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.

[Fallenone]

Hey guys, from christmas my CPC has significantly dropped. Before christmas it was 0.17 USD now it is 0.017 so im getting 10 % of the december's CPC. @Hungary

I know that earnings significantly drop after christmas, but is 90 % drop normal? i don't know. I made an other website in the same niche to my friends account to see whether my account has been smartpriced. The CPC was the same there too. So i am wondering, is the pile of #*$! that big, or am i getting smartpriced for the server ip which is hosting my sites and not the account?

Any ideas? Btw i made a german site where the cpc is from 0.1-0.19 USD, which is not bad at all.

[james_09]

My RPM is 45% down on December, but 32% up on January 2016.
So far 2017 looks to be starting out fairly well.

[Ammalgam]

Yeah this month has been a DISASTER. Seems like all the money has not come back into the system yet. After close to 15 years on the system, this month has been the worst ever.

Watching to see if there will be a recovery.

[Mentat]

Yesterday was promising, today is a disaster.

[trebuchet]

Yes, I'm afraid January is shaping up to be financially crushing for me. Despite heavy traffic and a reasonable CTR, earnings are just dire. Today's RPM is the worst I have seen since first joining Adsense in 2004.

[GiovanniB]

Sorry, wrong submit by mobile phone.

[edited by: GiovanniB at 7:29 am (utc) on Jan 19, 2017]

[GiovanniB]

Good rise here in January. But this 3rd week is 33% down.
CPC is falling down drastically.
We have more page views but less click.
Some big campaigns are shutting down? May be remarketing campaigns are boring users?

Update, text ads are down by 70%.

G.

[ranka]

Is it standard that Adsense RPM is highest in the morning but end of the day it's decreased by half? Anyone have the same problem or your RPM is constant whole day?

[Pistoche]

Is it standard that Adsense RPM is highest in the morning but end of the day it's decreased by half? Anyone have the same problem or your RPM is constant whole day?

It is best to avoid terms like "morning" and "night" due to different time zones. Your morning isn't the same as my morning. That said, I'll use GMT for this post. The RPM changes you experience will be largely due to the location of where your visitors live. For instance, I receive most of my traffic from USA so my RPM is highest between 2:00 PM and 10:00 PM (work hours in the United States). This is a simplified model but I hope it got the point across. Other things such as CPC would play a factor if your primary traffic is from a country like India (low CPC) and a secondary source of traffic from a high CPC country like USA. So you'll need to calculate work hours for the countries of importance and then see how the different CPCs would affect your RPM.

[ranka]

It depends what kind of site you have. If you are targeting one country and about 98% of the time traffic coming from this country, where is only one time-zone, then "morning" and "evening" is very accurate. It was my mistake that I asked question so general way, but this is what I meant.

Every morning, first 2000-5000 pageviews I have quite high RPM, but end of the day it's almost always decreased a lot. I think it's because advertisers daily budgets has ran out end of the day.

[Cralamarre]

I've been with AdSense for 10 years now, and while I always expect January to be slow, this month has been the worst in years. Trying not to worry, but it's getting tougher by the day. Currently, my earnings are down 24% from the same time last year, even though traffic numbers are similar. My CTR seems normal, but the ads simply are not paying anything.

To be fair, when I look at my earnings from last January, I see that things really didn't start to pick up until closer to the end of the month, and I was fine after that. So, I'll hold off on my nervous breakdown until next week.

I can't help but wonder if this has anything to do with the Trump inauguration tomorrow. Maybe advertisers are waiting until things get back to normal before spending money.

[NickMNS]

@Ranka and Pistoche
RPM is calculated on a daily basis, it takes the revenue and divides by the impressions. Revenue for the day = 100, impression for the day = 10000 then 100/10000 = 0.01 rev / impression * 1000 impression = $10.00 rpm. At midnight (your account time) RPM resets to zero, and the system starts accumulating revenues and impressions.

If by pure chance the first impression of day gets a click say $10 then $10/1 = 10$ / impression * 1000 = $10,000 rpm.
Then if you do not get anymore clicks for the rest of the day but impressions continue to grow, say 10000 impression. At the end of the day 10/10000 * 1000 = $1 rpm

So what your are seeing is most likely a side effect of the way the metric is calculated.

Note that the opposite situation getting big clicks at the end of day, is not as dramatic.

[Ironside]

Is reporting slow today, or just me? Earnings have hardly got off the ground

[kireb]

I have entered the doldrums as well. Low US RPM for already 2/3 days.

[Dimitri]

Impressions and CTR are good, but yes CPC is in the low range here too.

(* i compare with the months of January of the previous years)

[miccy]

<snip>

It does seem that this month is among the lowest compared to previous months.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:36 pm (utc) on Jan 21, 2017]
[edit reason] please read TOS [/edit]

[NickMNS]

@miccy nice shameless plug.
It does not reflect my reality at all. But providing a nice graphs is more important than accuracy.

[leebow]

My CPC is down from last week. Anyone seeing this?

[Dimitri]

@leebow: that's what lot of people are reporting here.

[EditorialGuy]

Our average CPC for the last week is nearly double what it was the previous week. I'd imagine this is related to our implementation of the Ad Balance slider.

But why worry about CPC? For publishers (as opposed to advertisers), RPM and total revenue are the numbers that matter.

[Ironside]

I'm afraid I've never quite understood the fascination everyone seems to have with CPC and all the other stuff. If you've got AdSense units on your website then all that really matters is how much you've made at the end of the day. I don't see the point of analysing anything else, how's that going to help you? Normally my page and impression RPM is fairly high on my 300 x 600 ad unit. However, have not made much money so far today and both of them are less than £1. I can sit there and look at the figures all night long, however I don't see how I'm gonna find out why so low at the moment compared to yesterday.

[frankleeceo]

Out of my 7 years with the program starting from zero. My conclusion is getting more traffic usually have a bigger impact than trying to optimize things. When traffic is doubled, I have a safety net of a 50% drop in RPM. And if RPM does not drop, my earning will surely exceed beyond expectation.

Maybe my view would change when I reach a certain pageviews daily where it makes more sense to optimize. But as of now, it's a waste of time.

I don't really see RPM improvement through January.

[EditorialGuy]

If you've got AdSense units on your website then all that really matters is how much you've made at the end of the day. I don't see the point of analysing anything else, how's that going to help you?

RPM can be useful in comparing the performance of different revenue sources, different ad sizes, etc.

For example, when I upped our main site's single ad unit per page from 300 x 250 to 300 x 600, I did so after testing and comparing RPM for both sizes. (If the difference had been small, I might have stuck with 300 x 250 and used the additional space for something else.)

Another example would be using RPM to decide how to allocate your backup ads, especially if you now have more of them thanks to the new "Ad Balance" slider. Let's say that you've decided to use house ads for affiliate programs as your backup ads. Comparing your site's RPM from affiliate program A, B, and C will help you decide which program to feature in your house ads.

[gogs25]

the january started very bad as usual about -45% down , you imagine that it would start to come back but from this sunday night it DROPPED AGAIN about 30-40% on dropped rpm , and its now at this point for 2 days , does anyone sees this additional drop?
logging into adsense is making my heart bleed after this additional drop :(
DECEMBER : $4.5 rpm
januar 1st to januar 22: $2.4 rpm
januar 22 and after: $1.5 rpm

Anyone ?

[Ironside]

It seems that my page RPM can be very high if for instance I have had five clicks and made £4. However, as soon as clicks raise the RPM will drop. So I don't really see how that helps me at all.

[NickMNS]

@Ironside see my post near the top of this page. It explains what you are seeing.

[Cralamarre]

My AdSense earnings are still down 26% over this time last January. Still no sign of recovery. Worst January ever for me.

[Cralamarre]

Is anyone else seeing a major improvement today? My earnings are suddenly twice as high as they were yesterday. Hopefully this is a trend and not just a fluke.

[frankleeceo]

@Cralamarre

No sudden change. The trend is that it will slowly creep up until end of Q1. For my niches at least.

[Ironside]

Thanks Nick, that makes sense. However, it really doesn't give me any information that is relevant. All I'm interested in is the ££s at the end of the day.

I don't know whether it's got something to do with me speeding up my website and making it more mobile friendly, but I'm certainly getting back to the amount of hits each day that I was a year or two ago. Things to do bit of a slump for a while, but it's slowly improving. Earnings are very much on a street level each day so I can't really complain. Not a fortune, but a nice amount each month. Just got paid today actually,