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.

[nubchai]

.35 negative balance here :)

[glitterball]

I have never believed that Adsense is stealing from me, but it is certainly not straightforward. I suspect that we operate within earning bands, probably designed to prevent fraud. I imagine that publishers can move between those earning bands slowly over time, or after a manual review.

Another observation is, since I have had cause to move sites between adsense accounts over the years, that those sites have earned dramatically different amounts depending on the country associated with the Adsense account.

The reason why people continue with adsense is because there is no alternative. I sold advertising direct before Adsense existed, but since Google made it "illegal" to sell links, that model is just not possible anymore. Since Google controls nearly all search traffic, moving to affiliate links and other advertisers just doesn't work.
I have also long suspected, because of correlation, that Google penalises pages for adding affiliate links instead of adsense, so I just don't see an alternative.
Maybe in the future, we will see options to go Facebook-exclusive, if we add facebook ads to our sites and ban googlebot?

[nomis5]

I have also long suspected, because of correlation, that Google penalises pages for adding affiliate links instead of adsense

I don't see that in any way. Several years ago I was Adsense only and then went to affiliates in a big way.

I saw no drop in Adsense earnings at all.

Let's look at it from another perspective. If I saw a drop in Adsense earnings after introducing affiliates, it would persuade me that I needed more affiliates rather than more Adsense.

[glitterball]

I don't see that in any way. Several years ago I was Adsense only and then went to affiliates in a big way.

Were the affiliate links through CJ or similar networks or direct?
I recently saw traffic tank to a website after adding links to a certain program (direct). I later removed the links as the click-throughs were clearly not being tracked correctly. To be fair, that program has a very bad reputation, but it is the only one left in that industry that tracks returning buyers through cookies (the rest pay only for immediate sales)
I've had some success with affiliate programs, but always found it impossible to get much traffic from Google directly to those pages that have affiliate links.

[MayankParmar]

So my Adsense earning dropped by 300$ this month compared to super May month. It's a drop of 30%... I'm kinda upset now :(

[azlinda]

If it weren't for link ads on my site, people wouldn't be clicking on much of anything.

[EditorialGuy]

I've had some success with affiliate programs, but always found it impossible to get much traffic from Google directly to those pages that have affiliate links

That's never been a problem for us. In fact, Google's manual for quality evaluators once singled out one of our pages that had a lot of affiliate links as an example of a useful affiliate page. (That was a few years ago, but our pages with affiliate links still do well in Google.)

Google has stated on many occasions that it has no problem with affiliate links per se, it just doesn't like "thin" affiliate pages. The key is to add value for the reader.

In the product-review space, for example, it's easy to tell real product reviews from "thin affiliate" product reviews. The former are in-depth reviews that just happen to have affiliate links, while the latter are basically pages of affiliate links that use rehashed product specs, user reviews from Amazon, etc. as filler content. The real product reviews tend to rank high in Google's SERPs, and for a good reason: They'd have intrinsic value even without the affiliate links.

Getting back to the topic of June 2017 AdSense earnings, ours are way down because I've removed AdSense ads from the most prominent sections of our site until the ad balancer gets fixed. The good news is that our affiliate earnings are up. If and when Google gets the ad balancer working again, I'll be able to put AdSense ads back on the sections of our site where house ads for our affiliate-related content are more productive than bottom-feeding AdSense remnant ads.

[kireb]

Seeing very decent RPM last week ,but seasonal decline in traffic. June is shaping up as anticipated, though slightly lower than June 2016.

[nomis5]

@Glitterball - they are a mixture.

Tradedoubler and Webgains are the two networks I use. Direct ads also account for roughly half of the affiliate placements.

[iwrkalot]

@Ironside I currently use responsive text and separate image ads.

3 locations for Responsive text ads: Below the nav, after the first post, footer.

Several locations for image ads: Below the nav, side bar, embedded in the first post, footer.

Not all ads are shown at the same time, to the same groups. Guests see more ads than registered members. Registered forum members are not ad clickers. They create the content that attracts the guest.

It's complicated. Guests see about 7-8 ads in different locations. Members see 6 ( I am looking at reducing that a tad). Some ads are direct adsense, some are paid placement that I server through Google DFP. I while back I dedicated 2 locations to serve only those ads which I have sold directly instead of back filling with adsense and saw no noticeable difference in adsense revenue. Doing that allowed me to show more ads to guests (that's where the money is) AND retain those direct advertisers, which are damn hard to acquire in the first place. Their ads don't compete with adsense so they get a lot more eyeballs and clicks. Like I said, it's complicated :)

Over time I plan on converting all ads to responsive but earnings are so good right now I and scared to death to touch anything LOL

[Ironside]

@iwrkalot I did used to use text only ads, however my way of thinking was that you would earn money through impressions from the image ads so I've changed them all back the image and text.

I have got a responsive link unit below the navigation bar which gets a bit of activity but doesn't an awful lot. However, I'm going to leave it in place for the time being to see if it improves.

I have my media.net at the very end of all content on the website.

I have a few 300 x 250 units embedded in the first paragraph of text. And I also have some 300 x 600 embedded in the first paragraph of text, and within the content in articles. The 300 x 600 seems to be the one that will earn the most money, followed by the 300 x 250. However, I do have responsive text and image ads located in between paragraphs which get some attention. They look quite good on mobile because they display as a 300 x 250, or thereabouts

It's funny you should mention members not seeing ads. I use a module called ads elite which has various optional settings. One of the settings is to show ads to only registered, guests or something else, can't remember. So I think I may block ads to all my members on the forum. I've also got the option to block ads on a mobile device using this module. I've just got to decide where it is beneficial to block an ad on a mobile device where you would normally show it on a desktop or tablets..

[MayankParmar]

I'm going to try out DFP. Anyone tried, does it help in increasing AdSense earning?

[Mentat]

It helps, if you create a lot of rules, for different countries and put different minimum CPM.

[RedBar]

For me the www is no longer 7 days a week, for quite some time now Saturdays have been a failure. Yesterday was my lowest-ever earnings, lowest-ever clicks together with my lowest-ever page views.

In actual fact 39% of my PVs were from India, the UK hardly registered anything.

Looking at it overall I'm being generous when I say I have a 5 day week.

Is anyone else seeing similar metrics?

[frankleeceo]

I am seeing RPM creep up the last couple of days, as well as start of July 4th campaigns during my personal browsing. I think I'll see some decent earnings up until July 4th and RPM may crash then after the holiday campaign ends...end of quarter, it's that time again.

I personally don't think DFP is worthwhile until maybe after 5k/ month earnings for it's complexity to use (relatively to adsense). I think a proper setup can probably increase earning by 5~10%...and do the math from there.. If a site is generating only $500 a month, that's about $25~$50 at most for hours of work. And to really get that 5~10% boost, micromanagement is almost necessary to account for seasonal RPM changes versus other ad verticals.

Without direct ad sales, DFP really made no sense to my business model. I implemented it before just to learn how it works but soon figured that it would be a full time job just managing the various tags and rules. It's not time cost effective unless a site is generating quite a bit of traffic. A simple waterfall / passback frees up my time to create more content.

But nevertheless it's a good thing to have little knowledge of. It is the strongest "free" ad serving tool there is.

I did think I read some rule of thumb regarding DFP use some time before...Something about direct ad sale -> use DFP, if using more than 4-5 adnetworks -> use DFP.

[Mentat]

My eCPM has abruptly cut Wednesday 21th of June.
This weekend seems dead. High temperatures in Europe => holiday season start.

Next is 4th of July and a 4-day long weekend.

P.S. In Ad review centre, I have a text ad marked as High "Just a drop and it will increase your size..."
Click bait for a possible malware spreading site hosted on blogspot.

block this:

bestmuseumin.blogspot.com

[NickMNS]

@Mentat
Blocking sites such as the one suggested is futile. By the time the ad has appeared in your ad review the new ads showing on your site (which will be nearly identical) will already be pointing to a new url, and be from a new Adwords account. Making blocking futile, but still necessary.

[trebuchet]

Never known a day as bad as this one. Thirteen hours in and I haven't reached double figures. CTR 0.3% and EPC not worth mentioning. Just a joke really.

[Mentat]

Talking about deceiving ads implementation and Fake Download Buttons.

[i.imgur.com...]

I believe it has a huge click rate!
That's why we see so many damn green/blue Download buttons.

[ember]

Good day - I think. Stats are not matching up. The dashboard overview is showing completely different epc and ctr from sites page stats. Revenue matches so I guess that's what counts.

[ember]

Stats are not matching up. The dashboard overview is showing completely different epc and ctr from sites page stats. Revenue matches so I guess that's what counts.

[Ironside]

@mentat here here. I don't know how they girl away it

[Mentat]

Todays's Fake Button ads are from:

onlineworksuite.com

[Jaideemaak]

@mentat here here. I don't know how they girl away it

I don't know how they get away with it, either. My daughter is now at an age where she in interested in PC games and asks me to download games for her. On several game sites on the download page there is a big green arrow saying 'Download here', but instead of downloading the game it is an ad. Like all the people on this board I am quite savvy at recognising ads, but I have been fooled a few times. There's no way this should be allowed under the Adsense T's and C's.

[RedBar]

Worst-ever weekend with Adsense in 14 years plus lowest-ever PVs.

Call me a cynic however the last 7 days saw my earnings -32% v the previous week and do you know what significance 18th June has with AdSense, it was its 14th Birthday ... Is this adolescent now totally out of control?

And yeah, 14 year olds love shiny green download buttons!

[MayankParmar]

If you have a download site, those green buttons will make you a lot! So AdSense will never shut it down. After all, clicking on those ads, downloads an app which is promoted by the advertisers.

[Ironside]

I wouldn't class them as fake downloads, they are more that trick people into clicking on them which is a little bit sneaky in my opinion. I don't click on AdSense hardly ever, however on one or two occasions even I've been fooled into clicking on one of these download links when I've gone through a website which involves me clicking on the download link.

Somebody goes to a website looking to download a specific piece of software but accidentally clicks on a advertising link that is also offering a download then it's got to be false advertising

Here is another example, although the ads are placed in a way that can't really be described as trying to trick people into downloading because they are so close to the proper download link.

[s205.photobucket.com]

[netmeg]

I've never had any problem with affiliate ads and AdSense; I just can't find a lot of affiliate ads that work well for my audience. As far as direct ads, not sure why those would be considered problematic. Just nofollow the link. Problem solved. My direct advertisers don't even know what that means, but they're buying ads for the traffic not for the link. For the first time ever, I had to shut down direct ads on two of my sites because I had so many I was afraid I would be diluting them for the advertisers (they run in even rotation) Obviously I have to rethink all this for next year.

AdSense performance very good compared to last year, running about at 2014 levels. 2015 was the high water mark, and I don't think I'll match that, but a big improvement over 2016.

[koan]

So AdSense will never shut it down

The problem is those buttons trick people to download malware as far as I know, instead of the intended software. That's as bad as it gets.

[Mr_Jefe]

Unfortunately, those crappy download ads are almost entirely all I get on my site, for two reasons.

1. The visitors typically come from 3rd world countries, so no top billing advertisers are targeting them.

2. A lot of people there seem to download videos instead of streaming, so they're apt to click such ads in trying to view videos.

I only offer a download option on about 5% of the content, so it annoys me mildly to know some people might be deceived by those ads.
I feel it affects the user experience. No one has complained yet, so it can't be horrible, but still.

I have a CTR between 3 - 4% because of this.
Then again, the CPC is absolute crap, so it doesn't add up to anything significant.