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.

[dethfire]

My CTR is so bad at .32 I'm going to try to go back to text only ads. Yeah my ad pool will decrease, but I think maybe visitors are sick of image ads and won't click them.

[dethfire]

Is anyone seeing a lot of duplicate image ads on their pages?

[yaashul]

Yes We r seeing lots of duplicate non relevant images ads.

[kireb]

Yeah, duplicates on every page.

[Jericho]

Same here. Getting a lot of non-relevant duplicate ads.

[breeks]

Seeing double. Low inventory or new strategy? 2 ads for the price of one.

[ember]

Feb/Mar 2014 and Feb/Mar 2015 a lot of us experienced major bot activity. Huge fluctuation in pageviews and outrageously high CTRs. Then giant clawbacks. Google told me that Spring is especially bad for that sort of thing. Well, here it is April, 2016 and I haven't seen any out of the ordinary bot activity (fingers crossed).

So I think Google has gotten the problem under control and is much better at detecting fraudulent clicks. As a result, a lot of people are seeing lower CTRs than in months past. Maybe those clicks were indeed fraudulent and were never detected before. Maybe they weren't and are just now collateral damage. It is all about protecting advertisers.

[Mentat]

Another very bad payment day. CPC is a shame, CTR is also down + I have a red bar.

Perfect, just peachy!

[Chronos Slayer]

Every day the cpc, ctr going down and right now the red bar happening :( thats mean more to come

[alexsimon]

Revenue went back to almost 2015 levels. Maybe 5% down from what I would expect normally this time of the year but maybe even less. And this is coming from someone who had major issues with adsense in the first three months.

No more inflated pageviews, ads are sometimes irrelevant, sometimes ok (did not have much time to follow that closely lately).

Redbar is still present from time to time (one hour ago it was there). But RPM went up to almost healthy levels. Worth to say that April the 2nd was my worst day of the year so far but from April the 4th it is normal.

It was a very wild ride for me in 2016, and overall one that made me realize how important it is to diversify. It changed my plans and I will not continue developing the sites that rely on adsense but move on to a niche where I can rely on direct sales.

I often heard about the dangers of putting all my eggs in one basket and I agreed theoretically but never took action. Now, for the 10th day consecutively things are back to normal, except for my sanity. I hope it will keep continuing like it is now as that will allow me to focus on my new projects.

[Jericho]

@ember I've been averaging .5%-.7% clawback. Call me crazy but that doesn't seem like anything outrageous. Not to the point where I would get crappy image ads put on my site. I also actively block bots that I find.

I am still seeing the red bar from time to time.

[jbayabas]

Surprisingly good numbers today. Oh, the games you play Goog.

[Mentat]

I'm still full of thise kind of ads...
[i.imgur.com...]

[kireb]

Another good day here. Almost on 2014/2015 level. Big contrast to Feb/March and begin of April. Ghost views seem to be gone.

[magician]

Something is really wrong with adsense this week. We have a tax related information website for US and it is the peak season for us (with Tax Day approaching). Traffic is great but the CPC and RPM has dropped so much that the total earnings are actually lower wrt last week. Really bad timing by adsense folks to screw up things - I wait all year for this week and they are giving me below avg. earnings.

[Blogging Global]

This month is now going totally bad. CPC is downed from 0.15 to 0.05. Thank you Adsense.

[kireb]

Lot of ads are not displayed now. What the .....

[Divedeep]

This is crazy. I placed 1 Media.net banner in de sidebar, often not seen by mobiles.
Yesterday earning with media.net $1,45 and with 2 adsense banner 0.04

[Mentat]

As a publisher, I rarely used the Adwords complementary program, and today I had a shock!
Now you must be a professional in order to use Adwords! This is a big problem!

Also, placement targeting is so well hidden, that's impossible to use.

[ww2015]

@mentat what do you mean you need to be a professional? Is it annoyingly badly designed in a way that only a 'certified' professional would use, or does it require some form of qualification or business registration?

For disclosure, I am a professional spending a 5 figure budget monthly, but I have zero interest in working with Google on the advertising front - they simply aren't that professional.

[Mentat]

" Is it annoyingly badly designed in a way that only a 'certified' professional would use" - that is the problem! Now is too complicated to be used by the usual Joe.

[Maximum44]

Our arrows (nessie) are back. Are yours?

[Chronos Slayer]

@Maximum44 not yet, when was your arrow was removed and when its back, bit more details will be helpful. I am still waiting for the nessie to back, cause 3rd party network giving better cpm than adsense atm.

[Maximum44]

We had Nessie removed April 1st and now it is back. Only thing we have done is to minimize our invalid clicks and got in touch with Adsense Support to make sure we were doing everything correct.

It will be interesting to hear back from others if they got their arrow back as well (or not) and if they did anything to their units.

[Halaspike]

I think U.S visitors have stopped clicking adsense ads lol. CTR dropped from 2.5 to 0.8 I'm starting to see acne on my face because of frustration

[Mentat]

It's that strange feeling that we did not yet hit the bottom :(

I'm looking at the figures in the last 12 months and I cannot understand how we got this low.
It's a nightmare!

[koan]

My Adsense earnings got halved over the course of a few months around this time of the year in 2015. I've been doing what I can ever since to try to get things back on track, with little success, but as I watch the trend in the past month, my worst worry now is that something similar happens again this year, which would be a final blow for me.

[jbayabas]

I wonder if the low earning has got to do with sheer number of blank ads that's appearing on my sites. I have so much blank ads that the backup ads from another network is now earning more than Adsense. I'm just totally flabbergasted. This is totally surreal!

[JustForAdsense]

Adsense just needs to get remotely intelligent. It's quite sad in some cases, from a programmers perspective.

Dear AdSense,

If i have seen a large specific ad (no matter what it is), but the same exact ad across my screen, like 100 f*cking times already, and i haven't clicked it once yet, guess what.....i'm not going to click it the 101st time you show it to me either. You would think they would rate limit impressions but they aren't. out of all their efforts to make ad serving more intelligent, this is baby stuff, stuff they should be doing since day one.

[MrSavage]

I will just chip in with this observation. I've been going through my ad review center. At best I would describe this a shoveling manure. Not with a shovel, but with bare hands. It's dirty. The ads stink. It's like sorting through spam. It's pretty much endless. No earnings? I know why. German ads. Odd adds. Ads that have no relation to my English based visitors. I have no idea how or why my account is saddled with spammy ads. I just can't get away from it. I swear. US and Canada are about 90% of my visitors. I would say 90% of the ads in the review are non English. I'm befuddled.