January 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

Here we go again ... I'm actually quite surprised I'm still earning more than the minimum!

[RedBar]

No red bar for RedBar plus today's earnings have already exceeded yesterday's thanks to one super click from the USA, yep one such click makes that much difference to my miserable days!

[nubchai]

I had a red bar earlier but it was up for a short amount of time.

[Ironside]

Yeah, mine has gone as well now. Mind you, I'm getting one of those apologies messages when I try and change one of the ads like Google suggest, basically I reckon I will earn more money.

[trebuchet]

Turning out to be a diabolical month. EPC/RPM started to improve around the 9th/10th and I thought we might see a bit of normality restored. Instead, it has plunged back into the gutter. Never known a January this bad.

The biggest culprit is US EPC/CTR/RPM, which is low across the board. Though looking at the junk ads displaying from US geolocations, I'm not really surprised. Inventory at the moment seems to be utter dross.

March is traditionally my best month so I hope we see at least some semblance of a recovery.

[rveram]

Still dead for me, today I had my worst cpc ever $0.03

[magician]

I earlier thought, Tuesday will mark the turnaround for low CPC and RPM as the holiday season is over and all advertiser campaigns will be live by today, but I was wrong, the RPM and CPC continue to be lower even on Tuesday. I get most of my traffic and clicks from US but the CPC is almost down by 40% in comparison to the average CPC of 2015.

Only respite for me is that almost everyone here is facing the same issue. Even then, I am not sure if this is going to change for better.

[MrSavage]

Down 60% from day from previous week. The earnings yesterday were so very very dreadful, OMG. On the flip side, affiliate income is curbing the concern or dependence. It's still shocking though. Unreal in a bad way.

[Mentat]

Yesterday I saw a sunshine, today is gloom and doom @ payment.

[RedBar]

today I had my worst cpc ever $0.03

You're joking? Wait until you join my club with multiple $0.01 earnings.

Plus, for me, the USA seems to have left the party with an unbelievably low CTR.

[nubchai]

I'm starting out the day with a red bar. With the totally unrelated ads they're serving, I think their inventory must be extremely low.

[RedBar]

I've been using proxies and had people sending me screen shots, my widget inventory is zero in several countries with totally unrelated ads.

[FourDegreez]

I'm seeing a red bar right now.

This month has been pretty awful, as RPM continues to slide. I hope for some improvement in Feb.

[RedBar]

Red bar for me too, it seems to me that their systems are very flaky!

[MrSavage]

I'm looking at my stats, a couple different servers and I see a crazy number of similar IP hits. Different sites, different servers, same IP range. I'm just wondering if there is some mass hacking bot action going down right now. My Adsense number are showing a virtual shutdown of sorts. Something seems askew. Not sure I've seen so many hits across a wide range of sites like this before. Perhaps Adsense is in protect mode right now?

[nubchai]

I use Media.net ads as passback ads for Adsense. I'm seeing the Media.net ads displaying which means Adsense wasn't serving those ad slots. Very unusual in my experience. Also the media.net ads are withing context for my niche, whereas the Adsense ads are not.

[londrum]

i do the same with amazon ads, and they are getting lots of impressions as well (loads!).
i'm still earning pretty much exactly the same, though, which is a bit weird, but i have more than one adsense slot on each page, so maybe one ad is still showing all the time — but there is definitely some kind of serving issue going on, or a severe lack of inventory.

[Bobb11]

Adsense is too slow. I was in admin and waiting long to show ads or stats. Also have problem with : [google.sg...] not working. Weird.

[nubchai]

I agree londrum. I think it may be a combination of an ad serving issue r inventory. Very weird.

[super70s]

I use Media.net ads as passback ads for Adsense. I'm seeing the Media.net ads displaying which means Adsense wasn't serving those ad slots. Very unusual in my experience.
i do the same with amazon ads, and they are getting lots of impressions as well (loads!).

I was trying media.net as a backup for a while but they wouldn't load either (I refuse to set up a backup ad for a backup ad). Finally had to settle on Chitika ads which load reliably but never get any clicks (so far anyway).

I may just go back to Amazon ads as the backup like I was doing originally, only problem is I already have a couple of direct ads to them and it looks like Amazon overkill when their alternates load also.

[kireb]

Frustrating to see such a low RPM's for the US. UK and Canada traffic are giving me better value now and that's a first.

[Broadway]

It's 11AM on Friday where I am.
My reports say I've already served about 10% more "pageviews" today than I usually do for the whole day.
Of course I've looked at GA and this is not true.
And yes, the Adsense Red Bar is showing.
I mention this just because I've seen reports lag before, but not report inflated stats.

[RedBar]

UK, red bar again, I'm beginning to think that this is a permanent feature at this time of day!

[frankleeceo]

Yeah "RedBar" appears every day this month o.o?

My shot in the dark guesses, as Adsense is pulling in other networks for the new year contracts and their own soup of passbacks and auctions, those stats get lagged out. Or it could be they are battling a new group of bots as some people reported earlier, and they are delaying those stats to sort out and process the bots. Instead of letting those new bots impression gain money on the report, and then taking it away would produce some sort of outcry like before.

Not seeing inflated stats here but the stat is not far off from the usual at this time for me.

A not so gentle reminder from Google to stop checking stats? ha.

In terms of RPM goes, has not bounced back like I expected at the beginning of month. Still hovering at low of the month and vary by the usual fluctuation.

My January is not so disastrous compared to last year because I have expanded into a few more properties that actually do decent. At least it's a livable income and not sub minimum wage last year.

[nubchai]

Yes I had the red bar with my morning coffee :)

[avalon37]

Google is so non-transparent about the red bar data delayed message. It's buried 3 clicks deep - on purpose so that 99% of publishers never see it. Google's always trying to "cover" something up. They're never just normal about anything they do - so robotic.

[ember]

Google's always trying to "cover" something up.

If that is true, then I assume that you no longer have Adsense on your sites? I know that I'd never keep an advertising network that I thought was so nefarious on my sites.

[Az416]

Hello everyone

[MrSavage]

Hi!

[trebuchet]

The Adsense dam gates (or damn gates...) seem to have broken for me today. The first four hours saw a pile of jumbo clicks with RPM well into double figures. It'll settle and equalise, no doubt, but let's hope it settles at a more reasonable RPM than the first three weeks.

[LuckyD]

@trebuchet, can you elaborate on the dam gates?

[netmeg]

I've had the inflated pageview stats for several days now - sent a bunch of screenshots in to support, and supposedly they're "escalating" it.

[Ironside]

I feel my hosting company have put the spanner in the works for me at the moment. This month was going really well, I was ahead of where I normally am and then all my websites went down. Apparently I was using too many resources for my shared server server hosting company closed everything down. Thankfully, we are back online now with much more powerful hosting so hopefully it shouldn't happen again. However, earnings are really slow at the moment, can't help thinking that has got something to do with what happened in the last couple of days.

[jbayabas]

Looking like it's going to be the worst day in years. I'm hoping it's just a reporting delay. Adsense is really dead. There's no hope in sight. So heartbreaking.

[RedBar]

Much lower than average Saturday PVs so far today, clicks are even rarer.

[Ironside]

Not too bad here, certainly not dead. Try rearranging your ad units, or try different sizes. Alternate before, the small 90 x 200 link units placed in the left-hand column above the menu work well. The 300 x 600 units are performing extremely well for me as of late, put them amongst the text. I removed any ad unit between the heading on the first paragraph of text because they don't get any attention any more.

[ember]

Thankfully, we are back online now with much more powerful hosting so hopefully it shouldn't happen again.

My host switched us to more powerful servers a few months ago without letting us know ahead of time. We went offline for a day and I wasn't happy. At that exact same time, however, our epc went up and has stayed up (until this month when it normally drops). So I attribute our now better RPM to better hosting, although I'm not sure how hosting and epc are actually related.

[nubchai]

One thing I'm still seeing is no ad relevancy from my Adsense ads. However, I'm seeing very good relevancy for my Media.net ads. My PVs are increasing, I can see visitors on real time analytics, but Adsense clicks and page RPM are down.

[MrSavage]

Not sure if anyone is experience abnormal lows right now. I'm seeing this today, big time. Yesterday also. There's low, then really low, then this. It's not normal so is Adsense experiencing issues?

[Maleda]

OT: What are the chances of getting a specific forum for Media.net?

[Mentat]

The low is the new normal. Since Friday, I've hit bottom again.
From 0.24 in December, to 0.13 now it's a huge difference for a bussines.

[RedBar]

A red bar at this time on a Sunday? Wtf!

According to Google's stats yesterday I had my 4th lowest-ever PVs, nooo I did not G, however I did have one of my lowest-ever earning's day, certainly the level where anyone would remove AdSense, and I mean anyone, not even close to the daily minimum required.

I've made it this month but this is pointless, my EPC was 45.4% of December's, utterly ridiculous.

[Calum_Jones]

I think all of this is because Google just got fined for £130,000,000! I'm also down to 0.13 CPC. I'm done with this system, from now on all my new sites will use Amazon and ClickBank, I might rebuild my AdSense site if it gets hit until those new sources are generating income though.

[ember]

Excellent last two days. EPC back up and RPM is increasing.

[nubchai]

Yesterday was excellent. Let's hope it continues.

[EditorialGuy]

Yesterday was our highest day in months. We're also up for "past 7 days" and "past 28 days," which is normal for this time of year. (Sometimes it isn't about AdSense per se; it's about the calendar, advertiser behavior, and user behavior.)

[Mentat]

Then you have our money :)

[C0DeZeR0]

Seem to be for some accounts .. today is normal (same decrease ) today 24/1 is worse !

[frankleeceo]

RPM going lower for me, 20% lower than the average of the month -.-

[RedBar]

Awesome G, 3 cent clicks from the UK on a UK site for visiting massage services!

If I told you what the site was about you would die laughing:-)

[kireb]

Weekend was good. Good RPM and earnings. Hope this is the turnaround.

[Az416]

hi new guy here just trying to set up adsense on my site how long does it take for google to review live site?

[Mentat]

It's like snow has frozen the US and UK advertising, aldo UK has no snow...
US payment is incredible low now.

[Peanut45]

Seeing a new design today for small text ads with the arrow positioned to the right of the ad body text (instead of below), and a cleaner layout which doesn't obscure the ad headline.

Looks like a big improvement in CTR for these ad units, hope it stays that way for a while.

[netmeg]

I'm definitely having ad serving issues; my backup pages I put in to measure have been getting hit a lot. And today I replaced a couple responsive ads with fixed sized ads, and the problem, while still there, was greatly reduced. Still testing and then I'm gonna send a mess of reports and screenshots in to G.

[kireb]

Super Monday (?) for me with RPM through the roof. Some of the clicks had (again) off the chart values, so I am afraid that the earnings are a bit too good to be true.

[Ebuzz]

@Az416

Your question should be asked in the official Google Forum. You ought to be simply reading the posts here in the past weeks to get a very accurate idea of what your expectations should be like, and any basic technical questions are best asked at the proper channels. This is a very clean forum and the standards here are much better than elsewhere, which are frankly speaking, full of SPAM.

[EditorialGuy]

We've had another record day*, but netmeg's comments about ad-serving issues with responsive ad units are intriguing. Unlike netmeg, we have no responsive ads (our only ads are 300 x 600 on desktop pages).


* for the last six months or so, anyway. (2003 was better!)

[radix]

"The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. We apologize for any inconvenience. " ATM

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Yeah, I couldn't connect to Adsense at all and now it's back with very good numbers!

U.S. traffic is picking up a little as of the end of last week, but the RPM is still half of what it was last year. Even worse is that revenue from every other country around the world is way down compared to last year. Canadian RPM is extremely good right now.

Traffic coming to my site from Twitter is through the roof on some days, but only from certain countries, namely Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, and Morocco.

[radix]

I'm not sure how long the outage lasted, 30+ mins for sure. Now the service is back.

[KaseyM]

Off a cliff last the couple of days. CTR and Pageviews are consistent - CPC down the toilet.

[RedBar]

Old school EPCs from the US and UK yesterday, I doubt this will last very long.

[Londo]

I posted an issue with ads not showing on my website when I use a browser with interest ads turned off, I thought I had resolved the issue but unfortunately it seems that it only worked temporarily. Now there are virtually no ads showing on my website, usually I have lots of related ads but now nothing. With interest ads enabled in the browser all the ad blocks are filled.

[netmeg]

Something's definitely weird. I've got a red bar on my reports today. I've got another set of massively inflated AdSense pageviews (on one site only) today that is not reflected in either StatCounter or Google Analytics. And I'm not seeing the ad serving issue nearly as much on the placements where I went back to non-responsive code. It's still having issues on the responsive code, and no issues on the Media.net code (but I'm not sure the backup for that works the same way - I have an email in to them but their support has massively slipped lately)

[systemaddict]

This is a huge announcement. The first serious Adsense competitor and it will surely bring more revenue (back) into web: [wsj.com...]

[fearlessrick]

That's interesting news from FB, and Google deserves the competition. They've hardly been innovative the past 5-6 years. For me, now running four different services, diversity is paying off pretty well, since Adsense earnings this month are the lowest I've seen in 10 years. Two places to look are Conversant and Infolinks. In particular, Infolinks is pretty easy to implement and, so far, revenues are solid. Will see as time progresses.

[nubchai]

I started checking my Adsense PVs against analytics and statcounter too. They're inflated by 25%. I swapped out the responsive ads with non-responsive. Clicks and RPM have improved. I'm also not noticing the media.net backup ads popping up as frequently.

[avalon37]

I've been talking about Facebook for months, yet no one seemed to believe me.

[RedBar]

Of course we did, it was only a matter of when, not if:-)

[breeks]

Looks like the Facebook Audience Network Mobile Web is live. I am able to create placements.

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