June 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Peter_S]

Hi,

This is odd, today so far, my adsense earnings is in my upper range (which is already something suspect these days :) ), but, exclusively from the USA, not a single cents from other countries. This is very strange, usually, in the first half of the day, I have incomes from European countries showing.

[EditorialGuy]

We're actually doing okay with AdSense this month. We'd be doing a lot better if I hadn't taken AdSense off the most popular section of our site because the ad balancer isn't working and I have better use for the screen real estate.

[RedBar]

@Ironside and Redbar: Are your sites hosted in the UK?

Mine are.

Sunday returned to an absolutely normal day and it seems to be continuing into today.

[Ironside]

I have one website hosted with Host Gator and the rest of my sites are with Site Ground who are in Bulgaria of all places. I've got to admit, I do like site ground, their support is very very good indeed. If you have a problem you just send them a message and they sort it out pretty quickly.

Earnings yesterday were slightly higher than the previous three days so I'm hoping that my new layout is going to start improving, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I made a quick YouTube video yesterday to see if I could get any help and advice from people who were in the same boat as those of us who have seen a massive decline in earnings.

[youtube.com...]

[glitterball]

Mine are all in the US, so no common factors there then.

[Ironside]

What I need to work out is how I should put more ads on my site that only show on a mobile screen and not a desktop. When people are strolling my articles on a mobile they are quite long articles because obviously the screen is a lot narrower. If you are looking at one of the articles on a desktop then you will come across an ad quite often so I can't really afford to have any more ads showing. However, I think I could put quite a few more ads in that only show on a mobile and still avoid upsetting anyone.

[glitterball]

@Ironside You can do that easily enough through css with a @media rule.
Something like:

.mobilead
{
display:inline-block;
}

@media (min-width: 780px) {
.mobilead
{
display:none
}
}

Then in the html, call the ad like this:

<ins class="adsbygoogle mobilead"
 data-ad-client="youradsenseidhere"
 data-ad-slot="youradslotidhere"></ins>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>

[breeks]

There is no one reason that Adsense revenue has declined for many publishers

Mobile Ads = Lower RPM
Google placing 4 ads above search results
More competition for your niche
Features snippets
Answer Boxes
Facebook
Amazon
Voice search
Big Sites targeting the crumbs small sites used to survive on. The publisher slice of the pie is getting smaller and Google is very hungry for pie.

on and on and on

Adapt or die.

[azlinda]

Google never did index all my pages. That, in addition to the paid ads above the search results, caused me to pay for the Free Find search service. They're great to work with. There is a free version where they have one 728x90 ad at the top and one at the bottom. I opt to pay them every month for the service so that it's ad-free, and I can use my own ads. The REAL plus is that they index every one of my pages, unlike Google. I had no qualms about removing Google Search from my site.

[Ironside]

@Glitter ball thanks for the code, however can you explain a little more in detail how I use it. For instance, where does the CSS go? And I'm assuming the HTML is what goes on the actual article page?

[glitterball]

The css goes either inline in the header or in an external style sheet.
The html goes in the page, it's a slightly modified version of the adsense code. without the adsbygoogle.js (which only needs to be included once per page anyway).

[IanTurner]

@Ironside - this article explains it well
[support.google.com ]

[iwrkalot]

I can't really explain what's going on with my sites. April was a record month. May beat that by 30%. June (so far) is up 15% from May for the same period. *holding my breath*

I'm in my season but this is off the hook.

[Ironside]

@Glitter ball I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong but I couldn't get that code to work. I put the CSS in the template.CSS file. And then I added the code in between the paragraph making sure I put my own ID slots and publisher code in. However, all that happened was there was a slightly bigger gap in between the paragraphs and no AdSense showing on either the desktop or the mobile device. What I want to achieve is showing an ad unit on my mobile phone only. I want to be able to put in more ad units so that they show up more frequently on a mobile device.

[No5needinput]

@Ironside - Do you have the "Auto InArticle Native Ads" option in Adsense? Home >> Optimization >> Labs

"A new format that places great-looking ads between the paragraphs of your pages. InArticle ads are native and are designed to provide a better experience for your visitors. This lab will only show InArticle ads to your mobile visitors."

If so all you need to do is add a line of code to your page header and the extra ads will auto insert and show on longer articles - mobile only.

[Ironside]

No, nothing in there apart from the message saying that I should check back to see if anything is available

[ember]

Just noticed in my user panel a note about the upcoming changes in Chrome re: ad blocking. It links to the blog post that it explains it all.

[That BizDev Person]

Hiya...

Has anyone looked at "Adsense Coverage" lately? It has been consistent for years (99%+) and now is dipping down, and revenue (rpm) is highly correlated to it. We do not use Ad Balancer...

The drops started in Feb and got really bad this June.

[NickMNS]

@That BizDev Person Welcome to webmaster world.

I have been watching coverage like a hawk, as the ad-balancer system is down our coverage is up in the 99% to 98% range and has been so since the system went down in mid May. I have no idea what could be causing such a thing for you.

But I have seen this before, a few years ago my site went through a period of 50% coverage for several month. Oddly enough I was making more money (high RPM) then, as compared to shortly after when the coverage went back to 99% and my RPM tanked.

[That BizDev Person]

@NickMNS Thanks, glad to be here :)

We run a very fixed program with highly optimized units on high profile sites, so we don't run the ad balancer, hence why we are always at 99%+. This fluctuation is brand new and we've never had any swing this big or this sustained...odd right? Curious if anyone else has a similar set up?

[koan]

That BizDev Person, I definitely notice a dip in coverage in the past months for a few of my sites.

[nubchai]

@ember. Yes, the Google "filter" will roll out next year. Looks like it will be a default ad blocker in Chrome. It's supposed to block annoying ads like autoplay ads with audio, countdown ads etc. But they could also block all competitor ads imo. I think they also want to take over the ad blocker world.

[Mentat]

@That BizDev Person - I have the same problem, but only for US traffic!
After some AdSense support questions, they asked us if we buy VPN traffic...
We do not do such thing, but...

It's an explosion of VPN's services, as more and more countries are filtering the internet access.

[EditorialGuy]

But they could also block all competitor ads imo.

Google isn't known for hiring stupid people.

[Martin45]

@That BizDev Person , since 2 months I have the same problem in Germany and The Netherlands.

[That BizDev Person]

@martin45 and @Mentat -- I see it across all countries actually, and across mobile and desktop (so not really a VPN issue since most mobile traffic is non-vpn).

Also with the coverage, we're seeing a decrease in "fill" of multi-slot ad units. So if one adsense unit requests 4 text ads to be returned, we're now averaging (much) less than 4 actually being returned.

You can calculate this yourself by looking at a trend of [Ad Impressions / Ad Requests] over time. If you calculate [Impressions / Ad Requests] you will get the coverage rate.

[glitterball]

RPM at all time lows today.

[Ironside]

I decided to go back to a slightly more aggressive layout and I think it may have paid off. Obviously it's still early so I really can't tell until I wait for a few more weeks. However, because the majority of my traffic comes from mobile devices I decided it was best to optimise my AdSense for people who are using mobile phones. I think I've got a pretty good balance between desktop and mobile devices. RPM has risen slightly, and CTRs also started to rise.

[youtube.com...]

[ember]

I decided it was best to optimise my AdSense for people who are using mobile phones.

I resisted designing for mobile for a long time - too much of a hassle - but I made myself learn basic responsive design nine months ago and I've been slowly transitioning to it page by page. My pages are very simple but pass Google's mobile-friendly test and RPM has increased.

[Ironside]

The money I make from Google AdSense is hardly covering the cost of my server now. The main reason I have the cloud hosting is for my forum. However, I'm going to do away with the forum completely if things don't improve very soon. I don't make very much money from the AdSense on the forum anyway, I just keep the main articles and concentrate on them. I don't need a cloud or dedicated server to host an article website, shared hosting will be more than enough. But like I said already, I'm afraid that in order to make any money from mobile advertising I'm going to have to make sure that people are seeing plenty of ads. In my opinion, there is absolutely no point in having two or three ads are not be article, people will just not see the ads. If you've got three or four ads on a desktop then I think you need three times as many for mobile devices.

[jbayabas]

The future is bleak. It is so bad I lost interest updating my sites. Sigh.