April 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Mentat]

March was a good month, but April is here.
New quarter, nice weather and a lot of religious holidays (on all major religions), so the traffic and payment will swing like crazy.

[Ironside]

Yeah, not showing much money at the moment, but still morning or early afternoon in the US.

I was thinking about trying an experiment where I remove all of my 300 x 600 ad units and see what happens. It'll be interesting to see if the revenue from media.net increased at all.

[ember]

Seems to be a big lag in reporting today - anyone else seeing this?

Yes.

[Bobb11]

Stil has lag in reporting ?

[Peter_S]

Just checked and the stats seems up to date here. But normally, I look only one time, in the morning. I don't believe there is an interest to check all day long.

[nubchai]

Saturday and Sunday were the two best days I've seen in a while. Many more desktop clicks with the higher RPM.

[csdude55]

I saw a surprising 35% increase on 4/23/17. No idea why, though, traffic was actually lower than average!

[nubchai]

CSDude did you check the devices used for that day? If you got more clicks from desktop users, the RPM is usually a lot higher.

[csdude55]

Good point... I did have a 26% increase desktop traffic as compared to the previous Sunday, possibly because I target a local demographic and it's been raining so much, keeping people inside. I was hoping maybe it meant the Google slump for the month was over, though :-/

[MonkeyPantz]

I have seen a sudden drop in CTR about 5 days ago, the rate before was around 2%-2.5% , while now on 750 - 1k page views I am lucky to get 1 single click, if at all. I have not changed the layout, viewability sits around 60%.

Is this common to happen? Will it increase again or should I take action? if so what should I do differently?

[edited by: not2easy at 2:54 am (utc) on Apr 25, 2017]
[edit reason] No specifics please/ToS [/edit]

[NickMNS]

@MonkeyPantz Welcome to webmaster world.

Is this common? No but it is known to happen.

2-2.5% is getting on the high end of the spectrum with regards to CTR, so it is possible that Adsense took action on your account and is now requiring users to click a confirmation pop-up. This limits accidental clicks. Others here have reported (complained) of this happening to their accounts.

[MonkeyPantz]

@Nick Thank you very much!

2% was on the very good days, the overall average was more likely to be around 1.5% . But it seems that 0 clicks on up to 1k page views seems a little too low. It's been like this for 5 days now, and I am starting to be a little concerned.

How can I find out if Adsense is requiring the confirmation on ad clicks?

[keyplyr]

Hi MonkeyPantz and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[NickMNS]

@MonkeyPantz

How can I find out if Adsense is requiring the confirmation on ad clicks?

I am not sure. I am tempted to say, click on an ad, but that would go against the AdSense policies.

You could look at other indicators of invalid click activity such as:
Does your account get rolled back by a big % at the end of the month? More specifically, are your estimated earnings much higher than what you get paid?
Are your clicks evenly distributed amongst your pages or do some pages have much higher CTR's than others?
Have you checked your account for any violations? In your Adsense account on the left side bar go to -> Settings -> Status.

[MonkeyPantz]

@NickMNS

I have no violations in my account as far as I can tell.
There is only minimal adjustments, with one exception, about one week ago I got click bombed from the Netherlands, about 60/70 clicks within a few minutes, but most of them were removed right away.

Could this be a reason for the drop in CTR after?

@keyplyr, thank you very much.

[solid77]

Since April 1st 2017, i've seen a 80-90% drop in revenue. The drop was sudden and overnight, I did not change anything as far as adsense settings or ad positioning. I average 12-13 mil monthly page views, so this is a huge blow to being profitable. I haven't seen it go this low in the past 2.5 years! In the past week i've been using Adsense experiments, and nothing works. My Page CTR has dropped to 0.03% (April), from 0.39% (March). I'm suspect this largely has to do with the WSJ hit piece on PewDiePie, causing a lot of the big advertisers to pull out of Google.

On another note my Page CTR has never hit 1%, so I could use some tips on that subject if anyone would like to help, thanks!

[Runfun]

Don't look only at the by the end of the month clawback... it's even worse. When I look at my earnings through the day I see several euros stolen by Adsense. I can't be positive about this because first it was a monthly clawback now it's a daily clawback of about 5%-10% and a tiny bit less monthly clawback but in the end more stolen than ever before.

By the way I'm also using Adwords but never got money back at the end of the month. Where does the money goes of those clawbacks of publishers?!?

[leebow]

Here come the end of month boosts. Yay!

[ww2015]

New Google update arriving in May - you will have to pay to display their adverts on your site - 'in order to maintain the delicate ecosystem of Alphabets profitability, publishers will now pay Google monthly to display quality advertising. Publishers can expect the same great targeted inventory of 'this one trick' and 'download now' advertisers, while being confident of their sites taking twice as long to load. Other updates include doing away with the messy auction system and boosting user related ads by displaying anything that anyone perhaps might be interested in - publishers have indicated that Joe Jones from North Carolina potentially maybe could be interested in hotels in Kabul, and we aim to fill this massive gap in the market.'

[Runfun]

Lol!

Well I'm not betting on Adsense anymore because it's low quality in advertisers and as mentioned above it slows down your website a lot. I've a premium network that fills about 40% of all impressions, all leftovers are for Adsense.

[EditorialGuy]

For us, April's ups and downs have mostly leveled out in the last 10 days or so. CPC is great, page RPM so-so, total revenues decent but unexciting.

[regiborg]

The publisher now have that pay the adsense?This is joke!

[regiborg]

Put only a ad adsense in the end of article,and you will see the ctr and click increase!

[Teddy_core]

25 April ... another bad day from Adsense, so nothing is constantly improving.

Waiting for May.

[NickMNS]

@ww2015

- you will have to pay to display their adverts on your site -

What exactly are you talking about?

[Peter_S]

@NickMNS : ww2015 was sarcastic and joking :)

[Ironside]

Yeah, I can just imagine people paying Google to show other people's adverts when they are hardly earning anything :-) On the other hand, if Google can guarantee doubling my monthly income than I wouldn't mind handing over a very small percentage of my earnings, but with talking no more than 5%. I don't see why I should do all the hard work for them to benefit even more.

[Peter_S]

@Ironside, oh you never know :-)

[MonkeyPantz]

Could the click bombing I had one day be the reason for low CTR in the following week?
This only happened once and most of the 80 or so clicks were removed right away

[NickMNS]

@MonkeyPantz it is possible. Did you do anything to stop the click bombing or did it stop on its own?

[MonkeyPantz]

@NickMNS It lasted about 10 minutes, for up to 80 clicks, I would say Adsense has immediately removed 75 of them. As it did not happen again I didnt worry about taking any actions. But ever since I am in a steep decrease in CTR. Like I said before 1k page views and 0 clicks seems to be the norm now. Which has never been the case before. It's been one week so far.