March 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[Mentat]

January and February [webmasterworld.com] have been a disaster for most of us.
I believe that we expect a "Spring miracle" for this month.

[RedBar]

All I can say, and quite unbelievably, even worse than Friday, next stop is ZERO.

I'll check the next couple of days' figures however I doubt I'll see anything much before Tuesday/Wednesday, if things do not improve later in the week then decisions will have to be taken.

[Mentat]

Let's not forget that traditionally, Mr. Google has the bad habit to launch SERP changes on holidays like Easter.

[RedBar]

Wow, this is going for seriously new record lows, not just for AdSense but traffic as well, I don't think I've seen so few PVs since the early 90s, certainly way before G was even contemplated!

[Selen]

new record lows

This made me wonder.. is it possible to have a larger amount deducted for an 'Invalid Traffic' that the actual earnings? For example, monthly earnings would be $5, but 'Invalid Traffic' is $10, so the actual balance would be negative (-$5).

[Roman Abramovich]

@Selen No that could never happen. How could $5 earnings show and $10 was invalid, if $10 was invalid then earnings would at least need to show $10 or more. The amount invalid must be equal or smaller to the amount shown as credited.

[ken_b]

Selen, from the terms [google.com] (I bolded a couple points)

In addition to our other rights and remedies, we may (a) withhold and offset any payments owed to you under the Agreement against any fees you owe us under the Agreement or any other agreement, or (b) require you to refund us within 30 days of any invoice, any amounts we may have overpaid to you in prior periods.If you dispute any payment made or withheld relating to the Services, you must notify Google in writing within 30 days of any such payment. If you do not, any claim relating to the disputed payment is waived. If an advertiser whose Ads are displayed on any Property defaults on payment to Google, we may withhold payment or charge back your account.

[ember]

I mean, who really clicks on an ad?

People who visit my site.

[trebuchet]

I mean, who really clicks on an ad?

Golden rule of the Internet - never assume that others use it the same way you do.

Is it possible to have a larger amount deducted for an 'Invalid Traffic' that the actual earnings?

The only way that could happen, I suspect, is if Google discovered invalid traffic for previously paid months, so decided to recoup this from your current month's payment. Not sure how likely it is though. Even when an account is disabled the account holder only forfeits monthly earnings to date.

My RPM has improved a little over Easter. It's now only 25-30% down on average. But being a holiday weekend with low traffic, it's nothing to get too excited over.

[kireb]

My Easter RPM is only half of that of last year's. Compared to March 2015, I am 35% down now for the whole month. I hope to see some recovery this coming week.

[JustForAdsense]

Just try to focus on continuing to improve and grow your websites, guys. Traffic is #1. We will all always be able to monetize decently as long as we have traffic. It may take everyone time to find out what works better than adsense currently does (....its getting easier and easier to do as earnings decrease! silver lining i guess?).....but it is possible, and you will discover many good ways to make it happen. Just grow your site, and maybe they'll redeem themselves. But (atleast) until then, keep brainstorming and testing other monetization methods in hopes of finding a good replacement.

[Mentat]

Traffic gain in the age of "the Panda" ?
It seems I cannot escape the Panda's claws.

Anyway, low traffic, low payment, end of the month...

[RedBar]

Surprisingly almost normal Sunday PVs, unsurprisingly new record low earnings ... Hang on, these are not even earnings, I've seen people drop more change and leave it on the floor.

[jbayabas]

Look at that, I just received this little announcement on my adsense homepage:

AdSense achievement
10 years

It's more like an insult. After 10 years, I've come to this. Poor and depressed. Left my high paying job for this sh*t years ago. And this is what I got. The worst decision of my life. I can't bring back time unfortunately. F U Goog!

[RedBar]

@jbayabas

Like me you used to have pretty good earnings, I know what caused my massive reduction, Google's image grab and quite a lot of keyword stuffed sites, do you know what caused yours at all?

[Roman Abramovich]

Well happy days for me so far (not with adsense). Going from £10 - £30 a day with adsense down to £1-£2 a day, I spent a whole day placing affiliate banners where my adsense ads were and yesterday I earned £7 from them, and today over £20 with plenty of hours to go. Had this still been adsense ads I would have made £3 if lucky and been in a not so good mood.

Still nowhere as good as when adsense was playing fair, but a hell of a lot better than £1-2 a day... I doubt this would be so good an alternative for information sites, but mines are primarily product related so I guess this is my way ahead now.

The more I think about it, most of my adsense ads were companies I can just affiliate to now, and I don't need to worry about having crappy looking ads as I am designing all my own banners and using the retailers ones too, and with the added advantage that they all open in a new window, so I retain the visitor even once I send them off.

I have no clue if the affiliate banners can outperform adsense in its prime, far too early, it was so nice getting £10 - £30 a day, but all I know is I am doing the right thing for now while adsense has something wrong with it.

[RedBar]

Inflated PVs back again!

[MrSavage]

Two days ago the earnings turned out to be something that I could live with. However, that was a one day event unfortunately. Google will likely be happy to hear that I'm stripping Adsense (will leave one insignificant Adsense ad) from my main site and replacing entirely with media.net. I will definitely use the forum here to judge whether it's worth putting Adsense back. In other words if I get the sense that there is some type of reversal of fortunes, then I will return. Enough with this for now. If others keep Adsense going full-on, then I will wait for a general sense of recovery before bothering again. My other main site, I'm removing 2 Adsense ads, and will leave 1 ad just to see if this creates earnings magic. I need to somehow address the blank white space where Adsense should be appearing. I would hope that one ad would reduce the chances of getting screwed on the agreement that when I put the code on my page, that it means an ad will actually display. So for me, I'm taking some drastic actions at this point. For everyone hanging in, I await in anticipation for stories of bouncing back. That's what I'm waiting for but in the meantime, F this.

[Roman Abramovich]

GL @ MrSavage. It is a wise thing to do whilst everything is bad. Just look at it like Adsense did not exist and see what other methods you would use. This is good practise for us all anyway, as one day it may very well be gone, or you could be mistakenly banned, best not to have all your eggs in one basket. And, like you say, if things seem to turn good again, you can always put all your ads back on and see how it does for you, by then you might not even want to anyway as you have found better.
This is by far a much better solution than people sitting waiting for things to turnaround, why accept garbage.

[RedBar]

For everyone hanging in, I await in anticipation for stories of bouncing back.

I very much doubt that is going to happen, to be honest I thought I would have removed all forms of advertising by last May/June time however it's kept generating enough to be paid out every month for a few beers as opposed to buying cars and other luxuries a few years back.

I'm not putting any ad slots on new sites however it's easy enough for me to do should I decide to do so plus I have no idea if media.net has any inventory for my widgets ... Is there any way of finding out without signing up?

[breeks]

" replacing entirely with media.net."

My media.net. ads show AdSense ads about 60% of the time :)

[MrSavage]

Yeah? Better than white empty Adsense ad slots though wouldn't you agree?

[RedBar]

The lack of CTR is quite incredulous, my actual PVs are where I would expect them to be on a "normal" day yet clicks are simply not happening ... if this were to continue for the rest of the week it would be quite disconcerting if I were to rely on AdSense for an income.

[JustForAdsense]

Today is noticeably better than every day for the past 3-4 weeks, but still not near what it was for the ~year prior. But it's a start, which is good to see.

[kireb]

And the freefall continues. Very weak Easter weekend compared to last year.

[RedBar]

What a disastrous four days ... my combined earnings from Friday to Monday accounted for 73.56% of one day's average earnings March 1-24, that's an average of 18.39% per day or put another way more than an 81% reduction.

Needless to say at this level AdSense is completely and utterly pointless on my sites however I'll let it run until Thursday night to see if there is any kind of recovery considering it was a long holiday weekend but will it, can it?

With less than 3 months to go to its, and my, 13th anniversary it would be ironic to remove it now ... from hero to zero:-(

[Ironside]

Yesterday was my best day for two or three weeks. I have been slight changes to my ad units, trying them in different places and whether it is starting to pay off is too early to say, but I'm hoping that it will all fall into place soon and I will find the places that work best.

[CommandDork]

Yesterday was my best/biggest earnings day in four weeks. Reduced number of article ads to two (from three) and introduced a new, cleaner layout. So far so good. And summer's coming!

[nubchai]

Yesterday was also a very good day for me. The only change I've made is to use non-responsive ads.

[trebuchet]

A good couple of days for me too. RPM has crept back up towards something approaching normal. Click numbers are still down on average but better than they have been in Jan-Feb. Fingers crossed this is a recovery to normality rather than another temporary surge.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

I had a good day yesterday (Monday), relatively speaking, but today is not looking so good.