browsing history.

[edited by: Ironside at 4:04 pm (utc) on Dec 27, 2015]

[EditorialGuy]

300 x 600 is working well for me, too, but only in sidebars. (I wouldn't dream of stuffing it into body text.)

[Ironside]

I don't think it makes the slightest bit of difference whether it's on the sidebar or whether it's incorporated into a paragraph of text. I can't speak for anyone else, but most of my AdSense earnings come from people who are using mobile devices. If you look at your website on a mobile device, you will find that any AdSense unit, whether it's in the sidebar, or incorporated into a paragraph of text will actually fall between paragraphs. However, when you look at the webpage of a large monitor, even though a 300 x 600 ad unit may seem big, it's not really any wider than a standard photo that you may put into your text. So if you do run a website where you have articles that don't warrant any photographs, a couple of these really large ad units really do put some colour back into the article and in my opinion makes a long winded article much less boring to look at. Anyway, that's just my opinion

[KaseyM]

I'm having probably the best month on Adsense ever. Everything is way way up. Adsense is anything but dead. You just need good traffic and sensible ad placements.

[Ironside]

The majority of my earnings are coming from mobile devices, how about everybody else?

[EditorialGuy]

The majority of my earnings are coming from mobile devices, how about everybody else?

For our site, desktop and tablets are the big earners (for both AdSense and our bigger source of revenue, affiliate sales).

[KaseyM]

Mobile 49.4%
Tablet - 18%
Desktop - 32.8

[MrSavage]

Um, what has happened. Three days now, or at least a number of days this past week with absolute bone jarring excellence. Eye popping earnings! I'm almost speechless. Three terrific days out of about 30-60 days is what I call a step in the right direction! Considering my downsizes and expense reductions, this feels all the better.

[ember]

Having a nice bump after Christmas. EPC is up.

[glitterball]

This is normally my best time of year (the days after the 25th), however, this year, adsense is not performing well.
The good news is that Media.net is outperforming Adsense by a long way, even if the stats do not match each other and I cannot make any correlation between the two, even though they are both on the same page.
Maybe Adsense has more slots to fill than they have ads?

I also put some of the bad performance down to Adsense continuing to insist on displaying ads based on Geographical location rather then page language, content and the user's browser language. My tourist information sites now nearly always have ads displayed in a language that my users cannot understand.

[RedBar]

UK clickers have been noticeably missing recently however yesterday I had some nice click values, this time it was the USA not joining in with PVs about 64% of average.

[netmeg]

New Year's bump is going nicely.

Ironside, most of my traffic is mobile. I hope that your aggressive ad placement doesn't include putting a big ad (300 x anything bigger than 200px) before your content on mobile. That could turn out to be an issue.

[breeks]

Finishing out the year on a high note.

Running about 70% mobile since many folks are off work for the holidays and away from desktop.

[RedBar]

Hmmm ... Today I've exceeded November's earnings with a couple of days to go however with 86.5% of the click volume which has meant my RPM is up by 14.8%.

My actual click volume is half of what it was before whatever it was G did to me in July. I have no idea how to get more valid traffic or clicks when I already rank so highly, people just seem to avoid clicking these days.

[MrSavage]

I am juiced. I need new pants with bigger pockets to hold all these pennies.

[Ironside]

Looks like December is going to finish on a high for me as well. On another note, it was brought to my attention yesterday that my homepage is displaying properly on an iPhone 6. From what I can gather seems to be okay on other mobile phones. Basically, the webpage is very narrow when you look at it in portrait view, if you turn the phone to landscape everything is fine. Anyone know what could be the problem? I have tried different templates and it does the same on all. I'm using Joomla! 3.4.8

[RedBar]

Yesterday was surprisingly above average again however today I've had to check all my sites are online, according to G I have hardly any traffic whatsoever and considering India is one of my biggest visitor sources, I have not had ONE visitor from there today!

Should we be having a red bar, is anyone else seeing bizarre traffic losses today?

[User]

There was actually a red bar a few hours ago. Gone now..