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]

[Ironside]

It's the 7th today

[MayankParmar]

@Ironside, yep just realised the typo and now I cannot edit the message, lol.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 7:21 am (utc) on Aug 7, 2017]

[MayankParmar]

Just tried in feed ad and this is what I see. Good job, Google.

[imgur.com...]

[chrisv1963]

Just tried in feed ad and this is what I see. Good job, Google.

Use this type of photo on one of your webpages and you might get a warning from Adsense ...

[ww2015]

Yep - last night / early this morning GMT various sites have all lost 30-40% on both AdX and Adsense - seems to be holding at that and seems to be across the board

[RedBar]

Oh, I think I've just broken my record for a single click value, $8.00+ from the USA on a responsive ad:-)

[westcoast]

So why would Sunday see such a huge drop? Its not the start of a quarter or even the first day in the month...

[RedBar]

So why would Sunday see such a huge drop?

Insofar as Europe is concerned, definitely mass holidays all over the continent, I also know in my niche in the USA/Canada that many are also on holiday ... Plus the web ain't the draw that it used to be!

[ww2015]

Looks to me like they are trying something out - rather than the usual lovely brand banners - ive got crappy text ads

[deriklogov]

2nd day continues , same -50% (vs same day/time) earnings so far today

[CommandDork]

Kids are going back to school this week in some places of the U.S. So if families are not still vacationing to get that last outing in, they're getting their little ones ready for Monday - no time for the internet this weekend. That on top of European holidays = a down weekend in terms of numbers (like for me).

[deriklogov]

Anyone else or just me ?

[deriklogov]

It have nothing to do with vacations on my side, page views stay the same, its a clear drop in RPM by -50% ( CTR and CPC) went down

[CommandDork]

Couldn't it just be, since it is a new business/work week, that old campaigns are out/completed and new ones have yet to start up (if they ever do)? I always assumed this is why we cannot always ride a high into eternity with Adsense. Someone always completes their spending in Adwords and there may or may not be someone to take their place (happened to me on one site, never recovered).

Earnings are low-and-slow for me this morning too - and Mondays are typically my best days of the week. I wont really know how good/bad today is until tonight when most of the numbers have come in.

[Ironside]

My earnings recovered slightly in the early hours of the morning. Not brilliant, but around the figure that I have learned to expect at the moment.

I decided to remove a lot of the 300 x 600 ad units the other they and just leave a couple in place on a few articles. So far, it doesn't appear to have upset the apple cart. The fact that more people visit my website from a mobile device means that I should be concentrating more on responsive ads. I didn't particularly like them to begin with, however, the response of units are quite good earners at times.

[ember]

Numbers are recovering here, too. Most of my regular advertisers seem to be back. Deriklogov, give it a little time. Sometimes the best thing to do is just wait for Google to get its act together.

[deriklogov]

Its not recovering for me , I will wait to see if things will get better, in a mean time i even email support to see their reply, i was going thru the stat and never seen so low CPM since all my adsense history , so there is something going on for sure , I have not figured out reason for that
And at the same time i see some Download buttons so i got rid of "sensitive download" category to see if this will help to get rid of "download now ads"

[yellowpixel]

This is the worst day ever: my earnings dropped drastically. July and August are terrible.

[deriklogov]

yellowpixel , same here, it start about on August 6 (around 12 pm est time) and today is August 7 (12:10pm here) and can not see any recover yeat, so it looks like they either testing something out or its a stat glitch and its just not showing something or something happens to whole bidding adwords system and now all advertisers messed up , because as i mentioned before both CPC and CTR went down!
Too bad that I never had adsense click tracker on my sites as some people do to see if the current number of clicking actually went down ? If anyone have it , please check if your CTR drops with Adsense Click tracker too ? if not then it might be a stat glitch.
With that click tracker you can see if Adsense stat actually matching real number of clicks

[ember]

I use statcounter to track clicks. It isn't 100% reliable but a fairly decent double check. Click numbers were matching Google's. There just were not as many of them (lower CTR) and they were paying pennies (lower EPC), in my case because my sites were suddenly flooded with irrelevant, spammy ads. Those are gone today, so things are back to normal. I did block a bunch of them, but I don't know if that is what fixed the problem or not. I suppose they could come back.

[deriklogov]

Do you guys have any black list to block those ads ? I start going thru them with Ad review center and its showing over 300,000+ ads , processing 18 ads per page will make me going thru 16,000+ pages so I can not process all of them manually, it would take me couple weeks to do that

[NickMNS]

@deriklogov, ad-review, where to start?
As soon as you display the ad review center you will notice centered at the bottom of the page a blue bar, and next to it % of number of impressions. What this shows is the number of impressions filled by the ads shown in the view. The ads are ranked by the ones with the most impressions first. So to start, begin on the first page a progressively move back. In my case about 24 ads account %50 of my impression. This varies from day to day and will definitely vary from account to account. If you have an established niche with a small set of advertisers, then fewer ads will fill more impressions. For a more general audience, you should have more unique ads each filling fewer impressions. So do as much as you can from first page on.

Second, in the top right corner there is a check box, "show reviewed ads", un-check the box and only ads that you haven't seen yet will be displayed, this will cut the number of ads down greatly.

When reviewing the ads, if you seen a questionable ad, hover of the ad-unit and then click on the icon in the bottom right corner (two opposing arrows) this will expand the unit to its own page. There you can see the how many impressions there were and when. You can also the ad network, the ad-words account, the destination url and a preview of the destination landing page. When you block an ad I recommend to block using the block button and by clicking the ad-words account. This will block all the ad from this account. If the you see the url coming a lot even after blocking, the copy the url and block the url using the "Advertiser's URL" tab in allow and block ads section of your adsense account.

It is a real pain to get started but if you do it regularly, say every day or every other day it is not so bad.

I hope this helps.

[deriklogov]

@NickMNS Thanks , I been with Ad Sense for so many years and i never visit that part , like i never had any really big issues with CPM before , probably that is why.
Question: Why blue bar disappears on 2nd page and not appearing when i am coming back to 1st page ? Its only showing when I first open it

[NickMNS]

I don't know but I've wondered the same thing.

Also, remember that when you block an ad it will be replaced with the next highest bid (lower priced ad). So blocking will not generally help get your CPC or CPM up.

[Bobb11]

Have you also low CPC these day? I have lowest CPC for whole history my ACC Adsense. Its started from 5 or 6th August.

[deriklogov]

@Bob check my post (few posts above)
@Nick It is understandable , but when you have "Download buttons " on site not even a bit related to download stuff then its doesnt really matter how high is the bid will be because people will never click it and I will have 0% ctr on those. I dont know why Google have not implanted any defense against those ads but they are completely waste

[Nightmute]

I'm seeing on average a 40% RPM drop across 28 sites beginning sometime on 8/7.

The decreases are in both CPC and CTR.

This is the largest day over day decrease I have seen in 4-5 years of running a major AdSense account.

[NickMNS]

@deriklogov, I wouldn't bank on the remaining ads having a much better CTR. But I will agree that those download buttons and many other spammy ads must be blocked. I just wanted to make it clear that blocking ads comes at price.

[deriklogov]

I can confirm that I start see some improving in overall CPM for the past 2 hours , I dont know if its something were done on their side or because I blocked "Download" category and blocked about 20 ads with "Download" buttons thru ad review center.

[Nightmute]

@deriklogov I doubt it's from blocking ads.

Now seeing some RPM recovery today (Monday).

I have a theory on this. I believe Google is updating the algorithm powering Adsense. A consequence of the resets is that it deletes any learnings Adsense has regarding your websites, for example knowing what type or subject of ad performs best on each site.

The RPM recovery over the next couple days is the algorithm re-learning.

I have seen this happen on two other occasions this year: 2/20-2/21 and 3/12-3/13. Each time, the drop off has started on a Sunday with recovery following Monday/Tuesday. And each time the initial drop was between 20-40%.