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.

[Lamaleta]

I have been using a vps for to connect the internet for some time, and in that time my earnings have been dropped 40%, mostly because the CTR from the USA has been dropped heavily. For some personal reason I could not connect to the internet for two weeks. The first time I was online again and checked my adsense account I was very surprised that my earnings and CTR from the USA has been going up like it was last year, but it dropped again in two days.

It looks that google hate that people want some privacy in there live. If they really hate privacy why they don't put all the browsers history, search history, and GPS data from all the googlers online, so we all can see what they do. Personally I don't like to share my live online with nobody, and specially not with companies like google.

[Roman Abramovich]

Will try media.net, give it a week, if not better than Adsense then it's affiliate ads for remainder of the year. Giving traffic to these advertisers for peanuts is not acceptable. If enough people are doing the same it surely will send a message, we are not going to be taken for mugs any longer. You were good once Adsense, but like anything, all good things eventually come to a end, and must I add, it's through your own making this time.
I might even adventure into ploughing money into Bing and doing some PPC, I can see me not using any Google products very shortly, including Android, Chrome, Adwords, everything.

[Roman Abramovich]

Has anyone even noticed how abysmal sites like youtube are now? This in my eyes has went massively downhill. I used to watch it a lot, now it's full of these pretentious people blogging, people who play videos games while talking about news, and 100 billion people who do fake prank videos, or the same old top 10 bull. It's rather depressing and a massive community of people copying and tweaking what each other does.
Google are nothing compared to what I used to think of them. If they were gone tomorrow I think my internet experience would enhance, why I am slowly drifting away from anything associated with them. Thankfully I never have had a gmail account, so I don't need to worry about having to change this.

[Roman Abramovich]

And what a fantastic idea YouTube Red is, a name similar to a #*$! site. For a fee similar to companies that give us quality content such as netflix & amazon video, we can view special shows from the likes of youtubers like pewdiepie, how awesome is that, Google you are rocking, no wonder Adsense is how it is...

[Roman Abramovich]

Ask yourself if you do not think Adsense would cheat you out of earnings and be corrupt, if they can evade billions of taxes to the United Kingdom and plough it illegally into lower tax Ireland, then settle a shady deal to pay the UK £130 million, and to pay all future taxes "properly", you think they would not royally screw us all over. I have lost all faith in them. I used to think all the millions of people who had accounts closed just before they reached 1st payment were cheats, now I think otherwise.
This is not a legitimate company.

[ember]

The biggest corrupt company in the history of the internet

Oh, for crying out loud. Put something else on your site if you think Adsense is so corrupt!

[trebuchet]

Roman reminds me of my (late) grandfather. Spent his life avoiding tax then complained about his pension being too small. Complained about tobacco companies covering up cigarettes causing cancer, but still smoked 40 a day.

Google is what it is: a giant company now driven by bean counters and share holders. The "do no evil" sticker fell off the bumper long ago. That doesn't mean you can't ride on its tails, just don't start thinking it's your daddy or your best friend.

[yaashul]

There is a discussion at google forum about the exact issue. And shared this chat from adsense ppl

db8316 said:
Just had a great chat with AdSense Support Team.
Here is a summary.

Q: The arrows on the Desktop Text Ads has disappeared, which I have never seen happen before
A: Last week our product team changed the way arrow buttons work. They will no longer show on some desktop sites where the implementation is prone to accidental clicks. So when you do see text ads, they will be currently missing the arrow button, as you noted.

Q: What is the main cause in my site design?
A: Placing Ads close a navigation element (in my case AdSense team thought it was close to the NEXT PAGE button)

Q: Is this done per ad-unit?
A: Apparently the change is made across the URL and can't be isolated to specific ad units.

Q: what is considered high invalid activity? is 1% too high?
A: Unfortunately we don't have specifics about how the Invalid Traffic team determines this.

Q: What are my options, is this a permanent change across my entire website?
A: The best thing you can do is change your implementation. We've been told that the system will continue to review pages and then if the implementation is better, the arrows will return!

Q: How soon after I make the change to the layout, will the arrow button return?
A: Not sure, will email more details over email.

Hope this helps.

For full discussion - [productforums.google.com...]

[trebuchet]

I'm pleased to hear that because the arrows still show on my ads. I've always kept ads well away from navigation elements.

[Mentat]

Well, I don't see the arrows on my site anymore, but the arrows are present in Ad Review.

[Blackadder99]

Hello, my April earnings have also taken a drop compared to March. I've found it to be caused by one single factor: a 50% drop in CTR on Desktop only, starting from April 4th. Everything else is normal and this has happened across a lot of sites. Anyone else seen something similar, or any advice on what to do?

[Maximum44]

Blackadder99, that is exactly what we see as well. Only a drop on Desktop. It is like they want to only pay mobile prices and give us mobile ctr on everything.

Question. Do you use responsive ad units (the async code one) or the older style?

[Blackadder99]

Maximum44, yes responsive async ads. All my ads are responsive so I can't compare to anything else.

[Maximum44]

Anyone have the non async old style ads? Do you suffer from Desktop ctr / cpc loss as well?

[Ironside]

Does anyone on here use media.net? I been using it for a few months now and I really like it. I've not been getting as much as AdSense, but my last payment was $141. I suppose I'm averaging around $4 a day at the moment. However, my best day ever was yesterday, $10.97 on media.net, worth giving it so I if your AdSense has started dropping.

What I really like about media.net is most of the time it's serving up relatively ads to my niche. I'm in the UK and there probably aren't as many fish stores as I write in the US so I'm not finding my AdSense is serving up that many related AdSense. Hopefully it's different in the US though.

[srgolub]

We use Media.net on a number of our sites. Typically their RPC is lower than Adsense but with the recent changes on Adsense, we're testing some new placements. One interesting thing I've found is that when Media.net serves an Adsense ad on desktop, they're still showing in the previous format - text with an arrow - which I'm not seeing at all with my native Adsense placements.

[FourDegreez]

I have the old ad codes still. I don't see a difference between mobile and desktop -- they are both down in April.

[Maximum44]

FourDegreez, interesting. How many percent would you say you are down? Using the async responsive ads i mainly see a loss on the Desktop portion. Its really strange. Looking at both mobile and desktop we're down about 35% since April 1st.

[nubchai]

For the month of March I had very few red bars. This week I've had a red bar every single morning.

[stateofmind]

I have the impression that most people in this forum runs relatively small sites. Nothing wrong with that, but with small numbers the day-to-day statistics are not very reliable. I thought I should give you some observations from a somewhat larger site:

I have been with AdSense for around 10 years, and I monetize around 3 million page views per day with AdSense (exclusively). I can safely say that earnings have never been as low as now, and starting on April 1st it has gotten REALLY bad *sigh*.

I've also lost the "arrows" that some people talk about here, but it doesn't seem to affect CTR much (and most ads on my site are non-text ads anyway). In fact, CTR seems pretty stable, but CPC has dropped around 15%. But the worst "offender" in my site are CPM bid ads. CPM ad impressions are about the same as before (perhaps a tad lower), but the RPM is down around 35%.

What's interesting is how these observations correlate with my AdWords campaigns: As with AdSense, I have been with AdWords for around 10 years, and it has NEVER been as cheap to advertise in AdWords as now. I get a RIDICULOUS amount of clicks with my budget now compared to before (perhaps 150% more), and the traffic actually converts very well. So... something "strange" is definitely going on; especially since April 1st. Still crossing my fingers that this is just an extended April fools "day"...

[srgolub]

Hey stateofmind, are you noticing more tablet and mobile Adwords traffic now than before April 1 (as a % of the overall mix)? Like everyone else on here, we've seen the arrows removed from the desktop text ads and the % of ads that are text has dropped significantly. It's an entirely different story on mobile and tablet though - arrows on everything and a good % of the ads are text. In fact, our mobile and tablet traffic has been performing extremely well. Just trying to get the whole picture of what could be going on from Google's side and that piece of info would be a key piece of the puzzle. Thanks.

[ww2015]

Checking in - Arrows removed and text ads down to less than 5% - on desktop only. Mobile have their own version of the text ad anyway.

Last months clawback was around 0.7%, my sites do around 10m PVs monthly. RPM has been utter garbage for the past 7 days. The issue is account wide and is affecting all of my sites.

Like usual Google is as transparent as a lump of coal, offering no useful information save for the scraps reposted on forums. I'm getting rather bored of the 'bad actors' excuses for not offering any client dialog, no other comany is quite as annoying to work with. If its a positional issue which btw was only a guess by the front line tech drones, then surely G could offer something to ensure the positioning used avoided this. For what its worth I spend a LOT of time ensuring compliance with their rules and the spirit of their rules. My ads are *always* wrapped in 'advertising' tags, and clearly seperated from anything else the user may interact with.

[stateofmind]

srgolub, I just checked what you asked:

For my AdWords traffic, no big change in the ratio desktop/tablet/mobile.

But then I checked my AdSense "Platforms" report for the last 30 days, and I can indeed confirm that mobile and tablet is performing as before (more or less); only desktop has seen a drastic fall in earnings.

My mobile traffic is currently roughly 62%, tablet 8% and desktop 30%. There has been no significant change in these ratios lately.

Hmmm...

[ww2015]

Just another quick thing i've noticed.

The image ads being served really have no relevance to the site or the location that im surfing from. Im getting what should be US ads served up to Euro geos. Basically a load of garbage banners that couldnt possibly be interesting to the audience.

[Maximum44]

Have some decent traffic. A couple of hundred thousand ad views a day. Certainly not a big player. But big enough to really get hurt by the 35% drop. It is plenty of dough lost every day. It is ridiculus!

I guess we all can agree the drop is mainly in Desktop. It is like they want the Desktop ads to be as cheap / low as the mobile.

And it all started April 1st. I really though March was a bad month...

Regarding media.net: They are performing pretty ok for below the fold / less attractive positions. Better than adsense for us. Have not tried them on a more prominent position yet though as i hope Adsense will come back. Without media.net we would really have been screwed.

For heavens sake Adsense, get your act together so we can go back focusing on creating good content and not have to worry about our next paycheck! Adblockers and being forced to have more ads on your page is bad enough!

[srgolub]

ww2015, my stats sound very similar to yours - 5% text, under 1% clawback, similar PV's. Also noticing no relevance at all between the site content and the ads displayed. Just garbage. Whatever it is Google is doing, I'm sure it's part of a well thought-out strategy - they're nothing if not smart. I'm just trying to figure out what their game is and whether this is a long or short term play.

[Maximum44]

They turned on the adsense-AI and it hates us! :)

[londrum]

maybe it's something like google changing the click area on desktop ads. maybe they've made it smaller
i'm seeing a lot of the bigger ad sizes filled up with a single ad (and lots of white space). so straight away that reduces the click area from maybe three links down to just one

[KaseyM]

CPC has been shot to pieces since April 1st. Never seen it this low before.

[Ironside]

Terrible start to April here. I've got the red bar at the moment, I hope that it is responsible for my dismal earnings so far today, £1.98.