CPC drop -50%

[ivok]

I have noticed huge CPC drop over the past 2-3 days. Today is almost -60%.

Checked by country - seems this affects USA and Canada. Australia, UK , etc looks like normal.

Anyone experiencing such issues?

[motorhaven]

Yeah, I've doubled checked them by hitting the expand button and testing them. I haven't had such a high RPM rate in months. Apparently this type of exploit has been going on for a long time.

[yaashul]

@motorhaven what other thread you are talking about?

[motorhaven]

The post by taljanich halfway down with the CSS code. [webmasterworld.com...]

You'll need to install that Chrome plug in too. Then review ads, any ad with a red shaded area on it not covering the entire ad, click the expand button and see if the entire ad area is clickable. If not, then block it.

[NickMNS]

@martinibuster

You should really take the time and read the references that you are providing.

The advertisers were banned and the cause of the issue was identified, noted here. [seroundtable.com]

Barry's article is simply publishing on his site what was announced here on page three of this exact thread by @publicpolicycomms. And, if you read the thread in its entirety paying attention to the time line, since the post by @publicpolicycomms declared the situation resolved, others including myself have continued to see evidence of this scam continuing, albeit not at the scale seen on August 8th. So your claim that

The advertisers were banned

is not entirely true. Some advertisers may have been banned, most likely most egregious offenders, but others are still doing this to some extent.

[seaex]

I have also just blocked others. Google have not completely fixed the problem.

[Maximum44]

Yes, it continues... argh Just saw same pest control ad but now with changed url. The new url is orkin.com.

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:10 pm (utc) on Aug 14, 2017]
[edit reason] No specifics. Ads Might Not Be Guilty etc. Mods Can't Be Judges for Every Outing. [/edit]

[csdude55]

This may have already been addressed, but looking through my reports I see an obvious drop in RPM on May 13, 2017.

I know we can't give exact numbers, but I can say that I had a consistent RPM of one value for about a year, and then the RPM on May 13 was exactly 1/2 of what it was on May 12. After that, it stayed at that halfway point until July 23, when it went up by 50% (so still 75% of the average before May 13).

Looking at the averages from January 1 until May 12, and comparing that to May 13 until August 12... the average RPM for the latter is roughly 1/3rd of the former (37.4%).

If this problem is the culprit, then I can trace it to starting on my end to that date: May 13.

Would anyone care to share a list of advertisers or providers that they're blocking due to this?

Any advantage to solving this issue by removing "Automatically allow new Google certified ad networks"?

[glitterball]

Are there any legitimate reasons why an Ad would not be clickable in the AD review centre?
I am seeing ads for Facebook (in Russian) that are not clickable - of course it could be a fake facebook account.

[Maximum44]

I don't think there are any legitimate reasons. But I guess it depends on the ad. It might be a mistake. If they have a very visible phone number and/or domain name then I would say the ad is safe to block. Ban the adwords account if you do not want to ban the url. The url is most likely a good url that is not part of the scam.

Look how many views the ad recieves. These bad ads get a lot of views in a short period of time.

We recieved 10k+ views over a day on one of the pest control ads. The ad was totally unrelated to our website, had a big phone number on it and you could not click it. You can bet I banned it!

[seaex]

Wow. This is HUGE. I spent the weekend going through the Ad Review center and have found many unclickable ads. Some are perfectly targeted for my niche. They feature "call now" and a number, a prominently displayed "brand" name, website URLs etc, but no clickable area. I am thinking that these advertisers rely on someone searching the name, manually typing in the website URL or calling. Looks like is is a loophole in adwords that a lot of people are exploiting. Most of them are now showing zero impressions, some after hundreds of impressions per day. Maybe a simple solution for Google is to make all image ads with a default 100% clickable area.

I have way over 1 million ad impressions per month. How much money have I lost due to these adverts. I can tell you I am not happy.

As with many reports here, I too have had a significant fall in Adsense income despite page views remaining relatively stable, in some cases growing, my income has dropped by around 50% in the past 18 months. THOUGH, I must admit August has been up 25% on last year and is getting better day by day.

I am thinking of turning off image ads until Google fixes this problem. What is your opinion?

[EditorialGuy]

Are there any legitimate reasons why an Ad would not be clickable in the AD review centre?

Some ads are about branding, not direct response: "Drink Coke" is a classic example. And even someone who is running a direct-response campaign might want to limit responses to prospects who are serious enough to make a phone call. (I can imagine this being a strategy worth trying for big-ticket B2B goods and services, for example.) If the advertiser is paying a CPM rate, rather than a CPC rate, whether the ad is clickable is beside the point.

Mind you, I'm not saying that's what's happening here.

[keyplyr]

Hello seaex and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[Maximum44]

I have never seen a branding ad not being clickable, lol. Even if someone wants to show off their brand only, their ad would still be clickable. Anyway there is css code and a chrome extension you can implement to let you know if someone is trying to hide the clickable area code.

[capulkit]

Had drops and today RPM is highest ever with highest ever CTR.

[glitterball]

I am thinking of turning off image ads until Google fixes this problem. What is your opinion?

Has anyone else noticed the bug (feature?) where if you try to Edit ad type , the radio buttons default to "Text ads only"?
If you then edit one ad, all other ads will default to that setting for the duration of the session, making it impossible to know what ad type settings an ad has associated with it.

[csdude55]

Anyway there is css code and a chrome extension you can implement to let you know if someone is trying to hide the clickable area code.

I saw the code but don't quite understand. Do you mean that I would be looking at ads on my current domain, and looking for any that showed up red to manually go back and block? That would help a little, but Ad Review Center shows 127,000 ads... it would take me months, maybe years to see them all!

It would be very helpful if everyone would share the ad networks they've blocked so the rest of us would know where to start.

[martinibuster]

Non-clickable ads were the culprits.
https://www.seroundtable.com/details-google-adsense-ad-buyer-exploit-24298.html [seroundtable.com]

The purpose was to get a bunch of free ads on Google, the advertiser didn't care if the user clicked on them, they got the eye balls. In fact, they increased their CPCs a ton, knowing they would (1) never pay for a click and (2) it would thus outrank the other ads, giving them a ton of visibility on their ads. The destination URLs were nothing at all related to the ads themselves, they were just there to fill the space. If and when the AdSense publisher blocked the destination URL, the advertiser would just use a different destination URL. So the advertiser just posted tons of these ads with fake URLs to get exposure of the ads themselves.

[NickMNS]

I just left a comment on the SER article. But I will repeat it here:

The bulk of the impressions of the blocked ads shown above [t u p s t e r] appeared on and around the July 29, and 30th. The "glitch" with Adsense seems to have occured between August 6th and 8th, with the 8th being the worst day. Google then claimed that they resolved the issue, and for the most part the CPC/CTR returned to normal. However these unclickable ads have persisted, albeit from different advertisers (Pest control, plumbers, and payday lenders). So I question whether or not these two issues are really related.

[NickMNS]

Further to my post above. I went back and looked through my ad inventory, to see if I could see any trends. For the most part ad serving looked normal, my main repeat advertiser's still dominated the impressions. Some ads placed seem to drop out on August 8th but it was not conclusive, overall impressions remained high. By the same token, if the inventory would have been dominated by these unclickables, then I would see certain ad units having many impressions and I didn't. For me the unclickables started appearing again on August 9th, and earnings on the 9th were back to normal.

The other thing that bothers me about the unclickables is the role that CTR plays in ad quality. If an advertiser has single CPC ad-unit and it is getting millions of impressions without any clicks this would ruin its ad quality score. And yes the advertiser could keep increasing the bid to win the auction but at some point the insanely high bids would certainly trigger alarms. We are all speculating that these unclickable ads are CPC ads, but they could easily CPM ads and as it stands we the publishers have no way way of differentiating. So we it may be that we are being fairly compensated for those spammy ads.

This is not to say that we shouldn't block them and that they are not bad but more and more I am doubting whether the unclickables were in fact the source of the adsense glitch.

[NickMNS]

Just to add to my point,
[imgur.com...]

The image shows the CPC (blue) vs CPM (red) impressions in my account over the last 30 days. Can you guess what day was August 8th?

Now look at this:
[imgur.com...]
The second image shows CPC (blue) vs CPM (red) earnings. Despite there being a massive jump in CPM ads on the 8th, there was no significant increase in CPM earnings, and there was a massive drop in CPC. Note that on the ninth, CPC impressions went about as did the earnings, and CPM impressions remained strong than the lead up to the 8th, but CPM earnings were also stronger in step with the increase in impressions.

[rustybrick]

Supposedly, this is still going on....

[netmeg]

If an advertiser has single CPC ad-unit and it is getting millions of impressions without any clicks this would ruin its ad quality score. And yes the advertiser could keep increasing the bid to win the auction but at some point the insanely high bids would certainly trigger alarms.

Why would you say this? I routinely work with advertisers who are bidding huge CPCs - Google doesn't send out alarms. They never have, and I've been working with AdWords since it started.

[Isa_Al]

I am still facing low revenue issues. Almost 70% drop here by the clicks and impressions as well. I was getting around 30 clicks per 1000 impressions and now barely 5.

Did Google fix it or not yet?

[NickMNS]

@netmeg you clearly have more experience with ad-words than I do. But my understanding is that CTR plays a big role in the ad quality score. So millions of impressions with no clicks may not raise flags, as in Ad-words sending out notifications, but I would imagine that it would make it exceedingly difficult to win any auctions even with a big bid price.

But the bottom line is that as Adsense publishers we have no explicit means of determining the bid type of any particular ad impression. The Ad-review center does not provide that information. We can see it on aggregate level, ie: the % of CPM bids we are getting per day or month. Furthermore, there are plenty of unclickable ads that appear for big brands, that are perfectly legitimate. So how can anyone say with any degree of certainty that those spammy ads are winning the CPC bids.

The graph i posted, with regards CPC vs CPM impressions clearly shows a spike in CPM bids on the 8th, which is obviously at the expense of the CPC bids. But the problem was not the mix of bid types as much as it was the lack of compensation for the CPM bids. And on August 9th, the CPM bids were still more frequent than earlier in the month but the compensation issue seemed to have been resolved. Now this is only the view of my own account, one account is not representative of all accounts.

What have others seen? Did you see this same spike in CPM bids on the 8th?

[RedBar]

Did Google fix it or not yet?

Certainly not for me, it's even worse, I have one site today that has had 2 clicks with a value of 1.2 cents for the two of them, that's insane, at that rate I'd need 834 clicks in a month simply to achieve the minimum!

[Isa_Al]

@RedBar same here. My CPC are very low. Yesterday my CPC were almost 0.01$ it's insane. Today I am noticing a bit of improvement. the rate is around 0.05$ per CPC. which is better than before but still...

I am having an issue which is sometimes my website shows blank space instead of Adsense since last week. Anyone faced this issue as well?

[not2easy]

@Isa_Al: There's a recent discussion about ads showing intermittently [webmasterworld.com] here and it is a problem that happens occasionally at some time to many AdSense accounts.

[glitterball]

What have others seen? Did you see this same spike in CPM bids on the 8th?

No, no spike for me. The only thing I can see if a slow continuous decline in the percentage of income from CPM ads (as a percentage of the whole account).

[NickMNS]

@glitterball thanks for sharing. Were you impacted by august 8th drop specifically. That is did your earnings drop on August 8th (or during the 2 or 3 days leading up the 8th) in the order of 50% and then recover the next day?

[netmeg]

but I would imagine that it would make it exceedingly difficult to win any auctions even with a big bid price.

Nope, not at all.