December 2015 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

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

[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..

[RedBar]

I'm showing some Indian PVs now however way,way down, in fact my lowest PVs of the year from India plus no earnings either, they're never high value but always consistent every day however today, none,

[EditorialGuy]

Big jump since for us since Christmas. Nothing new about that: It happens every year around this time.

[deuces]

Ahh, our hosting went down on christmas so basically our biggest day went down the toilet. How do you think I feel right now?

[Ironside]

I decided to change one of my top earning units back to responsive. Doesn't seem to have made much difference to the earnings thankfully. Basically, it was a 160 x 600 ad unit that was in the left-hand column above the menu. On a mobile the whips was perfectly okay, however it was obviously quite long segment you had to scroll down quite a long way to get to the content. Now I've changed it, it still displays as a 160 x 600 ad units on desktops and larger tablets, but it displays as a small rectangle now on a mobile which I think is more user-friendly.

Earnings have continued to be quite good, let's hope January 2016 starts off as well as we've left December

[RedBar]

Yesterday had above average earnings and so far today my 3rd best day of the month with extremely low traffic levels ... hey ho, Happy New Year!

[avalon37]

Not a horrible December/Holiday season, which is my peak time of the year, compared to last year. Frankly, my biggest concern has been my bounce rate going up this year. But here are my AdSense stats, trends, analysis.

This date range is Nov 1 - Dec 30 2015 compared to same dates LY. Again, this is my peak season so it's actually the best time for me to take stock of AdSense for my site.

Overall CTR was down 18%
Overall CPC was up 15%

Desktop CTR was down 6%
Tablet CTR was down 36%
Mobile CTR was down 20%

CPC prices for desktop rose nicely, tablets and mobile CPC were flat to LY and last couple of years.

Text CTR was down 7%
Image CTR was down 23%
Rich Media CTR was down 30%

Contextual Ads CTR down 11%
Interest Based Ads CTR down 32%

Interest Based Ads CPC is down quite a bit as well.

So what are my concerns/observations?
Obviously CTR rate being down 18% is not what I'd like to see. But my CTR is still over 2%
Tablets are trending terribly; CTR down 36%
Rich Media ads...holy crap these sucked this year and are trending badly. CTR down over 30% CPC prices falling sharply as well.
Interest Based Ads are also definitely on the decline for me. They used to perform even better in terms of CTR than contextual, but CTR dropped 32% this year...that's very concerning for me and is further proof that Google is asleep at the wheel.

[RedBar]

What an unusual last day of the year for me with my highest earning day since 21st July!

[jbayabas]

December 31st was my lowest day of the year. It's almost less than half of what I earned on the 30th. I'm in shock.

[EditorialGuy]

Our AdSense revenues on New Year's Eve were okay, and our affiliate earnings were much better than okay. I look forward to seeing how things look on Monday when advertisers and users have recovered from their hangovers. :-)