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.

[MrSavage]

Regarding blank ads, I'm using FF. I literally have to refresh more than 5 times in a row to see an ad appear on one of my main sites.

Earning wise, I've seen some more "normal" earnings the past couple days. Today looks to have a bit of life in it as well. I'm not saying things are back to normal, but it's encouraging and I'm a tad hopeful right now. I've seen enough daily reports to get a feel for dead, flat lining, broken and "normal".

[kireb]

I am seeing blank rectangle ads too. Also, I keep blocking certain ads that are taking up prime spots and have absolutely zero relevance and they keep popping up. Almost virus like. Could this be a cache problem?

Good Sunday btw with a almost decent US RPM.

[jbayabas]

Back down the drain. Looks like the redesign only helped for a few weeks. Oh well...

[filbiz]

No, I completely redesigned the sites. Same ad sizes but different ad placements. I gave the "half page" ad size 300x600 more prominence and placed 2 "large rectangle" ads 336x280 in the middle of the homepage.

Thanks Jbayabas for the tips. I think you have a point since I tried rearranging my ads and it has an improvement but after a day or two the earnings goes down again.

[frankleeceo]

The more repeat visitors you get, the more likely that ad placement redesign's effect is temporary.

I design my pages where the ads get max visibility while still maintaining usability. I do testing once in a while, and I finally stick with a template that I more or less place with all of my sites. I tweak the placement depending on the sites and pages, and I make judgement calls where the visitors might have max chance of exiting my pages, and I put ads at those locations. Work for me, I stopped at stressing about the heatmaps and such, only take in those advices as advices only, and went with what actually happens with my properties, and try to find the balance between pleasing my users and $.

Seeing an improvement of RPM's this past couple of days. But average of the month is still roughly the same as February.

Diversifying more sites to serve Facebook's ads and some other networks where make sense. Facebook seems to be approving subsequent domains much faster after the initial approval.

[breeks]

Getting a Google AD that reads TEST, 2 of them on a page

Brilliant. I sure this will get a great CTR

[RedBar]

Shhhh, no inflated PVs today ... As yet!

[nubchai]

March is shaping up to be the best month this year.

[JustForAdsense]

Adsense targeting fails of the day! No wonder our RPM's are in the gutter. Unreal.



1) "Get Google Chrome" ad, on my site (which has *plenty* of advertisers targeting it i know for a fact)..........wait for it............and im literally using google chrome right now. Wow gj.


2) Completely foreign ads when I don't speak that language. It is an english site....

[MrSavage]

The cynical part of me looks at my declines and asks this question to myself...Is it at all possible that they are just "testing" to see how they could hold together (Adwords) if the publishers went away or at least say, 70% to 80%? I mean this type of decline I'm having as well as others, Google would certainly have some solid data to look at. Afterall, whatever is on or not showing up on my ad slots is such DS that nobody is clicking and for all intents and purposes my account is next to dead at this point. Sometimes getting an answer to the question of "what would happen if we lost 70% of our publisher ad slots"? Nothing is too far fetched in my opinion. If this was me, and if I'm an example of the rule and not the exception, why not look to see how the whole advertising system holds together when no payouts or ads are being clicked on smaller publishers sites. I sure the heck would take the opportunity to look at the data. The debate of course is that it's a fluke or some random crash or just a 10% that is getting hammered. I can only speak for myself but I'm comfortable thinking a majority or doing worse from what I've observed. I will remain cynical until there is some public acknowledgement about a problem, or explanation why the ads are either bizarre or are simply showing blank. I don't think I had an agreement that said 50% of the time those spots would be blank.

[RedBar]

Well below average day for me on Monday with very low CTR from the USA, so far this month I have had seven days with identical click volumes ... hmmm ... I ain't mentioning the c..ling word.

[breeks]

Google Publisher satisfaction bi-annual survey is out time to tell they what you think. Not that it matters.

[C0DeZeR0]

Red bar appear ..

[Ironside]

And here

[nubchai]

Red bar here too. I was expecting it because numbers seemed under-reported this morning.

[Maleda]

Red bar here too!

[netmeg]

No red bar here.

Also I went into the Ad Review Center today; normally I just browse the image ads because those are usually the ones that have the most potential to offend. But most of them are HTML5 and the preview doesn't work for me (in three different browsers) on HTML5 ads. Anyone else having that issue? It basically takes away the ability to preview the ads at all.

[MrSavage]

Sad right now looking at the total earnings from last 30 days. Just astonishing. I would be looking at 7 or 8 of these months to be at an amount that I would have from just 1 cheque 8 months ago. I'm going to send in an inquiry about the blank ad spots and see where that takes things.

[Runfun]

Maybe we can send somehow somewhere a message to Google because recent days it's ridiculous with the CTR and CPM. My CTR reduced by 50% in 2 weeks. It's a scam but as a monopoly in the land of advertisement we have not much other opportunities.

[jbayabas]

Yeah, it's incredibly sad. What I currently earn in a month, I could easily make in just five days in the past.

Looks like there's no hope in sight. I've finally accepted that Adsense is no longer as lucrative as it used to be. It's time to move on...

[breeks]

Someone in the upper ranks of Google decided why should we share all this money with publishers when we can keep it for ourselves.


And they did.

[nubchai]

I have a red bar and RPM is much down from yesterday

[kireb]

I am having problems with ad serving on most of my pages. Lot of blank ads. Not good.

[Runfun]

I was thinking about several reasons that earnings drop that much:

1) Increase in publishers that all are trying to earn money so they are each others competition.

2) Decrease in advertisers because Adwords is sometimes suspicious and more advertisers I know are advertising directly because of lower costs.

But those 2 reasons would be something that will develop in a longer time than just a few weeks. The new advices of increasing your earnings are somehow insulting because most publishers are experienced and some 'improvements' won't make you earn more money. Besides Google grabs about 43% of what the advertiser pays for CPC or CPM.

[Runfun]

I was thinking about several reasons that earnings drop that much:

1) Increase in publishers that all are trying to earn money so they are each others competition.

2) Decrease in advertisers because Adwords is sometimes suspicious and more advertisers I know are advertising directly because of lower costs.

But those 2 reasons would be something that will develop in a longer time than just a few weeks. The new advices of increasing your earnings are somehow insulting because most publishers are experienced and some 'improvements' won't make you earn more money. Besides Google grabs about 43% of what the advertiser pays for CPC or CPM.

[EditorialGuy]

Besides Google grabs about 43% of what the advertiser pays for CPC or CPM.

Google's actual share is 32% for ads on content pages and 49% for search ads.

[trebuchet]

@Runfun, those factors would certainly explain a gradual decline in metrics and earnings. But as discussions here show, the drop in Adsense CTR/CPM has occurred virtually overnight. It has all the signs of a deliberate change in policy. Someone at Google flipped a switch that tightened click validation and stopped 30-50% of raw clicks being paid out to publishers. And possibly flipped another switch that funnelled higher CPC ads away from the publisher network and onto Google web properties.

Google's actual share is 32% for ads on content pages

We're still getting 68% of the pie. It's just that Google is serving up much smaller pies.

[kireb]

My March earnings are down by 40% compared to last year. When I check my site in different countries, I see a lot of non relevant ads and sometimes blank ads on prime positions. Something is broken in the system since end January. This drop is too strong and too many publishers are complaining.

[breeks]

"serving up much smaller pies"

We are getting the crumbs from the pie, and having to fight for them :)

[trebuchet]

My March earnings are down by 40% compared to last year.

Same here. Numbers for the first half of March 2016 vs 2015:

Traffic up 10%
Clicks down 48%
US clicks down 60% (WTF?)
RPM down 45%
Earnings down 40%

A pitiful month by any measure.