July 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[RedBar]

Here come the holidays to mess things up ... for some of us.

[nomis5]

I did make it past midnight and the figures haven't zeroised. So maybe you are correct,just can't figure that because I always look at my stats in the morning, Will report back tomorrow morning.

[trebuchet]

Wonder why you would have one daily accounting period and me another?

You can set the accounting time zone in Settings > Account Information.
@nomis5 has his on local GMT, @Ironside has his on server time, i.e. Mountain View. I've left mine on server time and the reporting day starts at 5pm Australian time.

[vegasrick]

Just to give everyone a heads up. Those #*$!s with the unclickable ads switched to a different adwords account. So far I've banned three ad words accounts associated with them. Banned a third one today.

Ive been screening ads at various points of the day and using a filter for ads reviewed or unreviewed in the last day, under 300x250 (which appears to be their size of choice).

So far I've banned at least 30 ads associated with these creeps.

[CommandDork]

July is closing out as one of my best months this year, despite loss of positions in serps. Gotta get ready for a lean winter.

[MayankParmar]

My earning resets at midnight IST.

And I'm seeing those have fun now ads again on my site and as well as on others. Though, they are less in quantity.

[koan]

unclickable ads switched to a different adwords account

Another thing I've noticed is they now link to respectable, mainstream sites, knowing the ads can't be clicked anyway, they're just interested in promoting their short domains in the image. I'm not an Adwords user but I imagine this could also give them an impression boost.

[vegasrick]

@koan, the reason they link to mainstream sites or sites having nothing to do with their ads, is to avoid being banned by domain. So if you block their website on Adsense, it doesnt matter because that's not the destination domain.

[trebuchet]

It staggers me that Google has allowed this to continue for several days. It's clearly deceptive and potentially fraudulent. If a small publisher was to play games like this they'd be banned in a heartbeat. Lift your game, FFS.

[RedBar]

You can set the accounting time zone in Settings > Account Information.

Well I never knew this existed, is this a recent thing since I've never changed anything since 2003!

I've set it to London time now however that might spoil my morning surprises when I get a small windfall overnight from the USA but, saying that, for the second time in three months my UK has out-earned my USA again.

[trebuchet]

It's definitely been around since I rejoined Adsense in 2010. I changed mine to AEST about three months in, then reverted a week later. I did this because the majority of my traffic was, and has always been, from the US. Having it on PST makes it easier to keep track of.

[blazinec]

Take a look at that - [alexa.com...] it seems that it is really rising on traffic even if there is no display advertising at all .)

[NickMNS]

@trebuchet

It staggers me that Google has allowed this to continue for several days.

Google has not allowed this for several days, it has been going on for years. The previous, large scale spam campaign was the vinegar ads. And this one will surely come to a close and be replaced with the next set of annoying ads using similar techniques.

[MayankParmar]

Similar Web has no data for this tupster. However, it says 84% direct traffic - [similarweb.com...]

[Ironside]

Things can't be that bad. I'm definitely going to be around 17 or 18% up on last month's earnings.

[RedBar]

I'm down on last month owing to a lot less traffic from the middle of July but I am +20% v July 2016 which was one of my low points of last year.

I need more traffic to earn more however, even though ranking extrememly well, my entire industry and visitors seem to have turned their backs on the www. Whether it's the garbage out there or the toally irrelevant trade widget sites, I have no idea, however all the people I speak to in my niche widget industry are all saying the same, so little traffic compared to only a few years ago.

Mind you, Google's image theft didn't help one little bit!

[netmeg]

believe it would be useful when discussing monthly Adsense stats if people would state the niche/topic of their sites.

Double check the charter for this forum. As a general rule, we don't discuss specifics of any kind.

It staggers me that Google has allowed this to continue for several days.

I'm not sure anything gets done during a weekend. I haven't seen these particular ads, but I know that other problems I have reported have taken days or weeks or sometimes even months before they're pulled. The wheels of AdSense grind slowly, but they do slide eventually.

[smilie]

I just posted a report in another topic about Google's CPC being doing 6 quarters in a row. About very large advertiser , Procter & Gamble, cutting digital ad spending by $2 BILLION dollars, and $100 million dollars just in Q4 alone. Because it is ineffective.

Very important, two bullet points brought by P&G's CFO.
1) bots click on ads
2) very difficult to control where ads appear, as they get distributed to unauthorized networks, and/or appear on pages and sites where content doesn't match them <<<<

Last point is a stone at personalized ads that follow everyone around, those are hated by people and they don't convert nearly as well as ads that match Adsense content for webmasters (this is, at least, my limited experience , ads that matched convert 5-10 times better, and on personalized G earns way more vs. webmasters).

Google posts -23% decline in Cost-per-Click
[webmasterworld.com...]

[vegasrick]

I don't even know why I bothered even reporting those malicious ads to Adsense.

They sent me a rep who has no idea what I'm trying to tell her.

Despite doing my best to explain the issue, and sending screenshots, in the end she says nothing can be sent to the Adsense techs without tracking codes for the ads and all sorts of other junk that is not needed in this situation. I'm like banging my head against the wall telling her, that they are ripping her company off and it's going in one ear and out the other.

[MrSavage]

I think back to the post about a new beginning. A new relationship. A new importance on publishers. Sounds like it's right on track. A perfectly excellent partnership and delivered as promised. Publishers matter. Clearly.

Not sure what happened to my earnings past 2 days. One day I don't worry, two days? Worry. This is day three and I need to see a dump. It's interesting to see that I'm down 50% in earnings compared to this time last year.

[smilie]

Guys, you are missing the point I posted above.

The easiest way to clean this up is not for all of us (you) to demand a checkbox from Google that says "Only show content-related ads on my site".

That's it.

You won't have to go around and catch hundreds of malicious websites, download buttons and multiple Adwords accounts and wonder why G is letting them in. As none of these ads probably match your content anyway. This will be a very easy test to run to see if CTR would immediately jump up, and I bet if you have enough advertisers in your niche that it will.

[blazinec]

@smilie this button is already at AdSense dashboard, but using different way - when you remove personalized targeting, you probably will loose some remarketing visitors, but these stupid ads which probably catched users somewgere else, will not appear on your site.... Problem solved. BTW I have blocked several low performing categories and RPM is 100pct UP overnight....

[trebuchet]

The wheels of AdSense grind slowly, but they do slide eventually.

I know. But when someone is flooding the GDN with ads that can't be clicked, linked to unconnected sites, it's deceptive enough to warrant faster action. I'm sure if I started clicking my own ads today I'd hear about it pronto.

I think back to the post about a new beginning. A new relationship. A new importance on publishers. Sounds like it's right on track. A perfectly excellent partnership and delivered as promised. Publishers matter. Clearly.

I think the usefulness of small and medium-sized publishers to Google expired some time ago, quite frankly. Beats me why they don't turn Adsense into a premium network (minimum earnings/PVs per month) and just purge the rest.

[MayankParmar]

Had a good day. 31st July was the highest!

[Mentat]

July vs June = -20%.
August is here and traditionally dead.

[MayankParmar]

Same here. July was bad.

Waiting for August thread now.

[trebuchet]

July was an unmitigated disaster for me.

vs. June 2017
Traffic down 45%
Clicks down 40%
RPM down 18%
Earnings down 48%

vs. July 2016
Traffic down 2%
Clicks down 1%
RPM down 22%
Earnings down 20%

[netmeg]

Best July ever for me, and clawback only 1.65%, which is also the lowest in a long time. I dunno if that's because we put everything into Cloudflare, but maybe it helped.

[watesh]

Traffic up 20%
Earnings down 10%
RPM down 32%
Clicks up 8%

Lowest RPM for me this year especially with my US traffic

[System]

The following 13 messages were cut out to new thread by martinibuster. New thread at: google_adsense/4861006.htm [webmasterworld.com]
10:46 am on Aug 2, 2017 (utc -5)