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.

[Roman Abramovich]

Does anyone think with Adsense your earnings are pre-determined.

Let me briefly explain why I think this.

When earnings suck and say your earning £1-£2 a day, you can pretty much guarantee you make £1-£2 every day in that period. Wait a week later and great, things seem to have improved, your now making £4-£5 a day, you can pretty much guarantee you make £4-£5 every day in this period. Now earnings are completely back to normal, your making £10-£12 every day. you can pretty much guarantee you make this amount each and every day.

This happens to everyone I know and have talked to about it, and throughout this traffic is always consistently the same.

Now do you not find it suspicious that when the earnings are low, you don't get a random high day, or when high you don't get a random low day? Why on Earth does everything remain so steady with Adsense, this should not happen on a pay-per-click platform, it should fluctuate much more but it doesn't.

Am I the only person here which finds that quite suspicious.
With Adsense I can almost predict what my earnings will be based on how that period of time is progressing, it's so easy to see. You cant do this with anything else, you can't predict affiliate earnings, only Adsense.

How can someone with the same amount of traffic go from a really low £1-£2 every day, to then another specified range, to then other ranges, it all just seems so pre-determined.

Another factor which draws me to this conclusion is that when I am in this pre-determined earnings range, I may do something and have a spike in traffic, say perhaps 1000 extra visitors than normal, but this does not increase the avg amount I know I will be earning.

So the next time you get really low earnings, well you know it's not for a day, and be happy the next time you get high earnings as that will last until the next change, and be grateful for the time you have when somewhere in the middle. It really doesn't matter what you do with anything as it's not in your hands.

The solution, drop your Adsense when your account has been set for low earnings, and put back on when back to medium-high. It will only take one day to know where you are at, if results are good for that day your in a good period, if bad, check back in a week or so.

You notice how some are reporting being good again, same with my friends I talk to on Skype about this. I quickly switched from affiliate to Adsense to see, and I am now too in a happy-medium zone so Adsense will remain (nothing changed with traffic at all). When it drops again I will switch back to affiliates, this is only way to combat this I feel. It's all about playing with the pre-determined rules set for you.

And stop playing with your ads, Most people know what is best for their site. These pre-determined rules make people change everything up, just stick to what you know is the very best even if earnings suck really bad, it will make no impact at all, and can actually make things much worse. You are being led into making changes thinking it's your ads which need altered, it 100% is not. Always keep what works.

[edited by: Roman_Abramovich at 10:44 pm (utc) on Mar 29, 2016]

[londrum]

that's just normal advertiser spend. Advertisers spend more money at certain times of the year, or certain days of the week, depending on your subject. If advertisers are spending more money and bidding more, then obviously your earnings will go up -- even if you have exactly the same traffic.

As soon as the school holidays come to an end, or the weekend ends -- or whatever the advertiser's period is -- your earnings will go back down again

[edited by: londrum at 10:40 pm (utc) on Mar 29, 2016]

[Roman Abramovich]

@londrum That's Google Adsense talk... We have been brainwashed to have a reason for every possible outcome which happens, and we are silenced, like you must not talk about earnings etc. You are right, of course budgets vary, seasonal things comes in to play, but this does not explain everything. What about the sites which are not so seasonal (mines are not), this happens to them, it should not be so extreme, I see the top advertisers on my site through the bad periods and the great periods, they are always there.

Everyone will have their on theories, that's mine. And even if not true, at least it's a pretty good practise to follow, only have Adsense when you like the earnings, and switch to an alternative when you don't ;)

[avalon37]

Roman Abramovich, yes what you are described (essentially earnings buckets or caps) has been discussed here in the recent past. I believe that it exists; 100% believe it. Let's say my average daily earnings is X; many days I may login around 11am and I am at or about "X" amount. I almost never earn any more that day (according to AdSense stats). Has happened so many times in the last year that I believe it is more than a coincidence. Of course since things have bottomed out so dramatically the last few months it's harder to spot the "great" days that Google "extinguishes" by way of daily earnings caps. But if there was a head of AdSense and he/she was told the truth, I feel very confident that they would admit to earnings caps (for publishers...not AdSense of course).

[Roman Abramovich]

@avalon Exactly, that's what I sort of meant by the part when I said even if I got a spike of traffic my avg would not get higher. Like you, say avg earnings were £5 a day and you hit that early on by lunch time, then expect nothing much to come for the remainder of the day, even if your site is busy, this is simply due to your pre-determined amount being made earlier than normal, 100% what you say, this happens with mine also ;)

[trebuchet]

Hmm, I just responded to Roman's post on the French media adblocking thread, where he says he blocks all the "stupid ads". And here he is giving advice on Adsense publishing. No conflict of ideals there Roman?

Another good day today. That makes four in a row. No doubt there's an earnings precipice looming and I'm about to fall off it.

[go4it]

@Roman Abramovich, Yes - Me too. The past few weeks has been almost a mirror of each other, and many times in the past. I must say however, there are many factors that will affect each individual site. Nobody knows our sites and our personal activities like ourselves. Honestly, if I want something to change I just add some new fresh content (daaa). Notably, many things of the past do not work, and actually cause a possible penalty. Things we were told to do in the past will now kick you out of the ball game. These days, mobile is a REAL problem due to low click through if they are not using ad blocker. I actually decided against making my site mobile friendly because revenue was worse than ever.

[JS_Harris]

I actually decided against making my site mobile friendly because revenue was worse than ever.

Dude you have no idea... I actually looked for a way to make Google remove all of my content from any mobile search but alas that's not possible. I did it with Image search by declaring noimageindex and several positive things happened

- Improved 'web' results, presumably because images no longer compete from the 'related images' position of web serps
- Far less scraping of content, it seems scrapers have an affinity for content with images and often come in on image search
- Less bandwidth served, web visits converted 100x better than image visits after Google's image search re-design.

If only Google would go ahead and fully segregate mobile vs desktop so I can tell Google not to rank my site for mobile I would do that too. Using the same content on both desktop and mobile, even if mobile friendly, just isn't optimal because one has a ranking effect on the other.

[Juniya]

For all of you who oppose Mobile users because of low conversations, you might have a point, and you might be right but in the end you are fighting a pointless battle that you will not win.

The world is going more and more mobile and the behavior is, more and more mobile users are are buying products online, this is the trend that google has noticed. So the more you try to tell Google's search engine to ignore mobile users from reaching your content, Google won't like that and you will sooner or later regret that decision. It's just the way these things go. Google will continue to push mobile importance at the cost of everything until they figure out how to balance it right.

If you try to somehow cut off your mobile users you will again, sooner or later lose ranking and it will be your web site that suffers in the end. The best is to start to learn how to adapt to mobile users at all costs. I have been working on this and for the past few 3-4 weeks I now have a very high RPM for my mobile users after I made user the site looks perfect on most mobile devices! Suddenly the mobile users are starting to convert and traffic from mobile users is up 200% from 2015 at the same time.

My desktop users still make me well over 80% of my funds but mobile, with a fraction of the traffic has already grabbed 20% and I cant complain, not yet.

[Roman Abramovich]

@trebuchet Are you mental? You think because I make money with something I cant block the ads. I don't even view the ads on my own sites, big deal. I am sure millions of people promote Amazon but have never shopped at the site, get over yourself son ;)

[trebuchet]

You think because I make money with something I cant block the ads.

No, what I think is that if you make money from ads then blocking ads yourself is contradictory, if not hypocritical.

I wasn't saying you can or you can't. Clearly you can because you are. I was just wondering how you reconcile the two.

And I'm not young enough to be your son... unless you happen to be in your late 70s...

[Ironside]

Forgive me if this is kind of obvious, but why would you want to disable Google AdSense on your mobile websites? That kind of sounds a bit mad, especially if most of your visitors use a mobile device to visit you?

[Roman Abramovich]

@trebuchet I think you are hypocritical to believe that people who make money from Adsense should not use an ad blocker if they want to. Show me the TOS where I cant do this, or where it says it's bad etiquette. What is the next rule, because I put a eBay banner on my site I must buy all my goods from their, or am I hypocritical for promoting eBay but never using their website?

There is zilch wrong with anyone using ad blocker regardless of if they use Adsense to earn revenue or not. I guarantee Google employers use ad blocker too.

[Ironside]

Would publishers be aware that the site has an ad blocker in place? If the ad blocker is purely for the website owners benefit but doesn't actually block adverts to anybody else visiting the website then there's nothing wrong with that. However, what gives the website owner the right to dictate what adverts his visitors see?

The only adverts I have a big problem with other ones that suddenly obscure the screen after 30 seconds, you then got to either wait 10 seconds before you can close the advert, or you got to try and find a tiny little cross somewhere to close the advert. In circumstances like that I am all for ad blockers. But when Google AdSense is placed properly it shouldn't inhibit the users time on the website.

[Roman Abramovich]

It's really common for website owners who run Adsense to have ad blocker on anyway, it's good so you never click on your ads whilst working, and why have them on anyway, you cant click your own ads.

@ironside The website owner can dictate whatever adverts he wants his visitors to see, it's their website. The visitor has the choice to leave and never come back if not happy.

[Ironside]

I don't really see the point of having AdSense or any adverts on your website if you are going to block them, why not just not have them altogether?

[Roman Abramovich]

@ironside Because you would not make any revenue if you never had them on! It's ok for me not to look at them, I cant click them anyway, but I want them to be of use to my visitors and to make revenue from them.

[Ironside]

Sorry, I must have misunderstood you. I thought that you had put an ad blocker in so that your visitors were not seeing the ads.

[RyuUK]

Things have improved in the past few days, but it has come too late to save this hellish month. Roll on April.

[Roman Abramovich]

@Ironside No problem, I wondered what you were talking about :)

[jbayabas]

Good day today. Surprisingly.

[trebuchet]

There is zilch wrong with anyone using ad blocker regardless of if they use Adsense to earn revenue or not.

There's nothing "wrong" with it. Nobody is telling you you can't block ads. I just find it odd and I'm sure other publishers here do too. Particularly given your comments elsewhere that you block ads because they "annoy" you. Why someone would operate a business model based on something they find insufferably annoying is beyond me.

For one thing, I don't block ads because I like to see how they appear on my sites and how they're being used (or misused) by other publishers. I consider it competitor research.

[Mentat]

Hmmm, yesterday was goodish, but I see chinese text ads on my site.

[go4it]

Sure, I see how mobile is the future, and is the Now, but I have had acceptable mobile revenue for years until the recent push to make the site mobile friendly, and after I did everything changed and went to heck. The View factor that has come into play really screwed things up as well. I personally think that was a big mistake for GGL, they basically shot themselves in the foot. And, there is the on going issue of ad blocker, now more than ever before. For example, I get traffic to India (which I would love to block) and it produces nothing, well maybe 0.25 at the most. CPC and CTR is very low. I venture to guess that the majority of these India made $10 mobile phones come stocked with ad blocker. This whole thing is way out of wack. My revenue is down 80% - that's just nuts.

On another note - and I would love to see a forum about this: If there was ever a time when website owners need a UNION, NOW IS THE TIME. For many, our websites are a business and serious income, until a few years ago, and we have virtually NO representation. Like some of you, I am now earning WAY BELOW minimum wage compared to a hourly job - and that's just crazy, in fact it is a disgrace for the quality content I provide. If a Union could understand how to represent us with these issues we are face with I would join up in a heartbeat.

[Roman Abramovich]

@trebucket You're missing the point entirely, on the other thread I said that I got ad blocker because the ads annoyed me on YouTube, prior to them putting stupid 15-30 sec ads on YouTube videos I had not needed an ad blocker before so Google sort of shot themselves in the foot as I imagine millions got ad blocker because of this, and these people do not filter it out so it then doesn't work on other sites. Putting ads on before watching a YouTube video was the worse thing they could have done, who really wants a 30 second ad to watch a 2 minute video, it's not practical. This is what made ad blocker popular in the first place, this is what happens when you piss people off with annoying ads, nobody needs to be annoyed by them and we would not be in this situation now. So well done Google on that front :p

I block ads on my own website because 1) I do not need to see them as I cant click them anyway, and 2) It stops me from accidentally clicking on them whilst working. I ask that my workers place ad blocker on too so they do not click ads accidentally.

I don't see any issue with any of this at all ;) And by the way for you to say you have them on for competitor research does not make any sense, you have all day just to look at your ads on your site? You do all this from inside your Adsense account, this is where all the info is, not by staring at your adverts all day live on site.

[trebuchet]

So well done Google on that front :p

You don't get it, do you? This is not just you vs. Google. Youtube raises a lot more revenue for content creators than it does for Google. That's why you can watch/listen to just about every song ever recorded on Youtube, because Google offers them a system for monetisation.

Do you actually create the content on your Adsense sites, Roman? Or do you aggregate or curate content created by others? Or something else? Your indifference to content creators suggests that you aren't one.

And by the way for you to say you have them on for competitor research does not make any sense, you have all day just to look at your ads on your site?

Where did I say anything about doing this "all day"? I wander about the web occasionally and I like to see what other publishers and creators are doing advertising-wise. If I blocked ads then I wouldn't know. Do the ads I see annoy me? Yeah sometimes. I take lessons from sites that use advertising in an inappropriate or eye-bashing way.

You do all this from inside your Adsense account, this is where all the info is

Most of the info is there, just not what the finished package looks like. When you own or run a high street shop and you dress the window, you don't just do it from the inside. You go out into the street and look in. You also look at other store windows.

[Roman Abramovich]

My content is completely my own, how you got to the conclusion that because I block ads on YouTube (and other places) it now also means I must not create unique content on any of my sites. You sir are full of theories and talk absolute nonsense. Your last theory before this one was that because I block ads I should not run Adsense on my sites ha ha.

Leave it as that, your next theory will be because I use Adsense I am hypocritical for not putting on Chikita ads or something mental like that.

[RyuUK]

I think you 2 should have a hug.

[trebuchet]

You sir are full of theories and talk absolute nonsense.

Well if that's true it would appear I am in good company.

[MrSavage]

Disgusting. Just over one F'ing dollar for an entire day yesterday. In the recent past I can say I would be about 12x to 15x what I made yesterday, consistently for YEARS. One F'ing dollar and a few cents. Many sites, many ads. It's extremely difficult to post an amount like that, but there is no other place where I can say it. I've never stated how poor days have been in the past. However, this really does speak volumes.