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.

[Roman Abramovich]

Yeah very true Frank. Ideally I want my businesses that I do online as a secondary income to be able to withstand even an event such as Google disappearing. I know they wont, but I don't want to rely solely on them for traffic or money any longer, but of course always welcome it while it lasts. I think this should be the main focus point for all small businesses on the internet, do not rely solely on one other company to keep you alive. Not as easy as it sounds as I suspect the vast majority have been so used to having a nice Adsense payment hitting their bank every month, so when gone you need to seek these funds from elsewhere or close up.

The benefits of affiliate marketing is that if a company closes or something like that, you still have all your partnerships with all the others, not like with Adsense, when that goes pear-shaped, where do you go for another similar model? We would not be in this mess online if there were 10 x facebooks, 10 x search engines, 10 x ebays, all companies of equal strength, this is what happens when you get just a few massive monopolies, they ruin everything, I would like a law which stops it from happening online. You don't see in the real world a car manufacturer sell 85% of all cars, or a restaurant 85% of all people only eat in, it's varied and shared and it works.

[koan]

The day that a car manufacturer create a car that runs on water, it will get 85% of the market. The day that a restaurant can serve affordable high end food in under 5 minutes, it will get 85% of the market. The fact is, making a good online search engine that doesn't get easily bugged down by spammers is a complex thing that few businesses can do as well as Google. As for Adsense, there's a chicken and egg thing that favors first movers where publishers only want a program with enough advertisers and advertisers only want a program with enough publishers (or traffic).

[Maximum44]

Roman Abramovich, sometime it takes a few days for media.net to update earning stats. As they are not selling the ads directly, they use 3rd party networks. Sometime the reporting is delayed, especially over weekends. I am starting to think its somewhat manual!

[Maximum44]

NickMNS, i second that union idea! I think it is a great way. There is virtually no transperancy. Are we just going to accept and trust? I am for one wanting to see what clicks get discared / understand what i am doing wrong (if i am). But getting served magical numbers that does not add up is a big issue.

Yes, i do underand the market fluctuates. But i do not understand all the mights and perhaps you get from an actual Google rep. Tell it to me straight out... Gee... What are they so afraid of that their algos will be cracked? If the algo is good it will work no matter if people figured out or not!

[Ebuzz]

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

If you are doing this for the Adsense money, you are in the wrong direction (even after all you've read and seen on here)....

(-_Q)

[avalon37]

This is probably my 5th cut and paste here of what's happening to AdSense. It's mostly Facebook/Instagram taking the display budgets (esp mobile) from Google. Don't believe me? Well then you've never properly run Facebook ads an advertiser. The ROI is head and shoulders above all Google properties. And Facebook requires ads look good! Unlike Google. So less quality advertisers on GDN means lower CPC prices and lower quality advertisers (which typically means lower CTR). It's not arrow testing - although AdSense, in my opinion, thinks their sinking ship display network might actually be helped by continuing to play around with arrows and fonts. If Google believed in the future and quality of their display network do you really believe they'd launch YouTube red?

[teaandbiscuits]

I don't think it's a coincidence when the same people either do badly, or do well all at the same time. Perhaps if google did better targeted ads then all those with niches would do better all the time instead of the upswings/downswings from generic ads based on seasonal swings (Xmas & easter) etc

[FourDegreez]

Maximum44, CTR across devices was pretty stable from March -> April. But RPM is down, about 9% for phones, 6.5% for desktop on average.

[FourDegreez]

For reference, I'm showing over 400k impressions / day. Two years ago my RPM was twice what it is today. Good times. September 2014 saw the first big drop, then another drop in January last year. Most recently another small drop this past January, leading to where I am today. It's very frustrating.

Either the display network is being excluded from the best-paying ads, or competitors (Facebook, et.al.) have stolen away too many advertisers. It's weird how it happened in distinct drops, though, rather than a gradual decline.

[glitterball]

I'm also seeing a total meltdown at the moment.
I may well change over the rest of my ad slots to media.net in the next few days.

[Maximum44]

Question, does anyone of you run https? We switched to https only in January. I read a few 1- 3 year old articles that might be an issue? Is it still an issue? Anyone know?

[Mentat]

No https issue here.

[Roman Abramovich]

@Maximum44 It was results for Thursday, Friday, Saturday with no estimated revenue, I was not aware there is a delay in the reports, still no reports today, so for now I shall keep the ads off just until the earnings do show, and then I will make the decision whether it's worthwhile to put Medianet back on or not.

I am quite liking the freedom I have on some sites now without Adsense. For example I am experimenting with using sticky ads on mobiles and the clicks to the affiliate banners has been pretty impressive so far. I should hopefully see sales. I have only done this on certain products but plan to role it out on to all. Basically when a person visits my site on mobile or tablet (and main desktops now), the nice small affiliate banner is always in view at the bottom of the page whether they scroll up or down. This is something not allowed with Adsense ads unless you have a special deal with them due to the obvious increase in clicks you get, and I am seeing that now which is nice.

I have Adsense on one site now, the lowest traffic one. I am getting $3 a day or so, my thinking is I will use this site as a guide to see if Adsense has improved over time, and if not all these $3+ days will simply pay monthly hosting for all my sites which is about $80 a month.

[londrum]

one interesting thing that I have recently discovered after digging through all the stats, is that most of my channels have a lot more impressions than last year, but less clicks and less money -- which might be down to the 'active view viewable' plummeting.

i can't recall changing the position of my ads, so i can only think it's due to me swapping everything over from synchronous over to asynchronous. even the active view stat for the banner at the top of the page has plummeted, which should be impossible -- unless it is now loading after people have already scrolled past it because of this asynchronous thing.

i've swapped everything back to the old school synchronous ones, and will see how it goes.

[Ironside]

WOW! I had a £4 super click this evening, that hasn't happened in a long time, let's hope that it doesn't get taken away.

[KaseyM]

Better this weekend but only after reinstating the Google Matched Content widget. I don't want to say the two are linked but it is one heck of a coincidence. Just wish the thing wasn't so damn ugly.

[yaashul]

Today I decide to surf website which are using Google adsense and are top 50 website in the world. I surf yahoo which uses google adsense and they r showing exact same bad ads on yahoo as well. (non relevant and same ads shown on my website).

[Mentat]

My sites are full of ads for "Google Adwords" and "Google professional email".

[Ironside]

@Mentat: I feel your pain, I also see a lot of Google ads on my website and I think it's taking liberties if you ask me. So Google are displaying their own ads on my website, a bit see they are only paying me p for each click. I particularly like the 300 x 600 ad unit as it often displays relative adds to my particular niche. However, just because you are seeing certain ads, that doesn't necessarily mean that's what everybody else will be seeing. Having said that, I do see an awful lot of Google ads when browsing the Internet looking at other people's websites.

[s205.photobucket.com]

[stateofmind]

Four days ago I wrote that it has never been as cheap as now for me to advertise with AdWords.

What I do (before and after I wrote about it) is to lower my Target CPA slightly from day to day on all my campaigns. And each time I do it, I just get tons of more clicks within the same budget. This trend is still continuing, and yesterday I got a record amount of clicks within the same budget once again.

In my 10 years with AdWords I have always tried to tweak the limits to see how low my bids can go before I start to lose clicks. Up until now I had to be careful with this, as I would easily go below the limit. But not now... It seems that I can just go lower and lower and lower...

So... Something is definitely very "wrong". Google's algorithms? Advertisers running away from Google? I don't know. But quite strange it all started on exactly on April 1st. True, it is the beginning of a new quarter, but still...

[Roman Abramovich]

Got my results back for Medianet, all I can say is 100x worse than Adsense at its worse. They must not be able to convert ads for UK shopping traffic, the results were abysmal.

[RyuUK]

RE: Google ads. I don't understand why publishers don't block Google's domains. Have even seen Premium Publishers not doing this. All you're doing is handing them free advertising, with there being little chance that you'll earn clicks unless you are operating in a business type niche. You just wonder if they do this on purpose or if there are no advertisers to fill the spots. The latter sounds more likely that would explain the CPC being cut by 50% or more. How many affiliate programs do you know that have cut their commissions in half? It's not an economy issue. Advertisers just don't want to use Google's partner sites. There's only so many spots in the SERPS so where are they all going? Facebook mobile?

[Maximum44]

Roman Abramovich, we get decent conversions, about $1 rpm on a pretty crappy bottom position. Better than adsense on that position thats for sure.

How much traffic u sending it?

[ember]

Four days ago I wrote that it has never been as cheap as now for me to advertise with AdWords.

My Adwords costs have increased this year to the point where I don't use them as much anymore. Still won't use FB because it is even more expensive and gives an even lower ROI.

I don't understand why publishers don't block Google's domains.

I block all Google domains and never see a Google ad on my sites.

[dethfire]

What are the google domains?

[MrSavage]

@stateofmind, thank you for writing. That is some of the best insight I've read here, maybe ever. It seems to me that you're really speaking to the meat of the matter. I don't think anyone has offered up that level of insight ever. Thank you.

Earning wise, I've been up for a few days now. This has been more to do with what I've been doing with my Adsense. If my trend continues, I'll be happy to report that here.

Also, whoever mentioned media.net not working on weekends when it comes to updated earnings, thank you! A "phew" on my part. I like what I see and it's Monday which does support your theory about manual entry or weekend shutdown. It's a bit bizarre, but my recent changes have provided a nice bump. It remained flat after adding more units which puzzled me. Now I see some earnings increase from that change.

[RyuUK]

@dethfire I block google.co.uk and google.com. This gets rid of ads from AdSense, AdWords etc. Obv, if you target international markets then you'll need to add those extensions.

[ember]

What I do (before and after I wrote about it) is to lower my Target CPA slightly from day to day on all my campaigns. And each time I do it, I just get tons of more clicks within the same budget.

If I do that, the ads stop running.

What are the google domains?

I just block www.google.com and that keeps Google ads off my site.

[Ironside]

I tried blocking Google but I kept seeing their ads appear. And I also got a little bit paranoid that they may penalised me in some way if I did block them. What annoys me the most is that we have the choice to choose for instance to display images only, or text and images. However, soon as you make a change and start again bombarded with messages from Google suggesting that you switch back because you're an let's say £50 and more each week. For example, I blocked a load of sites that were to do with gambling, they wanted me to put them back, probably because the revenue is quite high I expect. From my experience that is a complete load of old nonsense and they basically just want you to show every ad from every advertising agency so it makes them more money, they don't actually care about us at all.

[NickMNS]

I don't block Google.

In theory blocking domains is a bad idea, it limits the demand side of the price equation thus forcing the cost of advertising on your site down.

In practice, I do block domains and all sensitive categories. The reason is that the ads that appear on a site reflect on the quality of the site. I would like users to trust my content, they are less likely to do this if the content is showing up next to ads for Russian mail order brides, tarrot readers, and phishing downloads. So I block anything that I deem spammy. This comes at a small short term cost, with, I hope, a long term benefit.

Now in terms of Google ads, I assume, maybe wrongly, that these ads appear when the cost to advertise is at its lowest. That is when demand is low. As a result, blocking these ad will result in more spammy ads (if not blocked), and/or unfilled ad slots. A very very low probability of a click is better than certainty of no clicks (unfilled ad-slots).

When Google appear, to most users, they retain the message Google advertises on this site thus it must be good, even if only on a subconscious level, it is still better than blank square or spam.