May 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Ironside]

Today has started off very well, 28 clicks and I'm already into double figures

[CommandDork]

" How do you load ads for desktop and then for mobile?"

I simply use the same responsive one for both platforms - nothing fancy at all. It scales down nicely on mobile on its own. I keep the first ad instance (of three on the page) sized at 320px wide (via media query) so it shows up as a small banner on mobile. The rest are full-sized 300x250 adblocks going down the page (one after-article and the other pre-navigation placement).

[Ironside]

I think Google designed responsive ads so that you don't have to mess around with them, you just put the code on the page and it does what it's supposed to do. I recently changed my AdSense layout quite radically. I've started using a responsive ad either just below the main heading of the page, or just at the the first paragraph of text in between paragraphs. On a normal desktop or tablet the responsive ad will show you as a 728 x 90 banner. On a smaller mobile screen it displays as a small square which is what you want. There's no need to mess around with anything.

[Ironside]

A quick question. I have a responsive ad unit which I put on quite a few of my articles. On some of the longer articles I have it on the page at least three times. I always put one at the very top of the page either between the heading and the top paragraph, or just underneath the first paragraph of text in between paragraphs. This responsive unit has is own targetable channel. However, I just realise that it's probably not possible for advertisers to isolate individual ad units. Let's say you may only want to advertise on the Avenue unit that is at the top of the page. Because it uses the same channel then their advert will show on all of the adverts won't? I was wondering whether it will be best to have a custom channel that is dedicated to the responsive ad unit that is placed at the top of the page.

[Rasputin]

@sillysoft,
This question comes up often, and many seem unaware how flexible responsive ads can be - you dont need to rely on google getting it right, and often they dont come up with the ideal size if you use the standard responsive code.
See their sample code at the top of [support.google.com...]
You can also use display:none in the style declaration section of the code if that is useful (eg an ad in a sidebar, where the sidebar disappears on mobile devices)

[csdude55]

Quick question for anyone who runs responsive layouts for desktop/mobile. How do you load ads for desktop and then for mobile? Originally I was planning to use display:none via media queries so that the 300x250 ad would show for desktops then hide it via mobile version and then display a mobile version of the ad. But after reviewing their policy, they dont allow this, so the only way I saw was compliant was to use responsive ads. Anyone else come to this conclusion? Or is there a different way to do this that is compliant with Google Adsense policy?

I have two 300x250 banners on the right column for screen width > 1000, a 728x90 at the top for widths between 728 and 1000, and I'm rebuilding now to be mobile-friendly that will have a 320x50 at the top for widths lower than 728. There's no way this can be done using responsive because they're in different locations.

I had no idea it was against the rules, but I've been using display: none on the container since 2013! Google doesn't show a false number of impressions or anything, either, and seems to be perfectly happy with it. I've had violation reports over the years for other things, but not that.

If you're using ASYNC tags, maybe you could do something like:

if ($('#right_column').css('display') != 'none')
 (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

[Ironside]

320 x 100 is absolutely minute and I can't imagine you're going to be able to fit much advertising on something this small. I have page level ads enabled on my website so that when somebody visits my site using a mobile, they will get these mobile type ads, up. Apart from that I haven't done anything special. The responsive ad units are absolutely perfect. If you put one in a side bar then it will probably show up as a 160 x 600, or maybe a 300 x 600 depending on the size. I like to use them underneath the heading just above the main content where they show anything between 728 x 90 or ad unit that stretches the full width of the website. I checked the mobile landscape view and ad units that have text wrapped around them display with the text wrapped around them whereas in portrait view the responsive ad unit will drop below the paragraph.

[NickMNS]

@csdude55, First off I would recommend that the minimum height to use is 320 x 100px. 50px is too small, most users miss these ads completely.

Second it may be easier to simply have two ad units in your code and have one display:none on mobile while the other displays and then vice versa. Code wise this might be simpler, but it comes at the expensive of adding a small additional code block.

Warning to all using display:none with ad units. be sure that the display:none acts on the <ins> tag as this will prevent the Adsense code from requesting the ad. If you display:none the parent div, the ad will still be called but will not be seen by the users, which is obviously a bad thing.

@FrankLeeCeo and others seeing the problems with the ad-balancer. Are you still seeing the bug. I've been at 100% coverage for the past few days, and it seems to be the same today. My ad-review center is overflowing with low quality and spam ads.

[frankleeceo]

@Nick

Yes I am still seeing it. I contacted adsense via email yesterday and it seems that they are not aware of the issue yet. (Or think it's a nonissue but a mis-setup on my part). Maybe with more people reporting it they might take it more seriously. The rep did say that he'll forward my feedback to the engineering department.

[hansbrea]

I have had an adsense account for years but haven't done anything with it or kept up on blogs. I decided last week to dive back in. Honestly, I have very little idea of what I am doing except obviously knowing how to stick code in blogger. (Not my favorite website creator but it at least lets me us Adsense unlike Wordpress). I am sifting through the information on the forum trying to learn the basics. How do I get started putting adsense ads in without irritating people that they are being monetized? Right now I have had 1 click in two weeks and have earned a few other pennies from views.

Also, I have noticed that the days i am updating my site and having to view pages, I seem to get knocked by Adsense and my page rpm and impression rpm are both $0.00?

Another question, does adsense start the of count page views and impressions to 1,000 over each day or do they add up over a time period until you read 1,000? I still have yet to figure out how this actually works. Earlier today it said I had earned $.01 then it changed in back to $0.00 and dropped my page views and impressions down.

Any help, tips, or advice would be greatly appreciated!

[WolfLover]

Hello everyone! Haven't posted here in years probably. I used to be a regular and I used to make about $2000.00 per month with AdSense. Those were the days.

Now, it takes several months or more to get to the minimum payout of $100.00. This along with all my other streams of income went down in the past few years with this awful economy.

I've now come back to see how things are going for my fellow AdSensers.

How have you fared in the past few years?

[koan]

How have you fared in the past few years?

In 2014-2015, for me it became a constant battle with Google Search and Google Adsense, it's always something. Now if someone ask me if it's worth starting a new web site / blog / shop for side income, I'd be very hesitant to answer, unless that person has exceptional skills or knowledge. Traffic is very hard to acquire and advertisers are elsewhere. Granted, I'm not much of a social media person so that may be my weakness. The web is not as favorable to small sites and small businesses as it used to be. Everything turn corporate.

[Halaspike]

There's definitely something wrong with "Ad Balancer". Set mine to 70% coverage but all ad units are showing a coverage of 98 to 100%.

[Ironside]

@Hansbrea I never paid much attention to the rpm because it doesn't actually give you any conclusive answers about earnings. However, regarding the placement of your ads, I can give you advice based on my experience. As long as your guests are able to read the content properly that I don't think you will annoy them. Most websites have adverts in one form or another so I think it's fair to say we are all used to them. The adverts that really hack me off are the ones that suddenly pop up on the screen whilst you are reading something. One of the local newspapers in my area have a website that is jampacked full of ads that are just plain irritating.

Depends on how long your articles are. I only put one ad units on my very short articles, especially if people don't have to scroll on a desktop to read the whole article. Before you put your ads on the page check to see what sort of traffic you are getting. If a lot of your traffic comes from mobile devices then I think it's important that you make sure that the ads look good on my mobile phone. It's no good having a fixed non-responsive 728 x 90 banner on a small screen because that will annoy the user and it will kill your revenue because you're not going to get paid for something that nobody can see. I actually like to put a responsive unit just under the title, or below the first paragraph of text in between paragraphs. You're not going to annoy your users, however putting ads here can get a lot of attention. If you have a long article then I like to put at least one 300 x 600 as unit embedded in a larger paragraph of text. These can earn a lot of money, I had a £6 click off one of these units a couple of days ago. I would definitely put an ad unit right at the end of the content, either 300 x 250, or a responsive unit.

I use Joomla! which is similar to WordPress. I think with WordPress you can put modules on the left and right-hand columns, I think I'm right in saying that? Lots of websites you go to have AdSense placed in the right-hand column, somewhat like YouTube. The problem with this layout is when you view the website on a mobile device, anything in the right-hand column drops right down to the bottom and gets very little attention. I have ad units in this position for a while and they got hardly any attention whatsoever so I recently changed my layout completely. I don't have any rights or left-hand columns. The only menu I have is a horizontal menu. I think I got the best of both worlds. All of my AdSense is now contained within my content. My mobile users will see my AdSense and basically the same place as my desktop users.

[ember]

How have you fared in the past few years?

I don't do as well as I used to 3 or 4 years ago, but I still do okay. Competition, ad blockers, etc. have taken their toll. I used to be dependent on Adsense but the slow drop in revenue over the last few years has made me diversify, which is a good thing. Now I have the sites but also a little part time job and some other online ventures. I sleep better knowing that if Adsense dries up, I'll be okay.

[csdude55]

I sleep better knowing that if Adsense dries up, I'll be okay.

Wow, a full night of sleep? I can only imagine! :-) Is it everything I thought it would be?

Same backstory here... revenue was great in 2014, but has slowly dropped since. I also sell local ads, but I'm spending more and more time working on rebuilding things in the hopes of making Adsense better that I'm neglecting my backup plan... maybe not smart, but there's just not enough time in the day.

I left college in the mid-90s to pursue my dream of self-employment, and now I'm in my 40s and have been self employed ever since. Which has been mostly great, but I'm in a scary position now where, if Adsense dries up, I'm boned. Even with 20+ years of experience, I don't think I could possibly find a job paying a fraction of what I need that wouldn't require a college degree. But I don't have time to go back to college, either, so I can't think of a backup plan :'-(

On the topic of May Earnings, though... April was my worst month in years, and so far May is WAY worse than April! Unless there's a major shift in the last 1/3 of the month, I'm seriously eating nothing but bread sandwiches and putting all of my bills on a credit card next month.

[Mentat]

Yes, April was terrible, May a little better, but not by much.
The payment is really horrible (again) this weekend...

[EditorialGuy]

I never paid much attention to the rpm because it doesn't actually give you any conclusive answers about earnings.

RPM is useful because it lets you compare the performance of different revenue sources so that you can decide whether a source (such as AdSense) is worth the screen real estate that it takes up.

Back to May: Until the ad balancer starts working correctly again, I'm withholding AdSense ads from the most popular section of our site. (The space can be used more productively for a "house ad" that indirectly promotes our highest-revenue affiliate program.)

[nomis5]

My advice - forget ad balancer. It's a side issue which G have introduced, it just diverts your mind away from the real, important issues. I tried it for a couple of weeks and abandoned it - it's a waste of time.

[frankleeceo]

With ad balancer and proper backup/ waterfall to other ad networks. I increased my overall network earning by about 10~20%.

Ad balancer in it by itself is a waste of time in terms of raw earning, but when combined with other things that matter, make it much more worthwhile. In fact, from my experimentation that raw earning would actually drop if using it aggressively without recapturing those impressions via backup ads.

I do hope that they recognize the bugs and fix them soon.

The real issue is that adsense by itself as a network has its weakness and downfalls, ad balancer allows it to get a better foothold against other networks that allow better waterfall / backfilling.

Before ad balancer, I was getting more and more reluctant to set it as my tier 1 in terms of ad filling, due to the fact that the overall RPM as whole is sad. It was much better to set it as tier 2 or even tier 3 and the last tier to get that 90~100% fill. With ad balancer in place, I was gradually moving some of my fills to tier 1, but with extremely aggressive fill rate / coverage at 5~10%. This technique worked for me for the past 1~2 months.

With the current bug, I have moved my best earners away from adsense to T2 or T3 again. I think almost immediately after adsense email service responded that they do not see the bug on Thursday. (I first observed the bug midday Tuesday). I think I did good seeing that the same effect persists. My remaining unchanged ad slots is probably only about 5% of revenue lost.

Aside from this, there are many other macro issues that are outside of adsense control, these are macro issues experienced by all ad agencies as a whole industry. Ad blockers, continuously falling / commodification of Mobile RPM, technology issues, ad dollars moving to apps / other platform like FB etc. The best thing to do is to always be 1~2 steps ahead of the curve. If anything, adsense is the best network that is most beginner friendly among everything else.

Overall.. at the end of the day, it's really all about the amount of unique traffic, number of pageviews that get triggered, and the amount of times that you can keep visitors on your site so that their eyeballs are served with ads. The key is get that sequence correct. I spend very little time to optimize until a site hits 10k pv's a day, I pretty much use a cookie cutter template for all my smaller seed sites.

I am seeing RPM improvements in the past couple of days in terms of observation.

[kireb]

After a super week, a total collaps Saturday and Sunday. Weird

[themoabird]

The ad balancer has also stopped working for me.

I wonder if what we all have in common is we're trying to fill the unused Adsense slots with adverts from other sources (either our own or from other ad networks). In other words, whether they've tweaked the algorithm so it looks to see whether the space is going to filled anyway (maybe because it now needs to work out whether or not it's appropriate to collapse the div), and then decides that if it's going to show some kind of advert, it might as well show an Adsense advert.

[csdude55]

After a super week, a total collaps Saturday and Sunday. Weird

Opposite here! After a dismal week that's almost had me in tears, Sunday was the highest I've had in 2 months. I had a similar spike around the same day of the month in April, though, so I fully expect it to crash again within a day or two.

[Ironside]

Which AdSense page layout do you guys find works best on a mobile phone?

[EditorialGuy]

My advice - forget ad balancer. It's a side issue which G have introduced, it just diverts your mind away from the real, important issues. I tried it for a couple of weeks and abandoned it - it's a waste of time.

The ad balancer was working great for us until the recent glitch. I had it set to 12% coverage/100% revenue, which meant the other 88% of impressions were available for more productive uses. It's hard to find fault with that.

[honestman]

In the era of "Fred," with implications that pages with (too many) ads are more susceptible to being penalized, how do you best proceed?

It would seem that Adsense, which once encouraged placing as many ads as possible but has since backed off on that view, can be a huge hindrance on rankings unless one can figure out the secret/magical placement and ratios.

[searchengineland.com ]

Yes, I am naive, perhaps. But after almost 15 years, I usually make some sense of it all, and now am a bit at a loss as to how to proceed (not to mention the ad blocking issues and reports of ads on devices not performing well in many cases).

Thank you for any input.

[glitterball]

Looking like the worst day ever so far...

[MrSavage]

@Wolflover, how are things going regarding Adsense? To me the sites I have/had which relied on Adsense, also relied on Google search traffic. So right there, you know where I'm going. Unless there is another search, or an actual search engine (FB?) then this model is dead to me. Existing sites that I have are as they are, but as investments, they can die as far as I'm concerned. In no way do I consider Adsense to be worth what it can pay me to maintain or write on a website. Anything I'm planning now has nothing to do with Adsense. For an average one person operation, I can't see any reason to think that more traffic from Google search is coming, more people will click ads, and that the payment I get per click is going up. All three of those things are spiraling downwards. Not up. Google Chrome will be adding their own ad blocker so just wait for that. So let's see what they will do to strip affiliate links next. All in all, the success stories are from the long timers. The sites that have been established prior. Entrenched is another word for it. The investment to get anywhere vs. ad clicking revenue is an idiotic venture to take on fresh. The economics of the web revolve around Google and the last time i checked, Adsense was not one of their priorities. If it was, then we would see website links and not content.

Daily earnings update? I don't check daily anymore. I would say down 70%, keeping in mind that I've been dropping sites as well.

[Ironside]

I recently changed my AdSense layout quite radically. I put in a responsive unit between each page heading down the first paragraph of content. Yesterday I removed the responsive unit from my most popular article and put in a 300 x 250 directly in the middle between the H1 page heading in the first paragraph of text. I've had one click on this unit all day, however that click was worth 92p. According to Google and various other website the position directly between the heading and the first paragraph of text is supposed to be the number one earning position for AdSense units. Weil, I don't see any evidence of that whatsoever.

[keyplyr]

Which AdSense page layout do you guys find works best on a mobile phone?

I've attained good (not great) performance using Responsive Add Link before 2nd paragraph, or if your content pushes this area below the fold (1 screen on mobile) a Responsive 300x250... then a Responsive 300x250 above footer at bottom.

This is for content no longer than 3 screens (keeping pages fast) and I'm also of the belief than any more than 2 ads on mobile creates a poor user experience. I know I hate it when I go to sites with 3, 4 or more.

[Aniston Dillo]

This is the worst month ever. Its my lowest earning month in last 5 years even after higher page views in this months till now in comparison of last constant 6 months and most of the months of last 5 years ! getting average of only 0.19 $ RMP for this month till now. is Adsense is dying? because its going down and down each passing month and I am seeing its going down in earning for me since last one year.