August 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[RedBar]

WooHoo ... Now my AdSense day starts at midnight UK time I logged-in to a pleasant surprise of PVs plus earnings this morning, I feel better already:-)

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:45 pm (utc) on Aug 2, 2017]

[glitterball]

I see an Ad in the Ad review centre that states "Traditional Link Units intended to be a placeholder support.google.com/adsense".
It had around 10,000 impressions.
Was this an abusive ad that Google have now removed?

[neurropatic]

@glitterball I believe that those are impressions of your link unit ads.

[MayankParmar]

Is CTR high CPC down for anyone else today?

[MayankParmar]

Today is turning out to be yet another bad day. Gone the days when AdSense was reliable.

[glitterball]

@neurropatic

@glitterball I believe that those are impressions of your link unit ads.

Thanks for that - they were indeed. The spike in impressions coincided exactly with a test that I ran on link units.

[Ironside]

CPC isn't brilliant today, however, it is 4p higher than yesterday. Having said that, page RPM is at £3.23 and the CTR is 2.53% which is reflected slightly ill my earnings so far.

[nubchai]

Page RPM is $13.26 with a 3.10 % CTR so it's a good day so far. CPC is a bit low but it's early.

[capulkit]

Signed up with ezoic. Any one here used it?

[NickMNS]

@nubchai it may look good now but wait until month end when Google claws back those invalid clicks.

In all seriousness, if this is the result of a few clicks at the beginning of the day it is one thing, but if this is the ongoing trend on high traffic I would seriously look into the type and nature of traffic.

[MayankParmar]

CPC down but high CTR did the job. Just $10 less than yesterday's earning, so I'm not freaking out for now.

[Mentat]

They are mocking google and us...

(SPECIFICS REMOVED.)

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:19 am (utc) on Aug 21, 2017]
[edit reason] REMOVED SPECIFICS. [/edit]

[Ironside]

@nubchai when you get a RPM reading of $13 and a very high CTR rates, are your clicks very minimal at the time?

[CommandDork]

I always attributed friday/saturday drops with the work week. People at work surf way more for junk on corporate time than they do on weekends. I see this with my traffic and earnings. Come Sunday, numbers return a bit but its Mon-Tues that really shine.

[nubchai]

@ironside yes at that point this morning clicks were on the low side. Right now at 6 pm cst my clicks are greater than all the clicks I got yesterday. But RPM is now $8.45 and CTR is down to 2%. I also noticed they took back a couple of clicks. I don't feel like things are back to normal fwiw. I'll just wait it out and hope the scammers with the unclickable ads are dealt with.

[Ironside]

My CTR and page RPM is always much higher with just a few clicks and money starting from around 50p. At the moment RPM is at £1.91 and the three-way is 1.57%. And I've had 30 clicks so far. It's still fairly early in the US where most of my traffic comes from so I'm hoping to improve slightly but today is rather slow, if at the last failed to has been quite slow if I can continue making the same money throughout August then I will probably exceed last month's earnings by a few quid

[csdude55]

I received it, too, and blocked them all. Ad blockers included; I can't understand why Google allows them in the first place.

I'm not sure how to keep updated, though, if they're in alphabetical order. If 20 are added tomorrow, how will we know which ones are new? It took about 15 minutes to add the entire list in small chunks, it'll be a pain to redo it every day in the hopes of catching a few new ones.

I have to wonder why wix.com and winzip.com are included?

I think it might be the recent exploit. Remember that the thieves are putting legit domains as the destination, but it didn't matter to them because you couldn't click on it. Adsense doesn't offer a way to block ads based on what's being shown in the ad itself, though, so all we can do is chase after the domains they're faking.

Which is a failing logic, of course... eventually they'll start plugging in higher paying ads, forcing us to choose between blocking them and losing money, or not blocking them and losing money.

I'm hoping that this is MOSTLY a temporary fix, waiting on Google to get off their haunches and fix it on their end.

[MayankParmar]

Another bad day here :(. CPC is very slow, RPM is low too. And CTR as well.

This month is turning out to be the worst. 10 days for the month to end. Can't wait for September.

[Kash1111]

Hey everyone, an update since the drop of rpm this month. My website has recovered, it is back to normal. I have made the website faster, I added a cdn, improved the page load time by a second, the bounce has dropped and time on the site has increased. 50% of the traffic is from social media and the rest is organic search traffic.

I am not sure if the changes made any difference, but the rpm has increased.

[cr1t1calh1t]

@ember - thank you for posting this about Sulvo and their Abusive Advertiser Blacklist.

This gives me confirmation that it is not just Rich Media ads that can be exploited and are unclickable, but also Image ads - as I have seen in my own Ad Review Center.

I have found on this list two of the largest advertisers on my website.

Each of these two advertisers runs a mix of clickable ads, and un-clickable ads --- with the un-clickable ads gradually increasing over who knows how long.

I suspect that this exploit/bug has been going on for much longer than the past month.

I also think this exploit can, and already has, negatively affected my search rankings and decreased my organic search traffic.

Consider the scenario:

1. User clicks through from search result.
2. User sees an ad that interests them, but they cannot click.
3. User hits the back-button to return to Google and then searches for the product or service listed in the un-clickable ad, increasing bounce-rate.

What a total mess.

cr1t1calh1t

[NickMNS]

I am starting to think we are blowing this way out of proportion. Spammy ads have been a problem since as far back as I have been doing this (which isn't that long compared to others here but still). The sulvo list and the lists of others are great but not sufficient to fight this problem. In fact blocking all these URL's is probably causing more harm than good.

There is a very specific pattern that is used by the spammers, use many accounts, many domains and many ad units, and always be changing, and churn and burn. So these lists are bound to grow into the future. When blocking, before each time an ad is placed on your site, the url needs to be checked a against a long list.This comes at a cost in time and it will slow down ad serving. This will slow down serving of all ads not just the spammy ones. As the list grows so will the latency. The problem is that there is a very good chance that after a URL is blocked and added to the list the url will never be seen again, not because it was blocked but simply because it has been abandoned by the spammers. But you can't know this because the URL is blocked so you will not see it. But is due to the blocking or it being abandoned? So now you have list of thousands of domains, that is slowing your ad serving, and of which 80% of the content of the list is likely there for nothing.

In most cases the ads in question are responsible for only a few impression, 2, 10 even 100. For any site that makes any sort of money from Adsense, these impressions account for a small fraction of a percent of the total daily impressions. There are instances, such as the zloan ads where this isn't the case and then in makes perfect sense to block the domains. So we should be saving the blocking for when it is really needed.

I recommend blocking the ad, and blocking the AdWords account and only blocking the domain if you see it returning frequently and consuming many impressions. Note that the blocking of the AdWords account could cause the same scenario as the URL's, but I am not sure how this is handled as there is no list reported in ones account. I would hope (but don't know) that AdSense removes dead accounts from the list. In any case maintaining two long list is worse than only one.

[Ironside]

Are all Google ads clickable? Maybe some of the larger ads are not meant to be clicked, they have this just there as advertising board so to speak. Mind you, I don't suppose they would pay very much.

I was looking back through the last few years to see what my CPC and CTR was when monthly earnings was considerably more than it is nowadays. I can see that in some of the really good months my CPC triple what is at the moment. My rpm wasn't hugely more and most surprisingly, my CTR was absolutely awful compared to what is nowadays. I don't normally see CTR below 1.4% nowadays, when I was earning good money my CTR was about 0.5%, sometimes less. In all fairness, I was getting a few more clicks than I do nowadays, but it's only the CPC that really stands out as being different. So until advertisers start giving us a little bit more money per click things are not going to change.

[nubchai]

Yesterday turned out to be a great day. Hoping whatever technical problems there were have been resolved.

[MayankParmar]

I'm just blocking those ad-blocker promoters (including opera) and download ads.

[nubchai]

How can you see in Ad Review if an ad is clickable or not? Or are you sitting and watching your sites for suspicious ads?

[cr1t1calh1t]

@NickMNS - thank you for your insight. I have wondered about these same things: whether creating a big block list will slow down ad-serving, what is the best way to combat these ads, etc. While I don't know for sure, I am fairly confident that this kind of filtering and list-parsing does not slow down ad-serving.

Indeed, spammy and exploit/buggy ads have been around since the beginning of web advertising, and will remain, in one form or another, until the end.

However, I don't feel like the Google Adsense publishers we're hearing from are blowing this out of proportion.

I have lost five figures in revenue in the past month, that I am only able to attribute to this exploit/bug.

If my hypothesis is correct that this has been going on for much longer than the past month, then my total lost revenue that I can attribute to this reaches well into six figures.

On the contrary - I think the case can be made that we've only yet seen the tip of the iceberg...

cr1t1calh1t

[NickMNS]

@nubchai the question is not whether or not an ad is clickable or not. Because you for ads purchased on the CPM bid type your compensated for impressions. So if the ad is not clickable is not a problem. The question is whether or not an ad is a CPC ad and is not clickable. The ad-review center does not provide any means of determining the bid type of an ad at the ad unit level.

@Ironside the above answer your first question.
Second, CPC is not a good measure of comparison, you should look at RPM. CPC only applies to CPC bid type ads. Over the past year or so I have seen an increase in CPM bids. So you could be earning less per click but now earning more per impression. RPM shows you both.

@criticallhit

I have lost five figures in revenue in the past month, that I am only able to attribute to this exploit/bug.

I have made strong arguments as to why this new wave of spammy ads was not related to drop in earnings seen at the beginning of the month. As a result, Barry Schwartz of SER (@Rustybrick here) even went back to Google and they confirmed that the "unclickable ads" are unrelated to the "glitch" that caused havoc on and around August 8th. Go back into your ad review blocked inventory and tally up all the impressions. I would be surprised if you even get to 1% of total impression even with the zloan and exterminator ads. So it is even less likely that that 1% of impressions was able to cause the earning drop that you are reporting.

But don't get me wrong, I am not saying that fighting this type of spam is not important. It is and I have been very vocal about it over the years. The one thing I have learned over the years is that blocking ads is an exercise in futility. The only sure fire method for preventing spam ads from appearing on your site is by removing unsold inventory from the auction. This was most easily achieved by using the ad-balancer (currently under maintenance), but it can also be achieved by using DFP.

I think the case can be made that we've only yet seen the tip of the iceberg

So make the case. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that this wave of spammy ads is significantly different from what we have seen in the past. But if you have some evidence or a sound hypothesis. Share and I will more than happy to test it.

[ember]

I would agree that this has been going on for a long time and just got so bad earlier this month that the scam became much more visible and obvious to us. A Google rep once told me that Google is constantly under attack. So they must be fighting this kind of thing all the time, just like they fight click fraud, bot attacks and all the rest. Most of it we never see. So I would imagine that we've all been losing money to this for months, maybe years, and just didn't know it. It might just be one of those things that you chalk up to the cost of doing business.

[cr1t1calh1t]

@NickMNS - thank you for the reminder. I do need to go back and re-read this thread, and any other threads or blog posts on the matter. I have been so busy looking for other possible factors that could have caused my drop in revenue that I have not been following all of these things closely from the beginning - and I have not really put as much effort in fully investigating the 'glitch ads' as I should have.

It was only four days ago that I discovered the my 'unclickable ads'.

From doing a quick look just now - you are right - the total impressions from the 'glitch ads' like zloan and such are very small. On the order of 1-2% based on the quick sample-size I checked.

On the other hand -- the total impressions for the 'unclickable ads' are most likely to be the culprit, or one of the major culprits - for my revenue decline -- as I can now estimate that these 'unclickable ads' represent at least 50% of my total daily impressions. These are advertisers that have been running on this site consistently for years now.

Of course, take these % of impressions statement that I make in this post with a grain of salt, as these are just very quick observations, and I need to do a deep-dive and chart things out for the past month or more.

I will also be looking into how to use DFP to get rid of my unsold inventory - thank your for the suggestion.

I will work on gathering some factual and complete data to share, and try not to give any more of my observations that are based on quick-looks, or what to this point amounts to little more than assumptions.

If I have some evidence or a sound hypothesis - I will definitely share it.

I have been an Adsense publisher since 2009 - and have never had any problems with spammy ads, whatsoever - until this spring... I'll share more about what I found this spring, later - have to run now.

cr1t1calh1t

[elman]

A simple question : is it so difficult for Google to block all these non clickable ads ?

When you submit a facebook ad, an human review process your request.

Why Google do not do the same thing ?

[keyplyr]

Hello elman and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]