September 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Peter_S]

Since no one dares to start the monthly sacrosanct* Kiss and Cry** Adsense topic,... have a nice month :)

* [dictionary.cambridge.org...]
** [en.wikipedia.org...]

[NickMNS]

I am seeing zloan ads again. This time pointing to an autoparts website. Good job Adsense!

[honestman]

@NickMNS Yes, I have personalized ads switched off, but have toggled the setting many times. Still experimenting to see patterns. I have ad blocking software on but with enough sites whitelisted to check out patterns.

Sidebar: I wonder how much ad blocking is becoming a factor in the downward trajectory of income since the young tend to use it more and more such that the nature of advertising and reaching customers online will continue to change, in my view. I am one, for example, to change a TV channel when a commercial comes on and do what I can on the web to avoid being sold all the time.

[NickMNS]

@honestman, as I said my impression was that that setting would show mostly contextual ads. But I'm thinking that it may simply make the "interest based' ads worse, in that Google uses less data to determine the users interest. I have always had this setting switched on. What do you think?

As for your sidebar, this may be the case to some degree, but the problem is that the ad-blockers also block the reporting, so you don't easily get to see how many impressions you didn't get. This makes it difficult to quantify. But the issue we are seeing is with the reported inventory. That is we are being paid less for the ads that we are showing.

[nubchai]

@MayankParmar Thanks! A variable ad size. Cool. Gourmet Ads has those too. I didn't see that in my list. Thanks again.

[honestman]

@NickMNS I think you are right on all counts, though the relationship between your personal settings and the impact on the ads others see (what is the default setting, interest-based or not for the average browser?) is not clear to me. I have to "google" to research the relationship having gone back and forth so many times.

Yes, it does seem inventory is an issue, else I would not be seeing what I am seeing in any mode and on any site. BTW, I don't ad block our own sites and have hundreds of whitelisted sites whom I trust not to annoy me with popovers or heavy "50 greatest things to do in the world" page-by-page posts that I am idiotic enough to sometimes click when half-asleep, etc.

Thank you for your clear thinking as we all try to figure out what is happening -- and I am 100% sure something new is happening based on what I am seeing on our sites and others.

[azlinda]

Does anyone out there believe 11,000 impressions and 7 clicks? Neither do I, Google.

[RedBar]

Insofar as my widget sites are concerned with AdSense, it would seem to be game over.

Thursday was 10 clicks for 90 cents, I am not joking!

Fortunately how I constructed my sites I can remove all ads with one simple replacement include, I would hate to be in the position of having to replace ads individually on every page.

And, FWIW, in my realworld business, we've never been busier, every day we have great widget-supply enquiries and winning them.

Honestly, as much as the Mountain View glitterati try to applaud themselves, they really do not have a freakin' clue about the real business world:-)

[Ironside]

10200 impressions, 52 clicks so far today.

[Ironside]

Exactly what is a "widget" in your case Redbar?

[Pistoche]

In case anyone is wondering. Adsense has been partially down worldwide for the past 4 hours, with some ad slots showing ads, some not. App. also apparently down 4 hours now. After worrying and thinking it was just me, I saw a tweet about it.

[MayankParmar]

Many publishers are reporting that AdSense is not showing ads. At the moment, It is working fine for me but I noticed similar thing around 10 hours ago.

Looks like Google has decided to torture the publishers once a month (referring to 8th August).

[edited by: martinibuster at 1:58 pm (utc) on Sep 15, 2017]
[edit reason] Broken link. Removed for a better user experience. ;) [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

AdSense's new Auto Ads is here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Probably it has something to do with the outage.

[blazinec]

I have seen a solution to create a new ad units to start showing ads again. However, I would strongly disagree with this step, since all manual placements targeted to your ad units will be lost. Wait until someone from G wake up, start their 386DX2 and recache all the units. Evidently a mistake on G's side

[RedBar]

Exactly what is a "widget" in your case Redbar?

Specialist construction products.

WooHoo, I've made a Dollar in 14 hours, mustn't get too excited since at least $3 a day is required for the minimum payout.

Will I make it this month? Place your bets:-)

Using G's own figures:

Yesterday -73%
Last 7 days -39%
v 2016 -29%

8th - 14th Sept 2017 $16.50

8th - 14th Sept 2010 $750.00

Nice going G and that was nowhere near my peak days.

[Dhillon]

My earnings are only 12x less compared to 8th - 14th Sept 2010.
Yours are dire.

[MayankParmar]

Okay, today is pathetic. Whole AdSense system is broken. Many are still not seeing any ads. Gg Google.

[MayankParmar]

Breaking: Google AdSense Stops Showing Ads For Many Publishers
[seroundtable.com...]

[eek2121]

So, I currently only have one AdSense unit on my website. I've replaced all the others with a niche specific alternative which pays 50%-100% higher (I am always above $2 RPM, whereas with AdSense, there were many days that I would be closer to a $1.00 RPM) and is also CPM based. Today I logged in for the first time in a while and noticed that they have real responsive ad units (as opposed to the pseudo responsive ad units before). Does anyone know if these units are paying any better?

[MrSavage]

For what it's worth, I am seeing days where I'm not making 1 dollar. Now imagine that! Consider that a best day in years past was three figures. More recently double digit days were the norm. And now it's not surprising to see less than a single dollar.

A few factors of course. I'm transitioning. However my two main income earning sites on Adsense are still online. But of course consider that all mobile traffic using Chrome are being nagged to see the "mobile friendly" version of the websites which of course, parsing out my FVcking ads. Thanks for that Google.

I'm not fretting this because I chose not to update my sites in order to get Google to F off with their parsing of my monetization stream. Additionally, I'm killing sites left and right which will impact what I have going on.

However, given my traffic, the earnings are a complete joke. I mean tomorrow I will see it swing to 5+ bucks. Then the next day, less than a buck. So as a means to being worthwhile, as it is, it's amateur hour. There are still avenues to go with Adsense and I'll be getting to those. However, it's just incredible to see what I'm seeing.

[MayankParmar]

The main problem is AdSense earning is not stable at all, the difference between daily earnings is way too much despite traffic is constant.

[Runfun]

Will there be a refund for the publishers who didn't had ads on their website earlier today? Lol, guess not. I'm glad I'm reducing Adsense ads because as already said here with having decent amount of visitors (3k+ unique a day at a financial website) the earnings are ridiculous low. Few leads with affiliates earn me more money than continuously showing ads from Adsense.

[RedBar]

I've added one click since my last post at 1.11pm ... AWESOME G ... Utterly banjaxed comes to mind, for me.

[nomis5]

The main problem is AdSense earning is not stable at all, the difference between daily earnings is way too much despite traffic is constant.

The best solution to that is to compare earnings over a longer period.

Compare month to month maybe rather than day to day.

[MayankParmar]

Will there be a refund for the publishers who didn't had ads on their website earlier today?

They won't. The August 8 bug affected everyone and the drop was above 50%, and Google paid us nothing. This is so disappointing that every single month, Google is stealing our money.

[ember]

To be refunded money, we would have had to pay money to someone. If you mean that Google should reimburse us, I'm not sure how they would know what to pay us. I'm also not sure how Google is stealing our money. I doubt they want unclickable advertisements all over their network since it would mean that their system is vulnerable to hijacking, which would undermine their business model and eventually spook investors.

[MrSavage]

I think you meant content.

[Ironside]

My daily AdSense statistics are fairly uniform. I suppose I can get anywhere between 40 and 70 clicks in a day, if I go back through the weeks this is what I will say. The money I make each day doesn't differ much more than about £3 and my hits and page views are very much on par each day. So for me, it's very much of a steady line rather than being very erratic.

What might be of interest to some people is a difference the earnings are between a link units and a responsive ad unit. This month I've had 303 clicks on a top responsive link unit that I have at the top of most of my pages. Now if you look at a couple of responsive units that are embedded between paragraphs, surveys have received 89 and 85 clicks. However, the difference between earnings is £5 the responsive link unit has made just over £3 more than one of my responsive units. But look how many more clicks I had to get to achieve this.

[MayankParmar]

Is it fine with the policies to lazy load AdSense ads? It could help in improving earnings

[NickMNS]

Is it fine with the policies to lazy load AdSense ads?

Yes, I do it.

It could help in improving earnings

Possibly, as it should in theory increase your AVV. But if not implemented correctly, the loading of the ads may come too late for users to see them, that is they would scroll past before they load. Then if you try to avoid this by loading ads earlier the impact on AVV may not be as strong, so the impact on earnings may not be that big either. It all comes down to layout and implementation.

[Ironside]

If you are not giving your visitors anything interesting to read then don't expect to make much money because they will just skip through the page quickly which means they won't be looking more in depth at the content which is when they see the Google ads. I also used to think that pages needed to have lots of nice photos to make them look appealing. I've now realised that this is just not the case. If you're looking for a specific bit of information then I think photos get in the way and are of absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

So if you're not making much money then maybe it's time to look at what you are offering your visitors. If you are offering downloadable products then why would they bother clicking on Google ads? My particular niche is 100% advice for people on how to do a specific task. So when someone comes to my website they are going to read the article in full or skip through until they find the specific bit of information they are looking for. And since I have quite a few AdSense unit on my page, this is why a lot of the ads embedded within paragraphs get a lot of attention and make most of my money.