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]

[MayankParmar]

They are capable of tracking invalid activities but they can do nothing about these s h i t ads? Shame.

[MayankParmar]

some of your pages are not serving adsense units

How do we find that? If the ads are not serving, then the coverage would go down, right?

[NickMNS]

@Mark_at_slv that is clear. The issue is not with the difference. it is with the sudden and short lived change in the magnitude of the difference. Everything appears back to normal today.

[NickMNS]

I took a few minutes to check my GA to see if there was an usually large volume of traffic hitting pages with no ads. No, the most frequented pages without ads was my home page and it had orders of magnitude fewer PV's than the difference.

I checked to see if there was one user or a small group users that could explain the difference. I found one user or group, with an unusual high number of PV's. This could explain the difference assuming the user was using an ad blocker. Time to check the logs.

[Ironside]

I think today is going to be quite good. Page RPM is still on £4, CTR is just over 2%, and CPC was 45p this morning, that's drop down to 20p. And I'm currently hovering around 21 clicks and it's just coming up to midday US so I've still got 12 hours + of potential and in time.

[Maximum44]

They tried to take care of the #*$! using the ad slider. When it returns there will be less #*$! but also less potential income. Adsense have obviously focused on coverage. Maybe if there was no #*$! ads you would have no ads at all and the result be about the same anyway.

[MayankParmar]

And after a good yesterday, earnings dropped again today :(

[taljanich]

22nd of August - was good until 3PM PDT
AdS: Then CPM (RPM) dropped for 25% and yesterday overall looks terrible
AdX: looks good, really good

UPD: huge RPM drop for horizontal 970*90 ads

[MayankParmar]

Today is turning out to be yet another awful day. No improvements yet since 8th August. What the hell is wrong with my account? :((

[CommandDork]

My CPC has definitely not recovered since about August 4th. Maybe it's the new way of things. Time to plan for a lean winter.

[MayankParmar]

Can someone tell me what is AdSense support email? I asked my manager but he didn't email them.

[capulkit]

One cannot pay all his bills with Adsense. 1000 valid clicks and earning not even 40$. Niche is highly profitable and no students and housemakers.

[Ironside]

CPC has dropped back down to 10p to day. However, page RPM is £2.44 at the moment and my CTR is 2.36%.

[neurropatic]

My CPC is normal, but CTR is down for me.

[MayankParmar]

When the CPC is up, the CTR goes down. When the CTR is up, CPC goes down. This is pathetic.

[netmeg]

Re link units - the second click counts. i.e. the clink on the actual link unit doesn't count, but if someone clicks on the resulting ad, that counts.

They are capable of tracking invalid activities but they can do nothing about these s h i t ads? Shame.

What's considered a s h i t ad is subjective at best, and a matter of opinion. Just cause I think it's one doesn't mean the advertiser or Google does. And anyway - that's the product Google offers. You are trading control for ease of implementation, ease of acceptance into the program and ease of finding ad inventory. There's not a lot of percentage for Google in changing that offer. If they did, they're stuck with a lot of low paying ad inventory they can't move (which just ticks off the advertisers, who are the primary focus anyway)

You can't just email AdSense support, you have to do it through your account, which is keyed in some fashion as to whether or not you're eligible. But the eligibility requirements are fairly low - you just have to average $25US per week to be eligible. Go into your account, search through help for "Contact AdSense" and if you are eligible for email support, there will be a link.

[MayankParmar]

Clicking on "help" does nothing :/

[netmeg]

Maybe it's not available for you then, but I get a drop down with a bunch of links and a search box, into which I can type 'contact adsense' and the various options come up.

[MayankParmar]

45 minutes and 23rd August will end. Dropped by 43% from yesterday. I'm scratching my hairs, wtf is wrong with AdSense - SOB :(

[Ironside]

The way I see it is advertisers are only going to target specific websites and pay good money if they are fairly certain they are going to benefit from it. I suspect that many websites have not got anyone placing strategic ads on their website because they're not going to make any money from them. Therefore, all you are getting is a load of rubbish which probably pays no more than 10p a click.

10p may not seem a lot of money, however, if you are getting millions of page views a day and thousands of clicks then it's all going to start adding up. If you look through the list of the top earners and look at the ads being served up, most of them are a load of rubbish. Even though a certain website may be the number one earner in the world for AdSense, that doesn't mean somebody is going to want to pay a lot of money per click because most of these sites don't really have a niche. However, I suspect a lot of their ads are paying no more than what we get, but because they're getting that many more clicks they are making the money.


That's my theory anyway

[elman]

I suspect that they're playing with the ad balance

[azlinda]

When the CPC is up, the CTR goes down. When the CTR is up, CPC goes down.

This has never made any sense to me either, and no one has ever explained it to me.

[Ironside]

To me, the RPM is absolutely meaningless. Mine is always fairly high lately, I haven't seen it below 2 pounds for quite a while. When I do the calculations most of my money does come from clicks, rather than anything else. My CTR has got better and better over the weeks and it's about 2.5% today

[NickMNS]

This has never made any sense to me either, and no one has ever explained it to me.

I basically explained this yesterday here: [webmasterworld.com...]

So again really simply, high cost clicks are few, low cost clicks are many 1:20. If by chance you have few clicks but one of those clicks is high priced, your stats will display a high CPC. As the day progresses and the number of clicks grows, inline with the ratio above, the clicks should on average all be low priced clicks, so as the number of clicks grows the CPC drops. It is also possible that the high priced click comes later in the day, when the click volume is high, but in this case one won't really see the impact of that click as it will be one of many. So high CPC will only show with few clicks.

[Peter_S]

There are no calculations needed, you have the details in the "Bid types" report. You see, CPC bids, CPM bids, Active View CPM, and CPE bids.

As for the Page RPM , it's only an indicator of how much 1000 views of your pages, are earning.

Page RPM = ( Earnings / Page Views ) x 1000

Now, if I don't make mistake, the CPC showing on the home page is NOT the CPC bids.

Because "this" CPC = Earnings / Clicks ; but the earnings includes CPC bids, as well as CPM, AV and CPE ; and the number of clicks might include clicks on ads which are paying on CPM and not on CPC.

[NickMNS]

@netmeg

What's considered a s h i t ad is subjective at best, and a matter of opinion.

I respectfully disagree. There are ads, such as the <snip> ads of late that are objectively bad. The advertiser engage in practices that in almost any other setting would be characterized as fraud. Other ads use tactics that are explicitly in breach of Ad-Words policies and T and C's, for example including a phone number in the ads is against the terms and can and should be reported.

The problem is that there is very little effort and resources allocating to addressing this issue by AdSense and AdWords. About a year ago I came across this type of ad, I clicked on the ad-choices icon on the ad and try to report it. But, the form required an input that was not present on the ad (a copy of the link). I reported the problem to AdSense support, they fixed the form such that the input was no longer required. As a thank you they credited my account $50. I was very pleased, I blocked spam, and got paid.

This time around, I tried reporting the ads and one there is no ad-choices logo to click on the spam, and if I go to my own link to the reporting page, I the form seemed to have modified again, but that field is required again. So no reporting of the spam is possible. This time, no response from Adsense Support.

Also about a year ago I had the opportunity to meet someone, a friend of a friend who had moved to Mountain View to work for Google, for Doubleclick. He was back here visiting. And he essentially confirmed that in terms of priority inside Google AdSense is far from being at the top of the list.

Unfortunately, the rest of what you say is true. We choose to work with AdSense and we really have no choice but to deal with product/service as it is. And Adsense is very fortunate that there has not been any serious competitor that has eaten up their market share. I am sure if that were the case we would see a much quicker and more serious effort at resolving the problem.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:21 am (utc) on Aug 25, 2017]
[edit reason] Please read the MEMO about specifics. Thanks. :( [/edit]

[trebuchet]

Complaining about Adsense hosting poor quality ads is like complaining because discount stores like Poundland or the Reject Shop stock cheap Chinese-made tat. Those ads have served as ground cover for the GDN garden for years. Publishers hate them, most users ignore them but a few lemmings can't help clicking them, so in that respect they work. If you want more money either build your traffic or target higher-paying advertisers and/or niches.

[ember]

And he essentially confirmed that in terms of priority inside Google AdSense is far from being at the top of the list.

That's nothing new. Their primary concern is advertisers. Then stockholders. Then users. The their pet projects. Then us.

[NickMNS]

@Trebuchet I'm not sure I fully agree. Yes those ads are symptomatic of weak demand for your inventory. But one should be able to choose what ads are displayed ones my website. I am very willing to block the low paying ads and replace them with blank spaces, but that isn't currently possible. You can block an ad, but it is simply replaced with another ad that is just as bad as the one blocked (If not identical). So blocking is essentially pointless.

So I never complain about the quality at Poundland (Dollarstore in the US & CDN), I simply to don't shop there. (Actually when i was in England in May I did go to Poundland. But that is just because everything is so expense over there!, Lol)

[netmeg]

This time around, I tried reporting the ads and one there is no ad-choices logo to click on the spam, and if I go to my own link to the reporting page, I the form seemed to have modified again, but that field is required again. So no reporting of the spam is possible.

I don't think there's any way for an advertiser to remove the AdChoices logo from AdWords ads.