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]

On a good note I've had two consecutive days with non-inflated PVs.

[Maleda]

For those of you who check the Ad Review Centre... I tend to take a quick look each morning just to see what the highest serving ads are. For the last three days now the amount of available adverts has been stuck at 107873 and no new ads are appearing, I'd be keen to know if anyone is seeing the same?

[jbayabas]

Yikes, not looking good so far. I promise I won't check my earnings for the day. It's making me depressed.

[EditorialGuy]

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

For some, maybe. Not for all.

It would be interesting to know what kinds of publishers are hurting, and what kinds of publishers are doing well with AdSense. (E.g., advertising-driven sites, news and entertainment sites, niche editorial sites in various sectors, forum sites, e-commerce and affiliate sites that run AdSense ads, etc.)

[trebuchet]

For some, maybe. Not for all.

For some, definitely. The question is, for how many? I suspect the profitable niches like law, medical and financial services are still doing OK. But I also wonder if their CTR has dived like ours.

It's that time of day, yes it's le rouge barre.

[C0DeZeR0]

Red Bar again here .

[RyuUK]

My financial and gambling sites are at 50% CPC. Everyone is in the same boat.

[Runfun]

Google adviced me to run an experiment about using gaming banners or not. There are in % more impressions of gaming banners than % in earnings so I blocked it. My visitors are about 35-50 years old so probably not very interested in games. I made the experiment last week and now it says stopped... but I didn't stop the experiment :-/

I'm using another advertisingnetwork since a few weeks and the CTR is about 4 times more than with Adsense. There's something very wrong with Adsense at the moment and I've no idea if they want to trick us and get the earnings themselves but there are to much signs this smells a bit.

[Vader1206]

Is anyone else having trouble accessing the Adsense dashboard right now?

[MrSavage]

LOL at this. In the past I always knew when a site or sites were offline because Adsense earning just tanked. Whelp, fast forward to the past 3 days. Guess what? About 60% of my main earners, offline. Guess what? I had no real idea. Terrible days don't make me flinch anymore to the point that when my sites are actually offline, I barely notice the drop in my earnings! How fluffy.

[tidewatcher]

@Vader1206 Yes, I was unable to get into my account for a few minutes. Back in now.

[vdR7]

google adsense was down for some minutes...i dont know how many heart attack was happening during this minutes :P

[jbayabas]

Usually Wednesday is my best day of the week. Not today. Unusually low today. Just unbelievable.

[JustForAdsense]

I'm all for hearing potential 'reasons' why RPM's+ are lower now, just...guesses....but this all literally happened over the past ~3 weeks now; and it happened sharply. I *know* I have plenty of rather high paying advertisers. For a fact. And they've been there for the past year+. And we've only been doing better. But ~3 weeks ago, one day i had substantially low earnings compared to the norms for the past few months atleast. Then the following days right after that, were red bar for about a week. Lower and lower. I have absolutely verified my main advertisers are still going at it hard, in fact there's more competitive ads now than I've ever sen before - in general. Yet...lowest earnings I've had in ages.


None of it makes sense. Currently i've began initial tests of relevant ads instead, in some places. Big bonus fact there too is that I can easily make it visible to all users; even the ones using adblock.

[kireb]

Yesterday I only earned 20% of my daily earning after 6 pm US time. This has never been so low. On normal days 40 to 50% of my days earnings come in during these hours. Something off again?

[james_09]

I run a few blogs in the computer game industry as a hobby in my spare time. It's easy for me to directly compare year to date earnings with last year, because of the following:-

- My monthly page views have remained pretty much constant at around 400k-500k a month.
- I only monetise with Adsense.
- I have had exactly the same ad placements for the past year.
- I have not changed any of the default Adsense setting or recommendations i.e. I have not blocked any ads in review centre e.t.c.

My monthly year to date RPM compared to 2015 is as follows:

Jan 16 down 23%
Feb 16 down 3.8%
March 16 - exactly the same as March 15 so far.

So for my sites at least, it appears the start of 2016 was pretty bad, but seems to have recovered. I'll see what happens for the rest of March and April.

[james_09]

Actually I would add that the one thing that has changed since last year is I changed all my sites to mobile responsive. I noticed an increase in the number of clicks, but a decrease in the CPC, resulting in pretty much the same RPM.

[CommandDork]

Sad. This is the first time in 10+ years of using Adsense that I've actually taken impressions away from them because of what's going on now. Nothing has worked - ad placement, editing channel names/descriptions, social media plugs, filtering out garbage ads, going responsive (which they pushed really hard)... Traffic stays strong but Adsense earnings fail to deliver. Seems like the program's total focus now is on reporting and data collection. They have let too many people in and have made it easier to join - which spells disaster for quality. Their dashboard "suggestions" do not equal the estimated results - ever. Programs like Tribal and Media.net have performed better for me since the beginning of the year so they'll be getting more of the ad space for now.

I just cant believe what's become of it. For me the decline can be traced back to mid-December 2015. Thought January would be the bump I needed but it never came. Now I try and remain optimistic that "next month" things will turn around. Doesn't appear to be the case. Three months of data becomes a trend at some point.

I would say that that the online advertising landscape is changing - except other ad networks seem to be producing just fine.

[Ironside]

Red bar for me here

[RedBar]

No red bar for me however I do have inflated PVs.

[nubchai]

No red bar yet. PVs look legit and RPM is pretty good.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Today is looking bad. RPM is low for a Thursday. I'm starting to get desperate. What was once a reliable five-figure monthly income is now less than half of that. The current traffic is a little less than where it was at this time last year, but the earnings are pitiful, particularly for non-U.S. traffic. My next website will not use Adsense.

[RedBar]

Wow, it's a long time since I last had a $6 click, an IBA from the USA, I wonder if it will stick?

Red bar showing now.

[londrum]

when did google get rid of sidebar ads on the SERPs? i remember reading something about the cost going up for first page ads after they did that. maybe that's why everyone's RPMs and clicks have dropped. advertisers are forking out more money on search ads, so there's less for going round on the display network

[breeks]

They dropped the sidebar ads a week or so ago.

They added an additional 4th ad on top.

Something about after testing they found this arrangement a "better user experience."

What they really found out was they could get more clicks on the ads and charge more money removing sidebar ads

Decision was all about $$$, nothing to do with user experience

[breeks]

Increase your earnings by allowing Google to show ads within your Matched content units. These ads will be styled to complement the look and feel of the recommended articles.

Matched content units with or without ads don't count towards your Google content ad limit per page.

Outbrain vs Adsense

[JustForAdsense]

Yeah they're recommending to use their mobile page ads now 'that only show at times they think theyll perform well', and i see that matched content deal too - even though i dont currently use matched content.

Sorry, Google, I'm not going to continue to plaster my site with ads in hopes of a few more bucks, when this exact setup made me SIGNIFICANTLY more just weeks back (and for the months before that), and not only that but the relevant organic traffic has largely increased since then...

Show me the earnings back to normal, then i may consider implementing some other ad units that you 'recommend'.

[Mentat]

Well.. I had 2 days of good CPM/CPC.
The good CPM/CPC are on each important country, so It's clearly "Google GOD goodwill", nothing natural, exactly how it was -40% since 1st of January 2016!

This is the third day and the good will seems to vanish.

[RedBar]

What can I say, my best day since 22nd April 2015!

Nope, I don't believe things are changing for the better:-(

[netmeg]

I'm happy enough just leaving the one AdSense ad unit on each page. I'm now testing serving AdSense just for desktop and Facebook Audience Network ads to mobile across all my sites. Apparently the FB ads take a while to ramp up while they find your audience and figure out what to show them. Interesting experiment as I head towards July.