January 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Mentat]

2017 is here, so let's go to work...

My traffic is finally rising, but the payment (CPC) for the first days of the year are 50% down.
Let's hope this is not a trend for the year to come.

[Maximum44]

Must have a load of #*$!ty ads cuz i can take the slider down to 77% before the 100% revenue starts to drop! Geez

[ember]

EPC is abysmal.

[EditorialGuy]

Must have a load of #*$!ty ads cuz i can take the slider down to 77% before the 100% revenue starts to drop! Geez

That's actually good, because it means you can use the discarded 23% of your AdSense impressions for something else without losing any revenue.

[Maximum44]

Yeah hopefully, i will experiment with it and get back to you guys

[Mentat]

The problem is that they will not redirect to the backfill those ads, they will show a blank space!

[Mentat]

9 days and the payment is still on the drain.
It's like all the advertisers put their money under the Christmas tree.

[FourDegreez]

Earnings significantly down, not seeing any improvement yet. RPM is 1/3rd what it was this time three years ago.

[robzilla]

I don't know about 3 years ago, but I'm up by 20%, RPM-wise, compared to January 2016.

Have yet to play with the ad balance slider.

[Dimitri]

After 3 days in-line with expectations, today (so far) is EXTREMELY low.

[Ironside]

December was an excellent month, this month I started off quite well as well. However, today is really slow, anybody else experiencing the same thing?

[gogs25]

Last two days are really really bad :(( January started at 30-50% drop , and last two days dropped again even more..

[Dimitri]

Yes, last two days are EXTREMELY bad. CTR is okay, but CPC is very-very low.

[trebuchet]

CTR remains good (over 1% most days) but EPC remains in the gutter. I thought it might have started to recover by now, but no.

[Evan Salamanca]

Has anybody had massive CPC differences between rectangle ads and horizontal ads? For horizontal it's been very high for me, and for rectangle it's been very low. This has even been the case before this month. Anyone else?

[sujian919]

December is better than January.

[magician]

Extremely poor CPC - down by 33% from last month. Traffic is good though - hoping to see some revival next week.

[Dimitri]

Yes, I don't know what happened to CPC since 2-3 days. Traffic is good, CTR is normal, Ads (from the ad review center) looks fine.

[Halaspike]

The CTR for United States on my site is about 0.13% to 0.5%, while the CTR for other countries on my site are all above 2.5%. This has been going on for months and my traffic is 100% organic with 80% from the U.S. Looks like adsense is not registering clicks from the U.S on my site.

[Evan Salamanca]

No surprise about the CPC drop. This always happens in January. Has anyone noticed a gigantic link unit CPC drop though since they switched up the link unit style? More clicks yeah, but less CPC

[Martin45]

I noticed also 50% CPC drop of the link units in the last 6 months.
The link units were an important source of revenue for me.
Nevertheless, I removed a great part of these units.

[EditorialGuy]

Our January CPC is running about 11 percent ahead of December's, probably because of seasonal variations. (We always do better after the first of the year.) The new "Ad Balance" slider could be a factor, too.

[Maximum44]

Really bad couple of days, been experimenting with banning ads, but it does not seem to help, actually having all ads unbannedads seems to improve the situation. Have no idea why i keep trying to ban ads. It always fail.

We had an exremely good December, and now this crap!

[frankleeceo]

The best thing to do for january is to sit tight if this is a low month. Doing anything drastic during this period can hurt later earnings. Yes lower earning hurts, but being inactive, patient, and ready to move is the best course of action. This is the time where advertisers reevaluate their budget, end of year ROI, and plan their future ad placements. Removing ad spots, moving things around only make it much harder for advertisers and bots who actually make those judgement calls.

I generally use this month to plan out my content strategy for the incoming year, lower my own spending for higher profit later (as well as start with business related tax estimation).

This month is as expected 40~50% cpm cut versus December for my niches. I do not expect any CPM changes until mid February after a good number of advertisers coming back into the game to place their budget and playing chips.

Seasonality matters. Alot.

[Dimitri]

Yesterday, (more precisely last night) , was exceptionally "high". I wonder if the low cpc observed the last few days ,was the result of delayed data processing on Adsense's side. So "in my case", at the scale of the whole week, the situation ends to be in the normal range. (without counting that now my backup ads are earning me some more, thanks to the Ad balance settings).

[Mentat]

I see a lot of "Get Google Chrome" aads, so low inventory...

[Dimitri]

I had always wondered if Google is really paying for its own self-promotion...

[koan]

Horrible RPM since the new year, certainly a record low if I compare to previous years in the same time period. Bad CTR, terrible CPC.

[trebuchet]

RPM for January 1-14 is 0.45 cents down on the same period in 2016, and a full dollar down from 2015. EPC keeps hinting at a recovery then slumps to new lows. Yesterday was as bad a day as I've had with Adsense.

[nubchai]

Yes, this has been a very weak Adsense month for us so far too.

[kireb]

My RPM is about 2% up compared to the first 15 days of Jan '16. My traffic is up by 10%, so I am not complaining so far.