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.

[nubchai]

Hello red bar. It's been a while since you showed up to screw up my stats :( (US)

[Mentat]

Red bar on my account...
The problem is that in the last weeks, after red bar, there is almost no recovery!

[nubchai]

Yes Mentat. Once I get the red bar everything slows down and I usually have a poor earnings day.

[RedBar]

WooHoo G, you're going for it today!

1 click from UAE
1 click from India

That's one heck of a fall from 40+ per hour ... I'm still surprised you're not charging me for displaying your totally irrelevant ads!

[super70s]

(24 hrs. later) Well now instead of the wrong size Adsense ad loading on the home page, a custom 728x90 Amazon ad I made up as an Adsense alternate loads.

But when you click on it, nothing happens and the area goes blank.

I guess that's some kind of progress.

[Runfun]

Google Adsense is becoming a complete joke, reliability is gone and years of hard work to improve CTR/CPM could be vanished within weeks. Look at my CTR drops without any reason: [i68.tinypic.com...]

My CTR is low but I've a community with about 150K visitors a month but just cutting the half of the CTR in a few weeks is unbelievable. I also noticed the red bar last days but in the past there was a recovery of some nice money but now just a few cents :'-) Problem is there's no alternative, Facebook/Yahoo where trying to set up an advertisement programm like Adsense but I've no idea what alternatives I've for a Dutch website.

[nomis5]

My websites are doing fine this month as far as Adsense is concerned. But I have just viewed my key website on my small mobile (comparatively by today's standards, 312 px type wide) and seen an appallingly misleading Adsense ad.

It's very simple; in big bold blue letters at the top (350 x 250) it says:

(1) Alert Pending

This is followed underneath by:

Tap to read now. Your
attention is required.

Followed by a big arrow.


This is totally misleading and seems to be designed to appear as if the message is sent from my website.

I haven't followed the ads on my websites which appear on mobiles too closely for the last few months but if this type of misleading advert appears too often, that's it for Adsense on my websites when viewed from mobiles.

Ads of that kind are seriously damaging to my reputation. I have far better affiliate ads to take their place.

[avalon37]

AdSense has likely hit the bottom. I keep ads on 1 site just out curiosity at this point, but it's not the same program anymore. Switch officially flipped in Jan/Feb. Ads for the most part completely unrelated, pricing they are paying out plummeting, etc. For a while, one site I managed was $100K every month like clock work until around last fall. If I hadn't pulled ads from AdSense and replaced with OpenX my earnings would be approx. 20% of what they were just 5 months ago.

As someone who has been to multiple Premium Publisher conventions, and had what was considered basically the highest level of account management outside of sites like NY TImes, AdSense was, and will always be, an underfunded and cast of malcontents as a business division at Google. I mean I had some smart account managers Stanford MBA's that couldn't wait to be transferred into Adwords from AdSense. While I know some of the inside secrets from close relationships with past account managers, I hardly know enough to write any type of tell all book. And the account managers knew nothing there (and now I'm sure know even less). But someday the truth will come out about AdSense fraud - I guarantee it.

[MrSavage]

I could post my earnings from yesterday and today and compare this to say, 5 months ago? A year ago? I would never convince you that it was real. You would be suggesting my server is down, or there was an outage of some type. I'm not looking at a 50% drop right now, it's more like 80%+. What a completely bizarre circumstance here.

[jbayabas]

But someday the truth will come out about AdSense fraud - I guarantee it.

I always knew something fraudulent is going on with Adsense especially beginning in early 2015. I was earning so high and then it quickly collapsed to less than 70% and now less than 85%. I can accept a deduction of 20% or even 50%. But 70%. It's preposterous. A complete robbery! And yet google's stocks continue to rise. I'm sure because of the money they stole from us they're able to lie to investors about their skyrocketing profits.

I have been using another ad network for over a year now which is more targeted to my niche alongside Adsense and for the first time last month it surpassed my Adsense earnings. I have not tried yet removing Adsense completely because the other network has a very low fill rate. Can you believe even with a low fill rate, it still surpassing my Adsense earnings. Unbelievable!

[MrSavage]

In light of these earnings, I have taken the bad, and done good. Time to do things in life that I had been putting off and that is making this demise a bit more tolerable. In addition, I've be zero time into my adsense reliant sites, so in that sense, I will make a few nickles and dimes for doing nothing at all. If rot can pay, then I'll take beer money for that. Adsense has really altered my reality on what I've been doing over the years. No question of that. A lot of sites of mine are worthless without an Adsense type of monetization, which leave a bit of writing skill as being the only residual value from the time invested in them.

[kireb]

My UK RPM is on par with India these days and US RPM doesn't even appear in the top 5 of countries anymore. Maybe change the language format of my sites in Chines or Spanish.

[ken_b]

A little slower than I'd like.

[Macedonian]

Hello to everyone. I've been reading you for quite a long time and I would like to thank all of you for posting your sincere experiences with Adsense. It helps a lot to anyone who's wondering how things are going with Adsense.
This is my first month with Adsense. I got approved on February 28-th and started serving ads on March 1-st.
I would appreciate if some of you (more experienced publishers) tell me how I'm doing.
16,149 pageviews, 41,324 impressions, 101 clicks, page RPM 0.51$, impressions RPM 0.19$, Active view viewable 56,4% and you can calculate my earnings.
I know I'm not allowed to post link to my website so...
My website doesn't have a specific niche, it's based on articles sorted in categories (Life,People,Technology,Science,Nature,Sports...)
The website is responsive,quite well designed with bootstrap and mediaqueries to fit any possible device as good as possible. I placed max of 3 ads per page and I experimented with Responsive ads, 300x250,728x90,300x600,250x250,text link... but the results are more or less the same.
I have SSL/HTTPS sertificate, over 50% of the traffic comes from USA, 12% from Australia, 7% From Canada. No indian,malaysian,indonesian... visitors at all. Most of the traffic comes from social networks (75%) and the rest is from search engines. I do not use any paid traffic. I'm not involved in any click schemes,spamming or anything illegal.
Are these numbers a standard these days or am I under performing big time?
Thank you, all of you in advance.

[trebuchet]

Macedonian, welcome. Those figures are about what I'd expect given your situation and given the funk that Adsense publishers are currently in. Two initial observations and suggestions:

1. Try to increase your organic search results. Social media traffic converts at a much lower rate than other forms of traffic.

2. Your active view viewable numbers are fairly low. Visitors are only seeing a little over half your ads. Review your placements to see if you can improve this. I think 70% is a reasonable figure to aim for.

Good luck.

[Macedonian]

Thank you for your responce. I'm thinking about switching back to HTTP (removing my SSL sertificate) because I've read a lot about Adsense SSL related decrease in revenue. To be honest, I was hoping to earn much more that this so I invested in SSL, expensive and fast CDN network, Virtual Private Server etc... Now, I see that my earnings wont pay all those bills. :) Although I have a steady increase in my websites's visitors, I really doubt if I will be able to make my website profitable untill this time next year :) It's frustrating... I invested 6 months of my time and couple of hundreds of dollars, so I must succeed now. Failure is not an option for me. Therefore, I'm very thankful to all of you helping me with your suggestions. Thank you a lot.

[trebuchet]

No problem. I've read a little about SSL impacting on Adsense earnings, but I haven't researched it thoroughly because I don't have an SSL site.

Most of the people here, including me, got into Adsense when it was a gold mine. All you needed was a decent website and the money rolled in. Starting off on Adsense today is much more difficult. It can be months or years before you start seeing any decent earnings. All I can suggest is to try and stay positive.

[Ironside]

Is it a good idea to create custom channels for individual countries? If so, how do I do it?

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Does anyone know what the average lag time is between a visitor clicking on a link and then the value of that click showing up in earnings?

[RedBar]

what the average lag time is

I'd say about 30 minutes.

[Mentat]

@Ironside - you already have reports by contry...

[Mentat]

I wish I had a red bar...
Very poor payment.

[KaseyM]

Absolutely awful today. CTR at .2 less than normal, CPC down by almost half. Doesn't help that our traffic is a bit lower this week too.

I have to say, while there's benefits of living of off this type of revenue. But I do envy those who have stable daily income.

[trebuchet]

I've had a surge in EPC/RPM today, as often happens around the 9th of the month. I'm still only at three quarters of average RPM though.

[kireb]

I am 25% down compared to March 2015 so far, RPM and earnings. Red bar seems to be on and off today.

[MrSavage]

Holy sh!t. Just checking one of my "reliable" adsense earning sites. The 336 ad units are showing? Blank space. This is what I say a number of days ago. I utilize this ad size on a lot of locations, on a few sites. Clearly this could be some explanation? What I never see with Adsense on my sites (previously when earnings would at least respectable) is blank, empty spots. I haven't done anything different, so surely this must be a bug/glitch/explanation. I dunno. Anyone else seeing blanks where normally there shouldn't be? I had to refresh the page around 5 times to get one 336 ad to show up. Every other refresh there was a blank space. Epic fail.

[trebuchet]

It's particularly worrying if the 336x280s are showing blank space, as I believe they backfill with 300x250 if there's no suitable inventory.

I have seen some blank ads here and there. Google has removed the fill rate metric but AVV figures are down by a few percent, which suggests that some slots aren't being filled.

[kireb]

I had some issues with the big rectangles (336 x 280) last week showing blanks. For today I've had a red bar most of the (US) evening and stats moving at turtle speed. My sites are taking a beating this month.

[Ironside]

March hasn't been brilliant, I'm a little bit behind average. Yesterday picked up quite a lot and it wasn't a bad day. I'm experimenting with a responsive ad placed underneath the first paragraph of text on some articles. Looks good on a desktop because it displays as a 728 x 90 banner, on a mobile either displays as a small mobile banner, or rectangle. I only put them in place yesterday, had a few clicks and even made a few pence from just displaying and no clicks.

[s205.photobucket.com]

[s205.photobucket.com]

[edited by: Ironside at 10:24 am (utc) on Mar 10, 2016]

[jbayabas]

Really good yesterday. And today, it's quite high - the same numbers I used to earn 3-5 years ago. I'm not sure if these are true or if I'm just being click bombed.

I redesigned my sites this past few weeks. I hope the high earning has something to do with it. Oh please I hope so!