January 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[RedBar]

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

[nubchai]

Breeks did you have to submit your site for review?

[frankleeceo]

Jumping on the bandwagon and through one of my test sites on there. I wonder how long " a few business days would be".

**Please note: At this stage, test ads will only be served to admins and developers of your app or mobile website. Once you generate five impressions (five successful calls to our servers that return an ad), we will confirm your app or mobile website meets our guidelines within a few business days. We'll then update you when Facebook Ads will be served to everyone from your app or mobile website.

[EditorialGuy]

It's interesting that Facebook won't disclose its revenue split. That may not matter in the end, since the publisher's net revenue is what ultimately counts, but still...

[breeks]

FB ad only shows on mobile - Good
On desktop, the ad slot just shows an empty space - Bad

Nice looking ads though

[netmeg]

That's unfortunate. They should have a fallback.

[RedBar]

Tis Wednesday, like nearly all days recently I have a red bar again.

I suppose it would be more useful to others to advise when I do NOT have a red bar?

[Mentat]

The thing is that I need a red bar, but I do not see it...
Since Monday it's a new sheriff in town, that is deleting a lot of clicks!

[MrSavage]

F me and this Facebook. Best news I've heard in a very long time. A bit more exciting that those Amazon ads...

I continue to see incredibly bizarre behavior in Adsense. I've seen income from ad units that are from sites and ad units that have about 2 inches of dust on them from being dormant. Like literally from out of nowhere on a couple sites that are beyond nothingburger. So something to me is whacky. Yesterday was a bit more normal, but today there is a dead sort of feeling. So far from consistent, holy smokes.

[nubchai]

It's a dismal day here too. I should have a red bar but don't. I'm beginning to doubt we'll see a recovery. Something seems seriously wrong with Adsense ad serving. Not to beat a dead horse, but my media.net ads are very topical. My Adsense ads are mostly unrelated.

[MrSavage]

This is easily the best month I've had with media.net. For the first time in a while, I can say that the stats appear stuck (Adsense).

[kireb]

Where is that Red Bar. RPM of Canada is on par with that of India.

[nubchai]

I agree. My numbers are up with media.net so far this month.

[SEOPTI]

I'm waiting for the big announcement they discontinue Adsense.

No innovation, no communication with publishers, no transparency, no consistency, off topic ads, red bars, no profit.

Maybe they open up the market for FB? You know they are all in the same boat financed by the same occultic people, the powers that be.

[ken_b]

I'm waiting for the big announcement they discontinue Adsense.

I dunno

Just because some webmasters can't or couldn't make AdSense work or continue to work is NO indication that the program is going away.

More likely it'll just continue to move forward making good money for Google and successful publishers.
.

[MrSavage]

Well I tend to not like swearing (not true) but wow, today I see numbers that are so S it makes me say today is just F. I'm not checking my stats for a while. I'll wait for these issues to pass because I'm not willing to think that we I'm seeing today and over the past few days is "normal" now. I will disbelieve for as long as possible. I think at some point, publishers are simply going to need to post their earning over the past few years so we can collectively draw conclusions about where we are at on this. Keeping each other in the dark seems dark ages. A certain level of publishers will flourish and prosper just like the the way there are people who live in penthouse suites. Those people will always exist but it doesn't represent reality for most everyone else on the planet.

[SEOPTI]

Unfortunately they are not about money ken_b, they are about power.

[magician]

Good earnings this week. Thanks to increased traffic. RPM remains low - not dismal but lower than average RPM of 2015.

[Aniston Dillo]

Since last 8 days I am getting only 0.25 to 0.35 $ RPM which is the lowest of last 6 years of my whole working time with adsense and continues to drop each passing day/week/month. 1.5 Years back I was earning around 1500 $ a month, while this time its hard to reach 300 $ a month.

[trebuchet]

EPC/RPM up over the last few days. Lower than anticipated earnings this month but Adsense will still pay my bills, and then some. If it's not working for you then you should probably do something else - and I don't mean lecturing others about how it's dying.

[RedBar]

Wow, two super clicks from the USA on mobile yesterday, rich media, contextual, gave me my best day since 18th July 2015.

In reality this means I earned more than the minimum UK hourly rate for 24 hours ... yeah, it's that putrid.

need to post their earning over the past few years

USD 10,000/month > USD 150/month!

Fortunately my realworld business does not depend on advertising revenue.

Easily my biggest reduction was when Google grabbed everyone's images, more than a 90+% reduction in PVs.

[ember]

No innovation, no communication with publishers, no transparency, no consistency, off topic ads, red bars, no profit.

True, innovation isn't great; they communicate with me; they've never been good at transparency; my earning are consistent; my ads are very on topic; I do receive a few red bars; I make a decent profit. The program makes money for them; I don't know why they'd discontinue it. They could, of course, but I doubt it.

[EditorialGuy]

No innovation, no communication with publishers, no transparency, no consistency, off topic ads, red bars, no profit.

AdSense (and advertising in general) is like anything else. Some publishers do well with AdSense, and some feel cursed. Some people swear by Amazon's affiliate program, and some people swear at it. Some people make money from mobile; others (including us) make nearly all of our money from desktop. laptop, and tablet traffic

Bottom line: Find what works for you, and use it. Discard what doesn't and don't look back.

[Mentat]

After my first day on Facebook Mobile ads, I can have a good ice cream ~ 4 USD! :)

Very good CPM, but terrible fill rate.

It will show only to users with Fb account, logged in that browser.

[systemaddict]

@Mentat -> Did you pick "Balance CPM and Fill"?

Terrible fill rate = ? (just give us some ballpoint figure :-))

[RedBar]

Guess what? Red bar time of course!

[Mentat]

@systemaddict I did not set up the account, so I do not know.
3% fill rate, I've made redirect to adsense if not FB ads served.

[frankleeceo]

"It will show only to users with Fb account, logged in that browser."

That's probably the main reason for the low fill. Wow...Facebook is gonna use this to further their coverage. Get website owners on board to ask people to sign into Facebook account at all times? I guess this is a logical push. But probably will work for sites that are already really social, like those viral portals.

Maybe I should try to get in that space. hm.

[SEOPTI]

Wow, when I read here "1 click from USA" or "2 clicks here or there" people are you real? I mean I will not comment on this further, but if I would post this I would not be able to feed my family and my children. Are you real posting you got 1-2 high clicks or is this just a bad joke?

It sounds like you are starving for the next meal. I wish the best for you.

[magician]

It will show only to users with Fb account, logged in that browser.

Really? I doubt it. I won't even try it if it's true.

[Ironside]

I am hearing a lot about this Facebook advertising, however I'm not quite sure what it's all about. Could somebody point me in the direction of a tutorial or something that will explain exactly what it is and how you implement it on your website. I think my particular niche would fit in really well with Facebook advertising because there are loads of Facebook groups discussing my exact niche.

[magician]

what it is and how you implement it on your website.

You will get all the information here - [developers.facebook.com...]

[Ironside]

Thanks for the link. It says mobile website. Does this mean you have to have a specific individual website that is only meant for mobile devices? My website is responsive and mobile friendly so will I still be able to use it?

[RedBar]

Are you real posting you got 1-2 high clicks or is this just a bad joke?

1,000+ clicks per day to ~20, no joke.

It sounds like you are starving for the next meal.

Nope, AdSense is a simple add-on to our widget trade global B2B sites, it used be an extra easy way of earning loads of more cash for our beer/holiday/new car/whatever funds.

We don't bother with AdSense on any of our new/upgraded sites now, pointless.

[nubchai]

If Facebook ads offered a back fill option, I'd try them.

[breeks]

"My website is responsive and mobile friendly so will I still be able to use it?"

Works on responsive sites however when viewed on a desktop you see an empty space the size of the ad.

I have removed them until a solution for the blank space is found.

[Ironside]

Seems a little pointless using them unless your website is 100% mobile.

[LuckyD]

@nubchai, you could do this with DFP.
@Mentat, how long did it take for your ad placements to be approved by FB?

[nubchai]

Thanks Lucky but I think any serious ad network needs to support stacking ads in a funnel. Also, I don't have time to learn DFP.

[RyuUK]

My main site has had a terrible day today (traffic and earnings). Looking more like a Sunday. Just hope it's an off day and not due to some nasty algo update.

[webcentric]

Seems a little pointless using them unless your website is 100% mobile.

Or unless you don't know how to use javascript.

I've explained this many times in the past but here is the skinny.

Create two stand-alone files, one with Google responsive ad code and another with whatever ad code you want to serve e.g. Facebook mobile ads.
Use Javascript or JQuery to determine screen size or perform some other test to determine if it's a phone.

Load the appropriate ad file based on the results.

This is not the same as hiding content with CSS. Ad scripts are loaded according to screen size or device-type (depending on your logic) so only one of the two scripts will ever load on any given request.

[koan]

January has not given me any signs that 2016 will be a better year than 2015 so far.

[EditorialGuy]

This has been a great month for us, but we don't use AdSense on mobile pages. (Whenever we've tried, it's been a bust.)

[RedBar]

The last five days have been the best of the month, hopefully it may continue into February.

[nubchai]

What I see is erratic performance. One day it's very good, the next day it's not. Ad relevancy has improved though.

[RyuUK]

Much better today. A nice finish to Jan!:D

[C0DeZeR0]

No Updates .. as normal bad earnings ..

[Ironside]

Page RPM which is reflected in earnings. Hopefully should finish off January fairly good. Got the red bar at the moment though. Doesn't seem to be having much effect on earnings as far as I can see.

[LuckyD]

Red bar, but nice end-of-the-month stats. Agencies are spending their remaining January budgets, and I'm glad they do.

[nubchai]

Yesterday was a very good day and today was off to a great start. Then the red bar popped up. I've never seen as many red bars as we've had in January.

[mydino]

January was so high for Unbillable bid type with zero earning .. 60 % impression .. :(

[RedBar]

i've been stuck on 6 clicks and 50 cents for at least 8 hours, PVs are going up, easily my worst day ever so far.

[Ironside]

I am 38 clicks so far, however my impression RPM is £3.43 and my impression RPM is £.99, so that's reflected in my earnings so far today, let's hope this carries on because it's been improving in the last couple of months and in fact my impression RPM is almost back to where it was 2 1/2 years ago when I was earning really good money.

[Ebuzz]

My earnings have turned to crap after my webhost decided to "upgrade" my server to a supposedly newer and better one. I am speculating that the change of IP address for the domain has affected my Adsense in some way or another.

Any thoughts? Thinking of quitting the webhost for good even though they did offer me 2 months free rebate (which doesn't even cover all the losses so far, and it's still going on. The new server is also having problems with Litespeed software.

If your webhost decides to "upgrade" your server, this may indeed be bad news for you, as an Adsense publisher. At no point in history has Adsense applied as many filters as they do now. Change of IP could trigger one of their numerous filters.

[frankleeceo]

I have migrated servers a couple of times throughout the years. Usually problem does not lie with adsense itself.

Probably check server configurations to see if there is any error loading codes or any of the pages. Or it could even be a poorly configured site bringing down the whole server at certain times if your not on dedicated server.

During the server upgrades, sometimes host can patch things and upgrade different coding languages (albeit some can do a poor job if they are inexperienced or simple mistakes) if they are far too outdated, and that can break things with scripts.

I would double check and check again to make sure all scripts function, all pages load, error logs, and all.

I once had a popular page hit memory fail for over 2 weeks without noticing it after some configuration change / upgrade. Learned my lesson to always keep a really close tab on my most popular stuff.

[nubchai]

It was another good day. The only change I made was to swap out my responsive ads for non-responsive. The ads still look good on mobile and tablets. But then the improvement could be unrelated to that.

[Dhillon]

The last week of the month is always good and then back to crap earning, (at least that's the pattern for me ).

[RedBar]

What a horrible final day of the month EPC for me. Click volume ended up at the month's average however earnings were at 57.5%.

[Ironside]

I had a glitch in the middle of last month where my host took my websites down because they were using too many resources. I then had to get them to perform an upgrade. I think the website was down for about 36 hours. Things have definitely deteriorated in the last couple of years, but I'm actually improving slowly so it can't be all bad. AdSense units that were performing while a couple of years ago don't seem to do anything now. Best performing ads are the 200 x 90 link unit located above the left-hand menu. The next best performing ads other 300 x 600 unit which I have located in the left hand portion of my article. And then I have a responsive unit above my menu on the left-hand column which also does very well. The ones that don't do anything any more are the ones that are located between the first paragraph of text and underneath the heading, they're absolutely useless and I don't use them anymore.

[darthtoon]

After 3 years of steady decline this January was the first month in ages I've had earnings go up against the same month in the previous year. Not by much, but I had become resigned to ever-decreasing income so this is a very welcome development.

Just hope it continues throughout 2016...

[vdR7]

today + 300k page views +7k clicks on ads page ctr ok...but rpm like always low and cpc is just 1 cent...i never had 1 cent but last 3 days CPC 1 cent only...But its good very good i hope this month goes like it start :) just cpc i hope will be better

[MrSavage]

Words can be expressive, or not. I've contributed a lot to these reports threads over the past while. For what it's worth...

Never have a seen such a kick in the nuts type of earnings. I cannot say this is a trend, nor can I say whether this is a temporary glitch. Something is, simply said, F up in a big way. In my neck of the woods, this is how it goes.

There has been bad, terrible, even some hope in the recent past. However at some point in January this has gone so far south, it's simply some kind of joke earnings to me. I would likely take more pride in collecting bottles from bins at this point. However, the nickles and dimes is still better than receiving no nickles and dimes.

I've come to the conclusion that there are enough layers to how Adsense works that it will only be pockets of pain. Not one size fits all. There just has to be layers to this so that it's a few, rather than a vast majority asking WTF.

I would kindly suggest those who love piping up with comments like, "if it's that bad then why are you still using Adsense", I would say back away slowly from me. We can't tango here in the text exchanges that you might receive for being blind to other peoples reality. I make money from other programs now on the same sites that I run Adsense. Just keep the holier than thou to yourself. If you are doing great, then report it. It's great to hear about success.

For me it's one of two things. I'm in some trap, or my account is compromised in some way. Either which way, I'm in the dark. Please don't take my words lightly. This can be a reality for you too so watch it.

[magician]

I would say back away slowly from me.

:) +1 to your post

[Mentat]

For me it's one of two things. I'm in some trap, or my account is compromised in some way. Either which way, I'm in the dark. Please don't take my words lightly. This can be a reality for you too so watch it.

+1

I feel exactly the same. It's like google is trying really hard to get rid of us.
On the other note, I have six unresponded emails to my Adsense Rep.
It's very busy hiding or is fired.

[MrSavage]

Yesterday I had 4,536 impressions, 1,692 page views and a total of 13 clicks. I won't say how much money that totaled but I'm sure most can figure that out.