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.

[Chronos Slayer]

Redbar appear again and looks like the arrow is gone :( ctr dropped 50%

[TheWebGuru]

Hey there, Ironside !

Just got the red bar again(happening every day now) and this will end with a big drop in earnings, as has been the case whenever it appears so far this year.

My earnings seem to be stuck within "set parameters" and any time it looks like things are about to pick up, they drop off again....until I end up back in the low earnings zone!

[NickMNS]

All this talk about arrows. I said to myself "what is all this about?" So I checked it out on my site, and in the ad reviews. Well I have the normal blue arrows showing in the ad reviews, but they are showing up as black squares (or dark grey) with a white arrow on my pages. It doesn't look bad per-se but I would not be surprised if these experiments are responsible for my dismal click through rates.

[Blackadder99]

I replaced one of my responsive ad units on desktop (which took a 50% drop in CTR on 4/4) with a 728x90 unit yesterday. This has improved CTR by 37% so far, and earnings by even more. Does anyone else have April data to share on responsive vs non responsive units on desktop?

[Maximum44]

Blackadder99, please let us know what happens. Unfortunately we switched to all responsive the first of this year. Have no April data :(

[Jericho]

@Blackadder99

I had a mix of responsive and regular ad blocks and was hit by it. I switched my regular blocks back to responsive and no change. I'm getting 95%+ image ads. And they're total crap ads too. I'm seeing some ads for aviation financing. Like I can afford a plane with these crappy ads. The issue seems to be mostly desktop too.

I just created a new responsive unit, text only, for a single page to see what happens. It's been about 10 minutes and I'm only getting images right now.

Update: Text ads now with no arrow and completely irrelevant to me or the content on the page. Probably some low paying generic ad.

This is what I'm seeing on every refresh:

Text/Image ad: [i.imgur.com...]

Text Only Ad: [i.imgur.com...]

[edited by: Jericho at 2:34 pm (utc) on Apr 8, 2016]

[MrSavage]

One single penny! LOL. First time ever checking in the morning and see this. One cent! I will confess that I tweaked some Adsense settings so this isn't totally unexpected. However it is comical.

[Ironside]

I simply do not know what has happened in the last few days. Absolutely diabolical. I would like to say that I must be getting almost nothing for each click. However I got 80p from just one click today, so is not as if earnings per click are absolutely dismal. It's gotten to the point getting desperate now, and trying different layouts, swapping things around, going from responsive ad units to non-responsive. I always did really well with a 160 x 600 ad unit in the left-hand column. I change this to a responsive unit which worked quite well for a while. I decided to go back to the non-responsive and see how we get on.

[londrum]

stateofmind:

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.

if the advertisers are paying a lot less, then there's probably not a lot the publishers can do to rectify it (other than to get our traffic up even higher, of course). maybe it's just an economy thing

[Mentat]

Until 2015, I had 50 employees, but Panda destroyed my traffic like a poison, so in 2015 I've cut the staff to ~ 30 employees and I hoped to survive with a minimum profit or even no profit for a while.

I was prepared for this situation in 2016, but after 25 December 2015, no emergency plan can cover a drop of ~ 40% in revenue!
I cannot work with only 10 employees!

We have:
- Panda & Penguin mess, now in suspension. It's like the search is broken and no one really knows to fix the damn "AI".
- huge drop in payment (CPC/CPM), like the advertising business has moved on Facebook since January 2016!
- CTR has very strange variations (lower on steps), after beeing stable for big time periods.
- Ad relevancy is near 0. As a personal note, I see very few contextual ads, but a lot of useless IBA!
If I use the IBA OPT-OUT extension, then a lot of sites have blank placements.
- We see Google losing the lateral ads on search results, in a move that suggested a plan to increase the ad price (did not happen).
- no real and useful communications in the last year, except pictures of the "Utopian Google business offices".
It's like... party all day long!
- schizoid procedures Adsense team optimization vs Search Team.
Adsense team ask for more ads and blended content, search team and human rating team will penalize you for blended or too many ads!
- now we see that the arrow buttons are gone, on some sites, where there is a "suspicion" of accidental clicks!? (just another way to drop CTR).
- after contacting my AdSense rep for "premium publishers" about the January disaster, I got no reply from him! Other 4-5 emails about other problems, bot no reply, no error, nothing.
Maybe someone forgot to close his email box.
During 2015, we had 3-4 Adsense contacts. It's very hard to maintain communication and level of trust.

Now I'm waiting to see how this month will go and... last one out closes the door...

[breeks]

This month's CPC vs last month is down 30% so far.

Still have arrows, but not making any difference.

[Chronos Slayer]

Update, yesterday arrow was removed from 1 of my site, but today redbar happened again and almost none of my site has the arrow. CTR drop by 70%, i don't know if this is permanent or not but looks like google removing the arrow from text ads.
Edit, also I notice there are hardly any text ads, 99% times i am getting images.

[KaseyM]

Sorry to hear that Mentat. We're only a 2 man operation with a few people working freelance and I know how I struggle sometimes to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can only imagine your situation.

Facebook is the biggest problem for publishers period.

Btw, is anyone using Header Bidding here yet? I've heard it's something everyone needs to be on. Looking to implement in the next few weeks.

[jbayabas]

When the other network is paying you two times more than Adsense, then you know you're in deep sh*t.

[ww2015]

Ive reduced ad units from 3 down to 2, switched the larger units down to smaller ones, and removed an ad unit which while being properly tagged and separated was close [150px] to the navigation elements. 20k sessions later, still no buttons, adsense continues to serve rubbish, and rpm/cpc remains in the toilet.

All the while I see 'certified professionals' serving up ever larger, more jarring, more disrespectful to the user ad blocks. My focus has always been on making a site visually beautiful and easy for users to work with - despite Googles insistence that they are the guardians of the 'ecosystem', their certified optimisation partners seem hell bent on making sites worse for end users and worse for publishers.

I already work with a lot of alternatives to Google, and i'll be fine without them - but I think the publisher community in general needs to start calling a spade a spade, Google is a damaging influence on the ecosystem. I'll tolerate you if your system works and is profitable, but I don't drink the koolaid and believe that your faceless organization is anything more than a grubby network.

[Jericho]

I switched from 3 ads to 2 a few days ago and still no change. I don't have an ad near a nav button and the ads I get are almost entirely irrelevant. Seeing an occasional text ad that is irrelevant with no arrow. Mobile still seems to be doing ok but desktop is total crap.

What I don't understand is why other sites that have a similar layout seem to be unaffected. My clawback has been under .7% for months with around 1-2M visitors a month. The problem is account wide too.

[scottb]

We will find out a lot more about what is happening on April 21 when Google releases its first quarter 2016 earnings report.

It contains plenty of information about partner revenue sharing.

[dethfire]

I've had 3 months of record low RPM. I'm starting to look at other solutions and I've been with adsense for 12 years.

[breeks]

One click today of nearly $19.00 :) The only click on that page so far. RPM approaching $1500 for that page

Now if only they were all like that

Bunch of dollar plus clicks also and some as low as 2 cents

Seems like it is just luck of the draw

[vdR7]

Record of the Red Bar...what is going wrong with adsense...

[Peanut45]

Absolutely terrible today. On the upside (or possibly downside), seeing some alternative arrow style experiments (e.g. outlined arrow).

[Mentat]

Yes, another terrible day/weekend :(

[jbayabas]

Really heartbreaking. Yet Google is getting richer. The irony.

[JustForAdsense]

RPM still in the dumps besides overall growing (yes, organic, highly targeted ofcourse) traffic. There was literally one day a week or two back where i saw some sort of 'normalness' (still much below the 'normal' a few months back/and the year entirely prior to that...) - but that went back down the next day and has remained in the same dumps as its been for the past month now. Extremely frustrating in general.

[Roman Abramovich]

What's up with MediaNet? I wanted to experiment with a lower traffic site of mine so I applied and was accepted. Had ads on for first day late on, ended up with just over 1000 impressions and report was close to $2 earnings. So I thought ok, lets keep this running, next day just over 3000 impressions, I was hoping to see something good, but it's in an area saying Pending to be processed. Hmm ok, so kept it on, next day same. Today I have taken all ads off. I have 3 days off traffic and their system cant even tell me what I have made. At least Adsense can tell us what we are making even if bad.

Is this just another joke outfit as I just found a webpage where everyone on it said MediaNet did the same thing for them.

[edited by: Roman_Abramovich at 11:55 pm (utc) on Apr 9, 2016]

[NickMNS]

I am also seeing multiple arrow designs, varying shades of grey (I haven't seen any blues), thin or thicker arrows, different radius on the corners.

Hmmm? A/B (/C/D/E/F) testing of arrows and unusually low CTRs, I wonder if there is a link?

[Roman Abramovich]

@NickMNS Let's all be realistic, with arrows, without arrows (which you can turn off yourself anyway), or slight tweaks to arrow designs is absolutely nothing to do with why Adsense is not giving us money right now :) This is wishful thinking, nothing less, nothing more, in the hope that things turn good again.

[NickMNS]

It's not like Google is doing this testing for the fun of it. They obviously believe that they can increase the click through rate by tweaking the arrow design. So arrow design certainly has an impact on CTR. Is it a big impact? I agree that point is up for debate.

Adsense is not giving us money

Adsense does not "give" us money, the money is coming from advertisers when users click or view ads appearing on our sites. Google may well send us organic traffic through search but that has nothing to do with Adsense. Sure Adsense may give us a bigger or smaller slice of that pie. But from my end at least the issue is not the size of the pie it is that fewer users are clicking on ads. (that is not to say that I would not like bigger slice) Is this the result of "Zombie" traffic coming search reported by those with ecommerce sites? Is it the impact of Rank Brain on the serps? is it caused by the A/B testing on the part of Adsense? Or is simply that fewer advertisers are using Adsense opting instead for other options? Or is pure randomness? There is no way to know, the most likely scenario is that it is a combinations or all these factors.

I am digressing here...
Maybe the idea that was floated here last month about forming a union isn't that crazy. Well not a union. We should form an association of independent web publishers, pool some resources and data, conduct some studies about the market, set some benchmarks. Like DCN (formerly OPA) but that does not cost 15k USD to join. Then we the little guys (or gals) can get an overview of the forest and not just or little view of our own trees. There is definitely a case of information asymmetry going on here, there is no doubt that Google, Facebook and Bing know where things are headed, and I am sure the big publishers (DCN members) Guardian, Fox, Time etc... also have a pretty good idea. But it is us the little guys that are getting squeezed out.

[Roman Abramovich]

I know how we get the money :) (had an Adsense account for about 15 years), but to you and me Google are the ones who pay us, we don't even know for a fact that it's Adwords clients that pay us, for all we know that's hocus pocus and everything we get is a pre-determined amount, we know nothing when truth be told, don't rule out anything with these "do no evil" companies :) They even screw whole nations out of tax using every sneaky loophole found. Regardless, yeah could be anything, but it's not down to arrows, everything is f*cked. Just glad I never packed in my offline business as I thought one day the bubble would burst, and I feel totally sorry for people who rely on this (I rely on it also), but will be fine without. Sadly, like times in the past when things change but then ok again, I think this truly is it, there will be no Ah May everything is great now :(

[frankleeceo]

Isn't this the case with pretty much all advertising agencies?

The only way to get more control over the state of things is through direct ad selling, affiliate marketing, and even selling things yourself.

With adsense and all the other ads agencies, you really have no idea what's happening behind the scenes, and virtually little to no idea on what really gets served to the end site visitors. Adsense is however, much less likely to serve malware compared to some other CPC based ad agencies that I know.

And there are a few big guns around here that are suffering as well. So I don't think Google is really out to out the small fishes. I think the biggest differences is that a big guns can take a 50% hit and still keep lights on, while the smaller fishes gets slaughtered over a 30% drop.

Diversify diversify, try out new revenue sources and new ad agencies that come into play. i personally find media.net and facebook audience network worthless for me for my segment of traffic or intent. I can't work with affiliate neither because my audience doesn't really buy stuff. But I see success with RTB networks with CPM based bidding.

For me, adsense really only works at specific locations where it gets maximum exposure and potential clicks. Outside of those prime spots, they suck.

In terms of observation, seeing relatively higher RPM compared to the start of last quarter, but still lower than the ending of last quarter. But things are looking decent. I have good hopes for the coming summer months.

Trying to create more sites and break into more niches, but I am feeling burned out.