July 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[RedBar]

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

[Ironside]

I think it's a waste of time trying to block sites because there is always going to be something else to take their place.

[NickMNS]

Blocking reduces the amount of garbage but it doesn't eliminate it. I believe that it also negatively impacts the advertisers quality score. So by not blocking you are keeping costs down for the scammers. We need the ad-balancer back!

[Ironside]

Is there any way to find out if somebody is actually paying to advertise on your website? And can you actually see what units people are paying display on your website?

[Ironside]

Thing is, I think Google want you to advertise absolutely everything.. They give you the choice to block specific advertising but when you do start sending messages telling you that things could be much better if you allow these advertisers.

[NickMNS]

You are being paid, or potentially paid (if someone clicks) for everything that appears on your site. More advertisers is more demand, for the same supply, so higher prices. So blocking ads comes at a cost. But allowing spammy ads to appear on your site also has a cost (loss of you users trust). So the question you need to ask yourself is what is worth more to you, the lost revenue from blocking ads or the loss of trust of your users. Both are impossible to quantify. But you should have a pretty good idea of what your target audience is willing to tolerate, and when the ad-balancer was working you were able to get an idea of how much revenue is generate by spam, it very little if anything. Blocking the lowest paying ads made 99% of the spam disappear.

All that to say, Google couldn't care less whether users come back to your site or go to your competitor since they are displaying ads in both places. So their cost of spam is very low. So it is in their interest to push you to display crap. However, an argument can be made that they have pushed this too far, and now the cost of spam is quickly rising as popularity of ad-blockers is gaining steam.

[RedBar]

Lowest-ever AdSense PVs on Saturday, in fact weekends have such low traffic for me these days that I may as well switch my sites off. For me we seem to have have gone from a 7 day week world to a 4 to 4.5 day week ... I want one of those jobs, I'm fed-up working 24/7/365 only to to be scraped and fed next-to-nothing.

Amd just in case anyone thinks that traffic is going to my competitors, it is not, traffic for my niche has been declining for quite some time across my industry. As an experiment we shut down a major manufacturer's website to see what happened ... The result? Nothing, no one even noticed it was gone, sales stayed the same, real business enquiries stayed the same ... Bear in mind this is a B2B business, it would seem that the jockeying for position over the past 15-17 years have resulted in a status quo, no one is searching for new suppliers unless it is an exclusive product they've never used before.

[MayankParmar]

Why is the earning way too low on weekends? Page view dropped slightly but the earning is down by like 50%.

I want AdSense to be bit stable when traffic is constant.

[Mentat]

This Saturday was grim. Lowest payment this year.

[ember]

MayankParmar, if earnings are low on weekends but traffic stays consistent, then fewer advertisers are bidding on weekends, which lowers epcs, and/or advertisers are bidding less, which also lowers epcs, because their customers don't shop on weekends or they convert at a lower rate on weekends, etc.

[Ironside]

I get paid an absolute pittance for lots of the ads on my website. There must be millions of other people like me. However, Google are still making millions each day from advertising that only makes a few pence. It all adds up for them at the end of the day. They couldn't us how much we earn

[Mentat]

Well, Green fake download buttons are gone today, but I see a lot of dating ads!

[MayankParmar]

@Mentat, maybe because you've searched for dating apps? :P

[Ironside]

@MayankPalmar not necessarily, I never visit any dating websites, however I still get adverts for Russian dating websites taking up my 300 x 600 ads.

[deriklogov]

Looks like RPM went down this month, not sure if its summer or anything else

[Ironside]

Yesterday was not a bad day at all. I have a responsive link unit just above the main title of each article and this does quite well. I think they look very appealing on mobile phones because you get a couple of links on top of each other that normally follow the niche of your website.

[MayankParmar]

Is it a good idea to put more two link ad unit? I have one 320x250 link ad and it is performing really good.

[CommandDork]

@MayankParmar - if your page flow supports it nicely then I'd go for it (dont stack them, it looks desperate). I have two adlinks on some pages, but only above and below the "meat" of my content. Adlinks are outperforming base adblocks for me this year - so many of my existing adblocks have been replaced by adlinks.

[frankleeceo]

It's rather providing maximum ad exposure so that people are more likely to click on them, when they've found that ads have products or solutions that serve their goals.

[Ironside]

According to Google analytics, the majority of my users are browsing my website from a mobile device. To give you an idea the difference between mobile and desktop on my website, 12,700 visitors have come from mobile, 3500 from desktop and just over 1000 from a tablet.

If you compare a desktop view to a smart phone the desktop is a lot wider and there is a lot less scrolling involved to work your way down the article. What I found when testing is if I'm only putting three AdSense units into an article then you can scroll for ages without coming across any AdSense units. But what I've decided to do is put a few more responsive ad units in between paragraphs. One may argue that on the desktop there are too many, however I have got to weigh up what is best and I believe that because a lot more people are using mobile devices I'm better off by having more ad unit so that people using mobile devices are seeing my ads more frequently.

[MayankParmar]

Sunday was, in fact, better than Monday :(. The clicks were too low yesterday. It is already 18th July and there is no recovery yet. Waiting for August now.

[MayankParmar]

Strange. I am also seeing dating ads on my tech site. In fact, the ad says chat to Arab singles, although I'm in India. No wonder why clicks reduced, ad is targeting wrong users.

[RedBar]

Waiting for August now.

Then prepare for possibly even lower traffic/earnings. You sound as though you have the classic holiday season slumlp.

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar. Ugh, the August is going to be bad too? :(

[KaseyM]

I refuse to believe that someone reviewed these ads before they went around the network.

Blimey.

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:26 am (utc) on Jul 20, 2017]
[edit reason] Please let's not discuss specific ads, thanks. [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

@KaseyM Lol, I see them daily on my site. The one I see is actually a click bait image with title 'download now'. I guess these ads have higher click rate.

[Ironside]

Google have always been a little bit jumpy about adult content. I was asked to remove an image of a woman wearing a thong off of my forum. Some of these dating adverts seem to get away with murder in my opinion.

[Rasputin]

Ironside,
While I don't agree with the general idea of adding more ads to mobile pages, as has been explained at various times in these threads over the last few months, you can use display:none on responsive ads (see earlier threads or adsense site for method) - so you can have ads in positions that show in mobile pages but not in pc pages, if that is what you want to do.

[Ironside]

@Rasputin - To be honest with you I think I am probably displaying the best AdSense layout for my website that I can at the moment. I've tried quite a few different layouts in the last year or so which has helped me pinpoint positions and different types of ad units that just don't really seem to work. It wouldn't surprise me if earnings have dropped dramatically because advertisers just don't want to pay as much for mobile advertising. If you think about it logically you are more likely to scroll quicker on a mobile screen rather than look at a large screen without scrolling as much. So if there is a large ad unit is going to stay on the screen in its entirety for much longer than a mobile.

I have some 300 x 600 ad units embedded in the first paragraph of text on some of my articles. I haven't found a way of showing these just on PC and showing something different on the mobile screen. At the end of the day, is using standard code. Even if I make the Avenue unit disappear, the code will still be there and keep the div open

[Rasputin]

From adsense, an example of what you want to achieve (except this code uses display:none for mobiles less than 400px, you perhaps want it for min-width:1000px

<style type="text/css">
.adslot_1 { display:inline-block; width: 320px; height: 50px; }
@media (max-width: 400px) { .adslot_1 { display: none; } }
@media (min-width:500px) { .adslot_1 { width: 468px; height: 60px; } }
@media (min-width:800px) { .adslot_1 { width: 728px; height: 90px; } }
</style>
<ins class="adsbygoogle adslot_1"
 data-ad-client="ca-pub-1234"
 data-ad-slot="5678"></ins>
<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script>

A display:none div will occupy no space and you can set 300 * 600 for pc and something smaller for other devices.

Just slot in the sizes you want and add your publisher id

[MayankParmar]

18th July was another bad day in a row. Views up, earning down. The July end is so bad, August is going to be dead.

The number of clicks reduced. Anyone else?