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]

[magician]

This site used to make $100s of dollars a month. Now reduced to less than a dollar a day.

Was it making 100s of dollars for the same amount of traffic which you are getting now?

[Ebuzz]

The site's traffic has reduced over the past 4 years. By about 60%.

But earnings have reduced by.........95%.

Anyway, that is not the point. The point is, if you get a big click, it triggers alarms in the algo, and consequently, other clicks will either 1 ) not be recorded 2) reduced in click value.

It is all part of Google's "Smart Pricing" algo.

[NickMNS]

Anyway, that is not the point.

Do you want to find a solution to your troubles or do you want to lament about big bad Google.

60% less traffic == 60% less earnings. Two thirds of the problem lies with a loss in traffic. That would be the first issue I would address, if I were in your situation.
The remaining 30% drop is likely to do with an increase in mobile traffic across the board.
Where is your revenue coming from desktop vs mobile?
How does the portion of mobile revenue compare to the portion of mobile traffic?
What is difference between your active viewable for mobile vs desktop?
How are your ads implemented on mobile?

You may well be impacted by smart pricing, but I would doubt that. If you are only getting a few clicks a day there would be no alarm bells ringing at Adsense. My understanding is that smart pricing is used in situations when a publishers is providing many clicks to advertisers but those click convert a rate well below the norm, ie there is something fishy going on but they can't prove it.

As for getting a big click and then nothing behavior. I provided a logical explanation (see last post on page 3 of this thread) to someone else who came up with the same theory. Again, your lack of traffic and earnings makes your claim highly unlikely. What interest does Google have in spending time and resources to prevent publishers that are not making money from making even less money.

Finally, magician's recommendation to use the ad-balancer is a good one. With low traffic and few clicks, there is a high probability of being served spammy ads. These ads erode the trust of your users. So users will be less likely to click on a legitimate (high paying ad) if they are surrounded by spammy ones.

[Ironside]

I was having a look at www.Mashable.com yesterday just to see how they have laid their AdSense out. According to a couple of blogs I was reading, Mashable are in the top 10 earning AdSense websites in the world. To be perfectly honest there is nothing special about what they have done. They have just put a few different sized ad units in random places as you scroll down the page. Most of them show as either a rectangular ad or a 300 x 600 ad. If you go into an article then they appear to have a 728 x 90 AdSense banner at the top of the page and several rectangular's and 300 x 600 ads running down the right-hand column.

I can't claim to spend hours browsing the website, but I've had a good look through and the AdSense ads I am seeing are all complete rubbish, in my opinion, there's nothing there that would strike me as being a paid ad relating to the particular subject of the page. In fact, none of them even seem to follow my browsing history. I can't imagine anyone clicking deliberately on these ads, I think people probably click on them without even knowing what they are. A massive website like Mashable is obviously relying on a number of hits they get for their earnings. I get anywhere between 2500 and 3700 hits every single day. My daily earnings typically fall between high single digits and low double digits. Mashable will be getting 500 times my traffic I would imagine, so it's not surprising they are earning so much. I believe it's down to the amount of hits you get to your website, not really the quality.

[NickMNS]

@ironside according to Similarweb, they estimate Mashable.com to gets over 100M pvs a month.
Assume (very conservative estimates):
3 ads per page that is 300M ad impressions a month
CTR of 1% that is 3M ad clicks a month
CPC of $0.10 that is $300k dollars per month
$3.6M in Adsense ad revenue per year.

You can mess with ad placements, size and a host of other optimizations but at the end of the day the only real driver of earnings is your sites ability to attract traffic.

[Ironside]

Remember Nick that Google have now relaxed the rules and you can have more than three ads per page. If you go to their homepage they got absolutely loads of ads as you scroll down.

I've experimented with ad units in the right-hand column and I got absolutely nowhere. The only ad placement that seems to work for me is in the left-hand column above the menu, and embedded 300 x 600 ad units embedded in a paragraph of text. All other ad units and money but absolutely nowhere near these large units.

I would imagine that Mashable are earning thousands and thousands of pounds from just views rather than clicks alone.

But what I was trying to get across is that anyone could do what Mashable.com have done regarding AdSense placement, it's nothing unique or clever.

[Ebuzz]

@ NickMNS

Relax, I will moan about big (not so big anymore) bad Google as much as I want. Notice I used quotes to denote smart pricing, but that is not really what I meant. That "big clicks means instant capping" syndrome or whatever you want to call it is a sure thing whether you get a lot of traffic or not. Even when the site WAS making a lot more back then. Same phenomenon then, as today....

At least, that much is consistent with Google Adsense...

And, I don't depend on Google to make my income, although I will take whatever bones they throw at me. Even though I also have sites that get hundreds of thousands of uniques (not pageviews) a month (in case you think I only have small sites and know squat). Nah, I got bigger fish to fry and bigger traffic sources than Google....no hints there.

And that's why I hardly post here these days.

[CommandDork]

"I've experimented with ad units in the right-hand column and I got absolutely nowhere. The only ad placement that seems to work for me is in the left-hand column above the menu, and embedded 300 x 600 ad units embedded in a paragraph of text. All other ad units and money but absolutely nowhere near these large units."

Agreed. These are the ad placement / blocks working for me right now since revenue started to drop in mid-2014. Anything in the right-hand column was never seen / interacted with so I don't understand why so many big sites do placements there. I run a top-left and an after-article placement (like you) along with the traditional header block. These seem to work but at nowhere near the levels before the "Great Ad Crash of 2014/2015".

Ad links have made up some of the loss but there has been no total rescue. The Ad Balancer hasn't made much of a difference for me either.

[Ironside]

Revenue seemed to drop overnight for me, it wasn't a sloping. I used to have a 200 x 90 link unit in the left-hand column above the menu which used to do absolutely superbly. I've replaced that with the 300 x 600 which does even better. I tried a 728 x 90 in the header block but that didn't anything at all. Yeah, I know what you mean about ad units in the right-hand column. YouTube have a rectangular unit there all the time. But they probably make most of their money just from showing the unit, rather than people clicking on it.

In fact, just been having a look at my channel statistics. Actually, the 336 x 280 unit that I have at the bottom of one of my articles does better than I thought. If you compare it to the 300 x 600 and it does marvellously. The 336 unit has had 45 clicks this month and made £13. Now compare that to the 300 x 600 unit that has had 392 clicks but has made £66. But you have to bear in mind of I have one of these large units on all of my main articles. So maybe if you've got a really interesting article that gets a lot of traffic, try putting a 336 x 280 unit at the bottom of the page. I've actually put mine just before the last paragraph at the bottom.

[Runfun]

The credibility of Google Adsense is decreasing fast. I've a financial website in Europe with about 170k visitors a month and approximately 750k pageviews a month. Last week my CPM and revenue decreased a lot but visitors didn't decrease. Maybe it's because the companies who stopped advertising because of the scandal, who knows?

Suddenly I've strange advertisements that aren't targeted at all even in Chinese. Last week I also got a warning about using a 300x250 above the fold for mobile devices but I see it a lot at bigger websites. I've removed the 300x250 but increased ads from other networks because the revenue is dropped very much. I'm glad there's an increase of direct advertisers so hopefully I can exclude Google Adsense soon.

[jbayabas]

It's just bad day after day. No end in sight. My job hunting is not doing well either. Life sucks. The struggle is real.

[Mentat]

Friday was bad, but Saturday is getting ridiculous. The payment is much, much lower...

Well, it seems that the big brands and advertising agencies are boycotting Google Adsense, not only on Youtube.
Prepare for rough landing. They wanted a chance to hurt Google/Adsense and now is payback time.

AT&T and Verizon

Until Google can ensure this won't happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms

[robzilla]

My RPM is surprisingly stable since January, and slightly higher than the same period last year. If only traffic wasn't slow this time of year.

[Ironside]

Not a bad Saturdays earnings really. Looks like March is going to slightly exceed February's earnings which is obviously good. I've estimated that if media.net daily earnings carry on as they are, I should be getting anywhere between $160 & $170 for March.

[RedBar]

Simply diabolical, both EPC and CTR halved, daily earnings are now a quarter of just a few weeks ago.

I'll leave ads running until the end of the month however if earnings do not increase then they're gone, utterly pointless.

[Halaspike]

@RedBar you're a funny person, i laugh anytime i read your comments. Male or Female?

[glitterball]

Looking very bad here for the last few days.

[Cloudbaseflyer]

What do you think? Adsense page level ads can causing any drop in ctr? May sounds crazy, but anything can happen in this days..

[Ironside]

Sunday was almost my best day this month. Definitely going to exceed last month's earnings

[EditorialGuy]

As I mentioned earlier, daily variations have been a little more extreme lately than they used to be. On the plus side, we're up for the last week even though we're down for the last month.

[Ironside]

I was watching the YouTube video relating to real-time analytics yesterday. They featured a website that teaches people how to play the guitar. I couldn't believe it, they had several thousand people on their all at once. Couldn't find any AdSense on their website, surely they're missing out big time.

[breeks]

Last month was a short one, but I am up I am up 48% over last month with adsense earnings. The roller coaster continues.

[Ironside]

My AdSense earnings have also exceeded last month's, so have media.net. Should be a half decent payment next month.

[child please]

A lot of it IS a roller coaster ride, affected by quarter ends. March is end of Q1, so generally speaking ad rates go up...I'm ready to hear everyone panic in April, when things slide back down (as they inevitably will do, since it's beginning of Q2).

At least this is how it works for me...January is the worst, slowly rises until March, then a dip in April, rises until June, then a dip again until September and then October to December is a significant rise until the bottom drops out in January.

[NickMNS]

@child_please no complaints here I'll take what I can get.

[Ironside]

@Child please I thought you said you are on five digits every month? I could only dream of figures like that.

[Halaspike]

@child please did you buy the car you said you was gon' buy with your November adsense earnings? You're enjoying man, getting 5 figures monthly your traffic must be pretty high. @Ironside me too mhen, still struggling with 3 figures over here :(

[Ironside]

Earnings seem to be fairly consistent with me which suits me just fine. This month has already exceeded February, as has media.net so the good thing those are not going backwards.

[nubchai]

Things have definitely picked up for Adsense and Media.net this month.

[frankleeceo]

It's much better to save as much as money as you can in this business, especially for a small / medium sized publisher that are self-employed. If you work for others you can always find another job / gig.

You never know if the money will be gone tomorrow due to algo updates, competition, and stuff. I have learned again and again from others and got first hand experience myself. My personal experience - I got comfortable with my earning from my first year because of luck when I started doing this full time, only to see earning tumble nearly half in the following year. The second year with much less earning along with a highly attention needy newborn, was highly stressful. It was a vicious cycle between lack of sleep, little work time, and poverty level income. With that experience...I now constantly tell myself to never be comfortable and stop updating my knowledge and work habit, regardless of how I am doing. I survived.

The fluctuation with the big account is more or less the same as a smaller account. Just multiply the daily earnings to that of monthly, and you will more or less get how it is. 10~30% week over week swings are not uncommon. Despite having much higher traffic and impressions.

With the month closing, despite having a couple more days in March, my earning in March trails slightly compared to February probably by about 5% or so. Perhaps the major advertiser's protests had play into it.

At the last week of march, I started using ad balancer / passback combo and experience better combined earning (the adsense earning did decrease since I set the slider at user experience level). I appears to get 10% less on the adsense side and 20% more with my passback company, for a combined gain of 10% based on my week of using it. But then again, who really knows.

Overall for the quarter I am pleased. Off to the next, hat off to a ~20% drop for the new quarter. Hopefully the decline will not be as drastic this time around.