December 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

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

[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.