April 2016 AdSense Earnings and Observations

[Mentat]

March 2016 was the first sign that the things could get better, let's see April 2016.
1st of April is not very promising, with -30% revenue vs last week.

[frankleeceo]

@MrSavage

Is your traffic the same as an year ago?

[breeks]

February earnings up 14% over January.
March earnings 21% over February
April 20% over March so far.

Sounds good but earnings are still way down compared to last year.

Lots or reason why Adsense earnings are lower

Google keeping a bigger piece of the pie, more competition for the crumbs, mobile traffic, less free traffic from search engines, Facebook, apps, and on and on

Used to be able to throw up any old website and make money from Adsense, not anymore. Those days are long gone.

[teaandbiscuits]

Mobile is the main reason for all the drops in earnings, looking at my stats, they pay pennies, literally, compared to desktop clicks and impressions.

[jjoz]

@teaandbiscuits that's probably true to a certain extent, it doesn't explain the sudden drop of earnings since April 1st though... and the earning drop seems to affect both desktop and mobile.

[teaandbiscuits]

Is it worth blocking certain ad networks, for instance This month so far I have 62 clicks via criteo, but they paid just over £3, last month was no better, 71 clicks for just £7, do I block?

[ww2015]

Just a copy paste for the adsense product forum - relevant to some of us:

Got an answer from Adsense :
Your site was affected by this launch so I’ve recommended some ad placement changes below that may help decrease accidental clicks on ****** For more information, review our ad placement policies.
1. Increase the distance between the ad unit and your content.
2. Label your AdSense ads clearly using "Advertisements" or "Sponsored links".
3. Place the navigation buttons to the next page ABOVE the ad unit so as to avoid accidental clicks.

=======

The removal of the nessie button was a change we launched to improve the user experience of text ads. This change disables the text ad button on sites with ads that receive a high amount of accidental clicks due to the presence of this button. This change is part of a continuous monitoring and improvement system focused on maintaining a high quality user experience across our network.

The button will automatically reappear once ad implementation is sufficiently improved. The timeframe in which this happens varies per publisher. Please allow our system sufficient time to analyze the impact of your changes.

[Mentat]

Same situation here, after finally speaking with default adsense support (my rep seems dead).

1. Label banners as "Advertising"
2. Place the navigation buttons to the next page ABOVE the ad unit so as to avoid accidental clicks.
I also got an idiotic example about page navigation, and I've fixed the problem; now I'm waiting for a "blessing".

[Roman Abramovich]

You do realise they are just telling you anything. Not so long ago people were told not to have ads away from content i.e. above the fold on its own pushing content down. Now they are telling you to distance ads from content lol, do they think websites are the size of a football pitch. This 100% is just bullsh*t to make you run off like a good boy and have some hope, it's really the only answer they can give you as they are not going to get into a deep conversation about how they are screwing you over. This is really all they can tell you, take it with a pinch of salt.

My ads were always placed nicely, the ads were in good positions, the arrows never disappeared, and my earnings still plummeted, so to say this arrow thing is something to do with your implementation being wrong is complete lies.

[ww2015]

Ive always labeled every advert and adsense code is placed within a div that ensures a minimum of 50pixels clear space above and below - so that it doesn't get too close to the content (mainly because text ads can look ugly).

I removed the unit that I had above navigation - which had even more whitespace added, lines both above and below, and advertising written in bold, to ensure that it couldn't be mistaken for a navigational element. After this was removed about a week later arrows came back.

I now have just two units nothing near any navigation or even clickable content/social - and displaying substantially more conservatively than even the wildest policy interpretations by the google product forum wingnuts - and the arrows/nessie are gone again.

I have no idea how any accidental clicks could be happening.

Edit: Unless its due to being served a high percentage of click bait style ads, which users quickly close when they realize the advertisers site is junk - but hey - the problem couldn't be on googles side could it.....

[londrum]

you could try putting a border on them.

but of course... google will then suggest that you can increase your earnings by removing the border

[Whatagreatdayitis]

Right on schedule, there's the appearance of the meaningless red bar.

Is there anyone in charge at Adsense, or has everything been left to the algorithms?

[NickMNS]

Alphabet is reporting earnings today after the market close. It will be interesting to see what they report in terms of ad revenue...

[Ironside]

It's not as if my page RPM is that low, today it's £2.55. However, of the 21 clicks I've received so far today, I've made £2.68. Yesterday I got 56 clicks and made £5.77. Compare that to the first day in April where I received 38 clicks and earned £8. It's quite obvious that we are getting hardly anything per click.

Too many people wanting to make money from advertising Google and not enough money to go around, can't be any other reason why things are dying now

[WhoKnows111]

How is it with payment for you? Usually they send it 20th, but it felt to weekend the last two months. Now 22nd here (Friday) and not even an email.

[trebuchet]

Too many people wanting to make money from advertising Google and not enough money to go around

And too many ads in high-paying niches being funnelled onto Google web properties.

[Ironside]

Haven't had this month money yet, I normally get it around 22nd 23rd, have to check. I've not had a problem receiving it, it's normally in my bank account a few days before the end of the month without any problems.

Here is a prime example of the crap money Google are paying for individual clicks. Absolutely nothing from one click on a 250 x 250 unit. 1p from one click on a responsive unit placed within the article. 7p from two clicks on a 300 x 600 units. 9p from one click on a 336 x 280 unit placed within the text at the beginning of the content. And it gets worse, 14p from three clicks on the same size unit. 15p from seven clicks on a responsive unit placed underneath the first two posts in my forum. And then it starts to improve because I think people are probably clicking on the units that are the better pages. 76p from three clicks on a 300 x 600 unit placed on a very popular article. But it's still pretty dismal. I've given up trying to 2nd guess AdSense, used to be a case of me thinking that things were on the up because I would have two or three good days, then everything comes crashing back down to earth again.

I'm hoping that this month will be my highest media.net payment so far. If you guys haven't tried eBay partnership network than I would really urge you to have a look at it. I still can't get around the sort of money they are paying. The percentage I am receiving for each sale is more than 50%, that's crazy. I got a commission of £28.60 from one sale. And believe it or not, that sale was £51

[EditorialGuy]

Mobile is the main reason for all the drops in earnings, looking at my stats, they pay pennies, literally, compared to desktop clicks and impressions.

I stopped using AdSense on our mobile pages for that reason.

In theory, local and mobile should work well together in terms of advertising (ads for restaurants near the user's location, airport ground transportation, etc.), but until there's enough local competition among advertisers, rates are likely to be low.

[ww2015]

Ha - I saw 6 clicks from the US earning 4p last week - and thats CPC not some old CPM rubbish

[trebuchet]

I got a commission of £28.60 from one sale. And believe it or not, that sale was £51

The e-bay fee/commission would have been £51, which means the item sale would've been around £510.

[Ironside]

I see, that makes more sense now. I couldn't see how I would be receiving more than 50% commission of the actual sale item :-)

[trebuchet]

They actually pay 200% of commission if the item is bought by a new or reactivated e-bay customer. I earned $90 in one hit from one of those a while ago. Conversions are fairy rare though so I consider it bonus money, nothing more. I imagine it does a lot better on sites that sell/review items.

[Roman Abramovich]

Ya eBay is off the commission paid to them, and pretty nice if you have niche sites. Like for example say anyone here wrote a nice article about a Star Wars toy, Adsense would be pathetic on these pages but you can show actual ads with star wars toys on this page from eBay. Takes more time but I have several sites from years gone by where Adsense was a lost cause on them.
Now every website I have is a lost cause with Adsense.

Regarding payment this month, mines has been sent as it says so in the report, it never this morning ;) I will unfortunately not be getting a payment next month or the months after as I no longer have Adsense on any of my sites, I told myself I am not spending a year pissing about with them, much better things to do with my time than play these games. If I hear better things about them in future I might test out to see if old earnings have returned, until then it's a bye bye from me. I don't trust this company, just telling the truth.

[Chronos Slayer]

Growth in paid clicks
First quarter of 2015: 13%
First quarter of 2016: 29%
Decline in cost per click
First quarter of 2015: -13%
First quarter of 2016: -12%
Source:[url] [money.cnn.com...]

[masterjoe]

Data doesn't lie. Google has been on a mission to become the biggest penny pinchers on Earth. You guys with adsense really need to remove their ads and use something from networks that actually care.

[trebuchet]

Profit
First quarter of 2015: $3.5 billion
First quarter of 2016: $4.2 billion, up 20%

Been wondering where your Jan-Mar earnings went? See above.

[NickMNS]

@ChronoSlayer, I believe that G's CPC was down 9%(yoy). also the link you posted is now dead.
I think the take away from the earnings report is, that CPC is continuing its downward trend, and we should focus on mobile.

I got a feeling, "reading between the lines", that Google does not seem to be very focused on display advertising, instead they seem to be looking more towards, search ads, you-tube, in-app advertising and amp-pages.

[Whatagreatdayitis]

One of the problems with mobile traffic is that visitors are less committed to viewing your pages. They're looking at information on the fly. In comparison, the desktop viewer is more focused and more serious about finding information. A desktop visit eminates from a home office, a kitchen, or a coffee shop.The mobile visitor might be searching when amongst friends, when walking down the street, or even while driving. Certainly not all of mobile traffic is bad, but it makes you think a little about some of the reasons why someone abandons your website. Those reasons might have nothing to do with the quality of your site.

[NickMNS]

Absolutely right, the challenge now is to build website/webapps to cater to that environment.

[filbiz]

My ads were always placed nicely, the ads were in good positions, the arrows never disappeared, and my earnings still plummeted, so to say this arrow thing is something to do with your implementation being wrong is complete lies.

I agree with you Roman, that is also my situation and the arrows on my ads are still visible. Their ads are in prime locations on my pages compared with the other ads from other ad network I joined in. But RPM and earnings still sucks.

[Ironside]

When you see somebody walking down the street with their face in their mobile phone you'll probably find that you are checking text messages or on Facebook. My theory is that a mobile screen is very small so people will have to scroll a lot more to move down the page, whereas if you're sitting in front of a large computer screen you can spend more time without having to scroll and will probably take more notice of the Google AdSense.

Another theory I have is that a lot of people have upgraded to Windows 10 in the last year. I was talking to a ham radio buddy of mine in Canada last night and I just happen to ask him to have a look at my website and tell me what AdSense was advertising for him over there. He says he couldn't see anything, there were just blank spaces where the AdSense should be. I asked to check whether his ad blocker was on and it was, although he didn't remember enabling it. I'm wondering whether people are upgrading to Windows 10 and it's automatically putting the ad blocker on. Having said that, his ad blocker wasn't blocking my media.net and which is great.