MARCH 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[frankleeceo]

March is here, the beginning earning is usually lower compared to the average of last 30 days. Mid-end of february was decent in my book. Overall febuary as a whole was much stronger than jan in my niches at 17% higher RPM.

Expecting a stronger RPM near the end of this month nearing the end of first quarter. Probably another 5~10% boost from February.

Keep on churning and going~ I have been going back to my older properties to reflect on possible improvements. See what competitors are doing that seem to be working for them. See what things that I did no longer works. It's a continuous process.

Changed 95% of my properties to serve over HTTPs over November.

[edited by: martinibuster at 6:07 pm (utc) on Mar 1, 2017]

[Pistoche]

@Ironside Can you check your revenue breakdown by platform? My earnings have been all over the place lately and usually the culprit is a specific platform. One day mobile severely under-performs, and the next day it's desktop earnings that are throwing a tantrum. For the past 3 days my desktop CTR has been 80% of what it normally is.

[glitterball]

@Ironside My earnings were dire yesterday as well. So far in March, I've been seeing the biggest swings in earnings that I've ever seen in Adsense from one day to the next - one day was close to 3x that of the previous day and yesterday was about 50% of the day before.

[Ironside]

Forgive my ignorance guys, where do I go and check specific revenue performance on desktop and mobile, basically seeing what has and what time each day? I don't normally bother looking at all this information, I just look at the figures I make each day. But I think you are right, it would be interesting to see what's adding a lot, although I don't think I will be able to have much influence over what I am.

I'm probably echoing what I have said before so forgive me, however I am absolutely convinced that the massive downfall in earnings is down to mobile use. If you think about it, when you're looking at a 24 inch monitor whether website page open, you're going to be able to read a lot of the information without having to scroll. Even with a larger smart phone screen, the webpage tools the whole space and you got to scroll to see the information a lot more. I just think people ignore ads on mobiles where they may be more influenced by them on a desktop.

[Ironside]

So far this month I've had 28,743 page views on a high-end mobile devices. This has brought 130,000 impressions, and 379 clicks. Page RPM is £1.65.

Desktop has brought 8277 page views, 34,541 impressions and 101 clicks with page RPM at £2.92 earnings on desktop this month are almost half of high-end mobile device.

If you then look at tablets, I've had 3205 page views, 13,675 impressions with 75 clicks. However, the page RPM is £4.19. Monthly earnings are closer to desktop than desktop as to high-end mobile devices.

[EditorialGuy]

I'm probably echoing what I have said before so forgive me, however I am absolutely convinced that the massive downfall in earnings is down to mobile use. If you think about it, when you're looking at a 24 inch monitor whether website page open, you're going to be able to read a lot of the information without having to scroll. Even with a larger smart phone screen, the webpage tools the whole space and you got to scroll to see the information a lot more. I just think people ignore ads on mobiles where they may be more influenced by them on a desktop.

That's probably true if all other things are equal.But we can't assume that all people using phones are refugees from desktop or laptop screens. In many cases, mobile traffic may be incremental traffic, because (thanks to mobile) the average user is probably spending more time on the Internet than he or she did before smartphones made the Internet portable.

Also, some advertisers may be willing to pay a premium for desktop traffic these days, meaning that higher desktop revenues are making up for lower mobile revenues. Case in point: We don't even show AdSense ads on mobile devices, yet our AdSense revenue hasn't been hurt by the trend toward mobile.

[Ironside]

Is there an easy way to temporarily disable ads on mobile devices? It be interesting to do a 12 hour experiment to see what my earnings are at the end of a period when only earnings come from desktop or tablets.

To be honest, I think my earnings would suffer terribly if there were no ads showing on mobile devices. For some reason, a lot of the people who visit my site the same from a mobile device. I often wonder why this is. It could be that people are sitting watching television whilst flicking through websites on their mobile. My particular niche fits in with "browsing at one's leisure", if that makes sense. However, if you run a website that is intended for businesses then as a very good chance a lot of people will be browsing the website from work using desktops.

Thinking about it, if you could disable ads on mobile devices then advertises may pay a premium for the ads that show on desktops. So in theory, you may even be able to make up the difference if they are willing to pay more per click. But I think that would probably take quite a while to develop.

[Pistoche]

Thinking about it, if you could disable ads on mobile devices then advertises may pay a premium for the ads that show on desktops. So in theory, you may even be able to make up the difference if they are willing to pay more per click. But I think that would probably take quite a while to develop.

This could work if advertisers are using placement ads (specifically targeting your website to place ads) for their campaigns. Even then, it's a long shot that disabling ads on one platform will increase CPC for another platform. However, that said, some websites do block ads (through ad review center on Adsense) and force advertisers to directly advertise with them and cut out the middleman (Adsense in this case). This would only likely work for highly niche websites and ones that are highly sought after by advertisers for placement ads. Therefore, you should check on Adsense to see if you receive a lot of placement ads. If not, then there is really no point in trying.

[vegasrick]

Adsense revenue stats have not updated for the last two hours. Anyone else having issues?

[vegasrick]

Appears to be updating now, but stats are coming up very slowly.

[EditorialGuy]

It's pretty easy to keep ads from displaying on mobile devices, if you have access to the page code. Just use the "display" property in your CSS file.

For example, our pages have a right-hand margin or sidebar that contains a 300 x 600 ad unit and other information that I don't want to display on smartphones. I set off the code for that sidebar with:

<div id="sidebar">
[sidebar code goes here]
</div>

Our CSS file includes the statement:

sidebar { display: block; } /* sidebar is normally visible */

@media screen and (max-width: 767px) {
#sidebar { display: none; } /* hide sidebar if screen < 768px */
}

There may be more elegant ways to achieve this result (I'm no CSS guru), but the method is working for us.

[Squarix9]

Ironside: You asked a couple of days ago, but I'm bleeding traffic. I've been slowly losing views since early February. No idea why, nothing changed, no new ads. Everything still loads okay on my end. It's really affecting my earnings. :(

If this keeps up, I'll have to buy some new websites just to keep up with traffic.

[Ironside]

I've given up trying to 2nd guess or work out why Google AdSense is so fickle. My earnings are up and down each month. I'm guessing about the same amount of clicks every month and visitor rate hasn't really dropped off. There was a time when I would switch on in the morning, check my earnings and they would already be into double figures.

According to the statistics I'm getting a bigger percentage of new visitors than returning visitors on a daily basis. I think you're more likely to get clicks from new people to your website rather than people who are visiting on a daily basis.

I also think it's worth experimenting with different layouts if you find that your earnings are really dropping. I think nowadays I would advise people to go with large ads, rather than small rectangles. By far my best earning ad is a 300 x 600 unit. I have a 336 x 280 unit that doesn't do too badly. It doesn't get a shed load of clicks, but occasionally I'll get reasonably high paying clicks.

But I do think a lot of it has to do with how many people are hitting on your website. If you ran an online jewellers selling engagement rings and somehow you were lucky enough to have "diamond engagement ring" by high up in Google then I would imagine people would pay handsomely to have their adverts on your pages.

[NickMNS]

@EditorialGuy
No No No.... Your general idea is correct, but the implementation is dangerously wrong.
The display:none must be applied to the ins.adsbygoogle tag. If it is only applied to the parent div, the ad will be hidden from view but ad request will still be made, and this is against the policies.
See here: [productforums.google.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

@NickMNS: Thanks. I hadn't been aware of that. Problem fixed (I think).

[Bobb11]

Have somebody stuck stats now?

[Casanova]

In March, cpm was down by 40% and also traffic. Do everyone a like?

[Ironside]

Things have picked up quite nicely in the last couple of days, yesterday into double digits for just 50 clicks, that's not bad going.

Media.net is also looking quite good this month. I'll tell you guys, if you've not tried media.net and you are getting a lot of traffic then you're missing out on what could be quite a lot of money.

[LuckyLiz]

@ironside - You asked how to tell what you were earning from mobile vs desktop. The way to do it; Choose performance reports from the menu, click to accept the default report, then look at the top where it say Report Type. Use the drop down to select Platform.

[NickMNS]

@Ironside LuckyLiz's suggestion is great, especially for an overview.

If you want a more detailed view, specially if you are using responsive ad-units, go to Advanced Reports -> Creative Sizes. This will show you the breakdown by ad-size displayed, the only down side is that it does not show the exact position of the ad, so if your site is laid out such that it can show the same size in multiple locations, you will want to go to the top left corner of the report (not the menu sidebar), under where it says "Report Type" and click on the +add shown in the filter form box and select "Ad-units". Then you can see the report specific to each ad-unit, showing the stats for each ad-size displayed. This is powerful stuff.

[Ironside]

Cheers guys, I will check that out. Although it does say somewhere exactly how much you earn from each, I've been able to see that figure for a long time.

[Bensword]

Does anyone noticed some adsense incline last two days.

I get it across several sites in different niches.All US traffic.
Could this be related to march madness?

[jbayabas]

More like decline.

[frankleeceo]

Lowest RPM of the month for me.

[Halaspike]

Big decline over here

[CommandDork]

After a great Tuesday, Wednesday fell and today is lower than normal for me. Of course it's getting to the end of the week and some area schools are starting their Spring Break (Friday) but March isn't looking any better than February unfortunately.

[kireb]

After 2 very good weeks, my RPM is in sharp decline since March 15. Weord thing is that I received a warning email from Goigle that day about the EU Cookie Consent disclaimer. As I use the simple Silktide app, I thought this was covered. It appears Silktide changed their hosting script end 2015 and I never changed that. Could there be a correlation between their warning mail and the steep 40% decline in RPM since?

[andymorris]

Ive got weird stuff happening the last few days

when i got a low CPC, i got lots of clicks and when the CPC is higher the CTR is down by 50%.

Seems like Google is deciding how much you make now...

[Bobb11]

I have on 300x600 some rich media ads and they are paying very very low cpc. On other ads unit its ok, but on this ad unit its bad.

[glitterball]

Is something broken today? Never seen it so bad.

[NickMNS]

Seems like Google is deciding how much you make now...

That's right Google has room full of people monitoring each site, as soon as they are making too much money they dial down the money knob.

Or....

Advertiser A has a set budget say 50$ for the day, he sets his auction limit low say $0.50. Given the current market conditions it is sufficient to win enough placements to consume his budget. Thus the ad appears 100 times on your site, and the rest on other sites. Your user's are interested in the product being sold by this ad so they click on it at rate of 1/10. As a result your are paid for 10 clicks!

Advertiser B has a premium product, but keeps the same budget as A $50. But she sets a high limit say $5.00. She wins all her auctions easily and her ad appears 10 times on your site and the rest of the placements go to other sites. Again, your user's are interested in the product being sold by her ads, after all they are great, great products actually tremendous products. So your users click on the ad at a rate of 1/10. As a result your are paid for 1 clicks!

Take note that in the second scenario, there was no knob turning by any evil players.