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.

[frankleeceo]

Stats are frozen today? Have not happened for a while.

[Cralamarre]

Yep, mine have been frozen for hours.

[Bobb11]

Still frozen

[Pistoche]

If you have your Adsense linked to Google Analytics, you can check there for a rough estimate until Adsense is back up.

[Ironside]

Oh good, I'm glad I'm not the only one who hasn't even started moving today

[nomis5]

Stats going into reverse here! Was a very low 358 page views, did a refresh and it was down to 355.

Analytics seems to be OK.

[trebuchet]

The Adsense panel is still frozen for me, however earnings are still being updated on the Google Publisher toolbar for Chrome.

Well I say "earnings" but January revenue from Adsense continues to be disastrous. This is by far the most disappointing month I've had with Adsense. Yesterday's RPM was less than half that of December (which itself was below par). If this is a sign of things to come in 2017 then it may be my last year with Adsense.

[Pistoche]

Adsense appears to be working now. Hope all is good.

[RedBar]

I have PVs and Impressions however nothing else, all other metrics are 0 !

[Ironside]

Reporting seems to have started again now, with me anyway

[Dimitri]

Works again for me too, with extra data from yesterday have been added.

[RedBar]

What have they broken now? CTR way down and an EPC at 30% of average with my highest click volume being from Ethiopia and absoutely nothing from Europe, USA, Australia, Canada etc !

[Ironside]

@Red bar I'm intrigued to know why you get a lot of clicks from Ethiopian

[RedBar]

It all depends what new construction projects have been confirmed and whether the bidders actually know the specified products, if not they probably make a search and, invariably, end up on one of my sites since they feature in depth the top few thousand widget products in my industry.

[Ironside]

So do your AdSense units match your niche, or are they just following search engine history of visitors?

[RedBar]

The ads I see are usually ok however bear in mind whenever I close any browser I delete all cookies and history, I doubt that many Joe Public visitors do that every day therefore I assume most will simply be shown whatever stuff from Google's stalking history.

[gogs25]

Disaster januar, go away already..

[Evan Salamanca]

Seems that CPCs are up today. Anyone else seeing this?

[Cralamarre]

My CPC goes up and down from day to day, but all that really matters is your earnings at the end of the day, and mine continue to be terrible, including today. Any sign of recovery ends up being nothing but a tease. Worst January in years, and the only explanation I can think of is the political turmoil in the US, since the US makes up the vast majority of my traffic and earnings.

[Pistoche]

Seems that CPCs are up today. Anyone else seeing this?

I am seeing the same thing, but trying not to get my hopes up in case it's another blimp. Every time I thought it can't get any worse, it reached new depths, so now I'm just expecting the worst.

[EditorialGuy]

It's been a good day so far, and I've now got the Ad Balance slider down to 15%/99%. (Being aggressive with the Ad Balance slider hasn't hurt us at all.)

[csdude55]

So far, I've had 300,000 more pageviews than this time in December, but my revenue is down by 34%. And December 2016 was a LOT lower than December 2015, so this has not been a good period :-(

I saw an immediate drop off on January 1, so I assume it's related to Q1 spending. I am curious, though, whether sites that target outside of the US are seeing the same thing? I apologize for being political, but since the US GDP dropped after the election I can't help but wonder if we're seeing fallout.

[NickMNS]

@cssdude55 gdp numbers were released today, GDP increased 1.9%.

[csdude55]

That's pretty interesting... I was going on this article, where it dropped 1.5%:

[dailyfx.com...]

I've only recently begun keeping up with this, so I haven't noticed whether Adsense revenue grows / shrinks in proportion to the GDP or Dow. It would be interesting to watch, though, to brace for patterns.

[NickMNS]

I don't think you can easily draw a relationship. Adsense revenue is very niche sensitive. My niche is dominated by only two big players (medium size companies), a few second rate competitors and a few larger firms that are just dabbling. If one the main players goes belly-up, there goes the market for my niche. So unless you have a large portfolio of sites that are in well diversified niches, I don't think you will be able to see any meaning full correlation.

That said, this pure opinion. I have never run the numbers. It could be a fun experiment. Maybe the next I'm bored and procrastinating, I'll pull some numbers into python and take look.

[Dimitri]

Last two days are "anomaly" high on my side. I wonder if this is roll backs of old data which hadn't been counted earlier this month.

[Cralamarre]

Wish I could say the same, but no such luck here. I've personally never had a situation where earnings were suddenly added at the end of the month to account for earnings that were not included earlier in the month. Some days start out slow and then "catch up" near the end of the day, but for me at least, it never extends beyond that day.

[Pistoche]

Same here, first half of the month my RPM was roughly 70% of December and for the second half of the month it dropped to 50% of December's RPM. In fact, today has been my worst ever day with Adsense. Hope February brings better fortunes or else I'll have to search for alternatives.

[Cralamarre]

Yesterday was my second worst day in years with AdSense. Today is proving to be the absolute worst. I thought maybe it was something I had done, since I've been making some changes on my site this weekend, but apparently not. I can't believe how bad this month has been. Next month has to be better.

[Halaspike]

Yesterday was my worst day ever, i can't even look at my adsense dashboard because the figures are impossibly low. Am basically ashamed of what am seeing right now, looks like everything is falling down.