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]

Interesting experiment as I head towards July.

As a pure matter of interest v overall traffic, do you get many referrals from FB?

[azlinda]

I get very few referrals from FB - perhaps one click on the website per week. As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth having a FB page for my website.

[scottb]

FB clickthroughs depend in part on the site category. Newspaper sites have enormous clickthroughs from Facebook with some getting more than 50% of their total traffic from FB pages -- even more than Google organic.

Then they either sell the inventory to local advertisers or fill it with AdSense.

[netmeg]

do you get many referrals from FB?

Yes; my FB pages each have between 500 and 10,000 fans depending on how old the site is, and I set up Hootsuite to post event reminders almost daily. That brings a fair amount of traffic (although, obviously, nowhere near as much as it used to since FB slashed reach unless you pay for it)

But Facebook Audience Network ads are FB ads that run on *my* sites. Only on mobile though. Presumably they're using that superior targeting. One hopes anyway.

[magician]

Thursday and Friday were bad in terms of earnings - almost down by 20% w.r.t. last week's.

[WhoKnows111]

I've been reading this forum from time to time, but now I registered to share the sh*t that happened to me too

This is my best earning site in highly competitive finance niche

The drop happened from Dec 13th ... apparently the advertisers decided Worldwide to pay 50% less for ads

Nov 1 to Dec 12

1.29% CTR
$2.17 CPC

February

1.34% CTR
$1.37 CPC

March

1.32% CTR
$1.21 CPC

[trebuchet]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, @WhoKnows111. My plunge started right on Christmas. Christmas Day was abysmal (no surprise, it usually is). It rebounded on Boxing Day but has been all downhill since then.

Interesting that your CTR has remained fairly constant. Most seem to be reporting a big drop in clicks as well as EPC.

[Kurt4413]

Hey guys,
After following the forum for a while, I've finally decided to sign up and see if anyone else is having a similar issue... Other than the rough revenue.

Over the course of the past few days, I've watched my Active View Viewable percentage tank from mid 30% range down to as low as 2.75% for one ad in particular. The weird part? Clicks haven't dropped and in some cases increased, and so have my earnings. So, I almost feel it might be a glitch?

Anyone else experiencing this?

[RyuUK]

Could this be the worst AdSense month on record? My CTR has now climbed back up to its average state, but what hasn't changed has been the poor CPC rates. It is now at around 50% (across all niches) and so I now have to double up. This has been less viable since Google's spammy SERP layout was rolled out (rankings are as they were) . It also feels like newer sites take much longer to gain trust these days. Content heavy used to always hit the long tails, but they are lucky to now get the crumbs. I hope things improve for everyone, but as I've said before it has become a bit of a minefield. You just don't know what's coming next.

[kireb]

My RPM is creeping up a bit the last couple of days. Thursday and Friday still lower than last year's average, but Saturday right on the ball. Decent Saturday with decent earnings.

[RedBar]

I had a whole bunch of very low paying clicks from the USA yesterday that really dragged earnings below average, click volume bang on average.

[nubchai]

I have to say my sites are having a good month. Rpms are back up and revenues are good. The only change I made is I changed all of my FB ads to non-responsive. They still display well on mobile because I'm using a responsive theme on each of them.

[nubchai]

Ooops "FB ads" should be "Adsense ads."

[RedBar]

Sunday had my lowest-ever click volume, this does not bode well for the Easter holidays.

[jbayabas]

Sadness. :(

[tidewatcher]

I don't post much here, but check in occasionally. Just to say that I've been experiencing pretty much the same as a lot of people are reporting here with a big drop off in adsense RPM since the beginning of the year. Lately I have been experimenting with Amazon CPM and Media.net, and for the last couple of days those two sources combined have been generating more ad revenue than adsense. I don't plan on dropping adsense, but although I don't like what I'm seeing with adsense, I'm glad to be able to balance things out somewhat with other networks.

[jbayabas]

I notice a drop in fill rate. I see a lot of blank ads these days. Really bad. Even the other network I run is surpassing my Adsense daily earning now. I'm just in shock.

[breeks]

Last four days have seen a bump from horrible to barely adequate. Other networks are doing good to very good.

[romerome]

For people seeing a drop in RPM. Have any of you looked at times of day. I have noticed my rpm in the morning starts off great. Then it declines as the day goes on. It would be interesting to see if the drop can be attributed to the later hours in the day performing poorly.

For my site its going to the point where the revenue generated after 6pm is trivial compared to the early morning afternoon revenue. Traffic is relatively even throughout the day.

[Mentat]

The payment is big for US/UK in the daytime. It will decrease and reach minimum when Asia, Africa and East Europe is active.

The problem is that the US payment is were low since December!

[romerome]

Yeah I could see that happening for a site with a global audience. My traffic is 97%+ U.S. So non us traffic is not really a factor.

Basically I wonder if the dropoff in RPM is throughout the day or is more concentrated at certain times.

[RedBar]

It's total inconsistency insofar as I can see, one day I get 20 cent average US EPCs then the next day 60 cents. Today I have averaged 1 click per 1,000 PVs, it's unreal, the system seems to be totally fubard.

[romerome]

Another thing. I see dropping rpm's later in the day. But I don't see that on other ad networks I am running. This seems to be unique to adsense.

Also I have variation from one day to the next (like everyone). But alot of that variation is dependent on if I have high traffic in the morning or evening. High traffic in the morning means the rpm for the day will be high. If its high in the evening the rpm for the day will be low.

[Ironside]

Do you any of you guys still embed rectangle units with them text? I used to do it a lot before mobile use became quite popular. However, I've decided to give it a try again to see if it still works. I can't use a responsive unit because it just doesn't work with the float right/left code. So I'm using a 300 x 250 ad unit which should display perfectly on mobile devices. Also, this wondering if it's really a layout people use these days

[koan]

Ironside, you can put your responsive ad in a div box with a specified width/height that floats left or right instead of floating directly the ad. Then use media queries to cancel those float (float: none;) in mobile mode.

[filbiz]

Over the course of the past few days, I've watched my Active View Viewable percentage tank from mid 30% range down to as low as 2.75% for one ad in particular. The weird part? Clicks haven't dropped and in some cases increased, and so have my earnings. So, I almost feel it might be a glitch?

I suspect there is something wrong on how the active view works on adsense. Maybe this is the reason why we are experiencing a sudden drop of RPM and CPC.

[RyuUK]

Last few days clicks have dropped from 50% down to just 33%. What a joke.

From their financials the change from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015 was reported as...

Cost-per-click on Google Network Members' websites: -8%
Cost-per-click on Google websites:-16%

Just an 8% drop over a year? Doesn't compute.

[avalon37]

Adsense is done people. It's the epitome of something that was once a good product turned into absolute garbage. The analogy I think of is a franchise restaurant. At one point any chain restaurant must have been decent to go franchise and attract investors. But at some point all things "chain" go stale and fail to adapt. AdSense is a failure, a total "F", in terms of adapting to mobile and serving relevant ads. They never really put the necessary resources into AdSense even during the "glory days", but now the product and the results for Google and Publishers have been trending downward for some time. Recently the pace (-) has intensified. It's over people. Over. Pennies on the dollar. Sad, but true.

[EditorialGuy]

It's over people. Over. Pennies on the dollar. Sad, but true.

AdSense is working just fine for some of us.

Fact is, not every source of revenue is right for everyone. Amazon is a good case in point: Our site earns a lot of money from affiliate commissions, but we never did well with Amazon, so we dumped Amazon and found affiliate programs that were a good fit for our audience. If AdSense isn't working for you, don't take it personally: Just move on and try other opportunities.

[avalon37]

EditorialGuy, you are making my case for me. "Some of us"....there is statistical significance here that earnings are down. Way down for many/most of us. This is not personal - it's factual. To suggest publishers who are seeing revenue declines are in the minority is "out of touch". Should I ask for a show of hands?