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.

[Divedeep]

@Ironside, now I'm sure. Yes, this was also something I noticed. A partner of mine was upgrading to W10 and weeks later he visited my website and compliment me on having Ads removed. I said, nothing is removed. Well he doesn't see ads.

[Ironside]

@Dive deep silly thing is, I didn't have a bad day yesterday. But every day is different for me, you can never foresee what the next day is going to bring. What I might do is try some of the media.net units a little further up the page, probably above the fold and see if things improve there. Media.net has definitely been improving slowly so I might put a little bit more time in there. It might also be a case that leaving just one or two AdSense on the page improves the cost per click, will just have to test things and see how it goes

[Mentat]

Maybe some of you know, that we have a section for Adsense Violations.
In Adsense Account, hit the Settings Icon (COG) -> Status -> "Account level violations" and "Site level violations"

My last mentions are since 2013.
My Adsense told me that in his panel there are 28 NEW violations and that triggered the arrow removal.

The question is why this info is "secret"? It's not really secret as he sent me all the details after requesting them!

So, there seems to be another glitch in the system, and we do not see the violations!

[ww2015]

@mentat - what were the violations, if you dont mind me asking - i see none on mine either, and despite nearly hitting 100k in earnings with adsense, I still haven't been given any support contact or link

[Jericho]

@mentat yeah can you post what they were. I don't have anything from the last couple of years either.

[Mentat]

In my case the Google "Ai" detected mostly nudity and they seems to hate any tutorial about how to download videos from youtube.
This is a paradox, because is full of such programs and services, you only need to search on... Google!
The Google AI is so good at this, that it can even detect small ti*s under a wet t-shirt!

Another problem is a new fixation with page navigation.
If you have pagination like: <<, < 23, 25, 26, 26 > , >> and any text ads or link ads in the vicinity, you are screwed!
Use First, Prev/Next, Last

[ww2015]

Yeah I've received one policy warning in my time with google, for sexual content - i assumed it was a competitor flagging the page - because the image was a clothed woman who had a cleavage line - substantially less 'adult' and cleavage than the asian-dating ads they are peppering my site with - makes sense now that its an AI.

I have always used a next button rather than the traditional numbered pagination - in fact my next button is 700px x 100px (responsive) and solid color with mouse over effect to ensure that even the most cranially challenged readers cannot miss it, the nearest adsense ad is more 600px away from it also - I wonder what their AIs problem is.

I wont be buying a google self driving car anytime soon - their AI systems are scarily bad :)

[NickMNS]

Just to direct the conversation back to Google's performance vs ours (or mine in this case). G's CPC fell 9% YOY mine nearly doubled, except that the my number of clicks for the same period fell by 75%, net result 50% drop in revenue. G's PPC grew by 29%. I think what we are seeing is that G is steering advertisers away from display ads and pushing them towards search and other Google owned products.

[Ironside]

I am afraid that Google in my opinion can be a little bit pedantic when it comes to some of these warnings they like dishing out. I've had at least two whilst I have been putting AdSense on my website. The first one I got was related to a post that somebody made about a girl in England who had made a sex video with her boyfriend and then he had posted it online. She then went on the Internet and got all the videos removed. I got a warning from Google to remove the posting that have been made. Not sure why, I only mentioned her name, there was no sexual content at all. Anyway, I wasn't going to argue with them and it didn't make the slightest bit of difference removing the thread. The second warning light lot related to a photograph of a woman wearing a bikini, they wanted the picture removing. Again, it didn't make any difference to me whether the picture was there or not. But I could never understand what the problem was, and also who reported it

[Ironside]

It's ridiculous, I've been moaning and groaning about AdSense, however looking at my accounts today my page RPM is at £4.88, my impression RPM stands at £1.45 and if my earnings carry on as they are today I reckon it could be a record for this month. But nowhere near as good as it used to be.

[dethfire]

Google missed their estimates ans stock tumbled. Look out for ways they can squeeze more $$$

[Mentat]

Anyway, even if you fix the problems, the system will evaluate the changes sometime...

[Aniston Dillo]

getting just 0.22 $ RPM since last 2 days. Lowest ever.

[Roman Abramovich]

Regarding the messages above about violation to nudity etc, I agree, they are absolutely hopeless at it. I remember a few years back I had a picture of a woman wearing a full football kit, they warned me to remove. I contacted a real person and explained it was a woman wearing a football kit, same as we see men wear on TV, same as we see women wear on TV playing in games. No that was not good enough, this was sexual content to Google. So they obviously live in a world where they see woman as only sex objects. There was honestly nothing sexual about it at all, needless to say I obviously had to remove it to keep them happy.

[jbayabas]

Earning has been consistent the last few days -- consistently low! A big F U to you greedy Goog!

[IanCP]

@mentat

Maybe some of you know, that we have a section for Adsense Violations.
In Adsense Account, hit the Settings Icon (COG) -> Status -> "Account level violations" and "Site level violations"

That was a newie on me - however when looking this was my result:

You have no account-level policy violations on record. Thank you!

I'll go back to feeling smug all day - even amidst my current era of low CTR.

[RedBar]

Inflated PVs back for me today only on the one site which I have Match Content approved but not actioned.

[RedBar]

Ah, interesting, they obviously "know" what's causing this since my inflated PVs have now gone!

[jbayabas]

How are your earnings doing today guys? Mine is really bad.

[Chronos Slayer]

@jbayabas earning sucks, best answer I can give you.

[MrSavage]

I've taken some drastic measures over the past week or so in terms of settings and ads. I'm going very aggressive on this so I can't really judge overall where things are at. I know that generally drastic changes take time before having positive results. What I can say is that if you were to ask me, even with my tweaking, I would say Adsense for me is pretty much abandoned. As in, the concern, care, help is superficial. It sounds good on paper I guess but the reality is beyond what I consider bleak. I can obviously only speak on my own end, but I would think 20% or less would tell friends to get in on this program because it's so fantastic and rewarding. What I simply cannot get past right now, is why 80% to 90% of the ads in my review center are German language when 90% of my traffic is English. My sites are English based. It doesn't seem to matter if I hammer these ads away, more just keep replacing them. I have a couple more weeks of doing this before I say F this. Based on the wild experimentation and bizarre ads, I can only think now that I'm providing a dart board as a test platform for Google to utilize for their own needs in the future. Some hits, some misses, but the outcome really doesn't matter because my business model which relies on Adsense is dying faster than I would have ever thought possible. The only piece of pride I have on this is the fact that I'm not adding content on the Adsense reliant websites so it's essentially like domain parking income. The real insight can be found on the investor reports. That's what an Adsense publisher should be looking at in terms of what is real. Is it me that's sucking alone or is it just a big shift that is undeniable. Just imagine what Adsense in you City would look like in say May or June 2016. What a bunch of smiling faces. Can you imagine? When I went to the last one even then people were talking about the decline in traffic and earnings. That was when things were worthwhile, now it's gone so far from that it's astonishing. For me at least.

[kireb]

reasonable Friday and Saturday, good Sunday. Seems that earnings in April 2016 will 'only' end 20% lower than April 2015.

[filbiz]

@Maximun44 I tried media.net but the RPM is very very low. Only $0.04 RPM.

[Mentat]

Not just "Ad-non-sense" is dead, but also AD Exchange is dead!

Just to understand the situation:
1 Jan - 31 Mar we had 2200-2000 clicks/day
1 Apr - 20 Apr we had ~ 1200 clicks/day
21-24 Apr - 900 clicks/day! WTF!

[netmeg]

If you see a bunch of ads in your Ad Review Center that are in a different language, it might be worth looking at your traffic. Google (largely) serves ads to match the visitors and not the site. When I get an influx of foreign visitors to my sites (for whatever reason) I will see ads for those languages in my Review Center.

[Chronos Slayer]

Today adsense looks like a dead horse to me, we are still trying to beat it for no reason.

[NickMNS]

@MrSavage and further to netmeg's point also remember that what you see in the adreview center is delayed by a few days at least. And one user can view many ads specially if they view many pages. So what is seen in the ad review center can be heavily influenced by a single user.

My view is that blocking ads is rarely a good idea, it should only be done if the ads are clearly spammy and have negative impact on the reputation and trustworthiness of your site, otherwise all you are doing is negatively impacting your earnings.

Even if you feel that user will not click on those ads, those ads are propping up the cpc of the other ads on your page. Blocking an ad will replace it with a lower cpc ad, and reduce the cpc of the other ads on the page by the marginal difference.

[trebuchet]

Today's CTR is threatening to dive under 0.50%. I have never seen it that low, ever.
Adsense (or should that be "Adcents") is plumbing new depths.

[jbayabas]

Yup, every week Adsense is setting new low earning record. I remember a year ago my wife asked a ridiculous question, "do you think your earning (which was already bad at the time) will ever go down to this x amount?" She gave a very low amount that I quickly replied confidently, "no way!"

Looks like I just swallowed my words because it's happening now! Omg! What just happened to my business of 12 years! What a disaster!

[jjoz]

I know I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but each day when revenue is lower than the previous, I think to myself... surely it can't get any lower. At this rate, I'll be paying google come this time next week.