October 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[ivok]

Another month, another problems, but let's hope everyone will be happy with Adsense this month. May the force be with you!

Now to the point - Huge clawback for September earnings - like 8% , which is high three digit...

[Ironside]

@Leebow

If the content you provide for your visitors is interesting and you have put your AdSense on the several parts of the page then you shouldn't have to worry about your visitors not seeing your AdSense units. If your visitors are leaving the page by the time we AdSense appears then there's obviously nothing interesting for them to look at so they probably wouldn't even bother clicking on the AdSense anyway.

[dollarsound]

Weird, Adx has been performing really bad also but yesterday increased by 50-100% (different accounts ). Let's see if it stays like that.

[MayankParmar]

AdX was showing an ad "1.2.3..... Your download is ready" lol.

[MayankParmar]

Analytics down for anyone?

[CommandDork]

Not for me, no. It has been running fine all day.

[leebow]

@ironside - true — But even if you have ads down the page - your top ads are the highest earning. And with “active views” now being very important in Ad prices - you want all your ads loaded with your content.

Like I say - I use cloudflare and saw no negative affect on earnings. It was just a thought why some people have said cloudflare has reduced earnings.

——-

I’m still seeing non loading ads today -

Could you imagine not using async ads nowadays? Sites would take 10+secs to load. And sometimes not at all

[Ironside]

@LeeBow I think some of these big websites that make hundreds of thousands of pounds a year rely very much on viewable ads. Obviously, I'm not going to mention any names, but the websites themselves are not displaying any kind of quality AdSense when I have looked at them before, however, they have a lot of image ads placed down the page and I would imagine that is what makes up the bulk of their earnings through AdSense.

Even if they make 1p per view & are receiving 300,000 page views a day, that's £3000 a day. And I suspect some of these extremely popular websites get double that amount of page views.

[azlinda]

@leebow - But even if you have ads down the page - your top ads are the highest earning.

****

Not necessarily. My topmost ad makes 1/3 of the ads on the right rail and at the bottom of my content.

[Ironside]

I don't see why top ads would always be the highest paying. Surely, it would be based on the content on the page. I don't know whether Google can monitor where the user is spending the most time on a webpage. There is a program you can buy that will enable you to monitor where people are spending the most time on a webpage so I suppose it's feasible that Google would have this kind of technology themselves. Therefore, if people are spending more time reading articles halfway down the page then adverts placed in this facility are going to be more likely clicked on than at the top.

[ember]

I've found that the higher the ads are, the better the viewability and the higher the RPM, even on long pages that I know visitors are reading. Everyone sees the top of the page and those ads; not everyone reads every article all the way to the bottom and sees those ads.

[frankleeceo]

Most of the time it's not about how high up in content it is, it's about how often they are in view. Coincidentally, the units higher on the page usually get better viewability metrics. It's correlation. I have been using tower units heavily in my site designs 160x600, 300x600 to generate higher viewability metrics, but it seems like I need to redesign plenty of my sites around the new mobile ad experience requirement of 30% height density. I am not exactly thrilled about that. Content and navigation all need to be rethought and redesigned for my sites. Ah it's a part of the game to stay ahead.

I think those heat map program is good to have, but sometimes...design the site in certain way to shovel your visitors toward certain tasks or areas can be much more fruit. Use of those analytics tools to make sure visitors are using the site as intended, and look for more opportunities to profit.

Top ads will only yield pennies if visitors have no reason to stay within that first screen, like wise, if you find ways to keep visitors on that first view, they can yield plenty. Every site is different, it's all about usability and design. I have been educating and experimenting myself with more designs and thoughts, it has proven highly profitable for me.

Ps. Very big sites generate thousands if not hundreds of thousands on nonviewable ads buried deep, advertisers dump their money in trash that way. It is what is to be a part of that premium bucket. I doubt many of us will ever be that premium big sites group, I know that I almost will never hit that rank without some amazing luck on my side.

You should never use sync ads in this time and age. Even if you do have tags in sync from other agencies, you need to bundle them via adservers like DFP and serve them async.

[trebuchet]

Even if they make 1p per view & are receiving 300,000 page views a day, that's £3000 a day. And I suspect some of these extremely popular websites get double that amount of page views.

1p per view equates to an RPM of £10. I don't think any site is pulling in that kind of rate from CPM advertising.

[MayankParmar]

CPC is very low.

Also, since when Google AdSense started sending multiple reminders for getting feedback?

[Ebuzz]

This is the worst period I've seen in a very long time, mainly for US traffic. But again, let me reiterate that I strongly believe things outside the internet (in the greater world at large) are having a huge impact on people and advertisers right now. Impacting in a very negative way. Adsense is at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to monetization of sites, so it's definitely getting hit hard. Dollars will become pennies and cents. But everyone is reporting bad times now.

[jbayabas]

@Ebuzz. You may be right. It's quite scary how low my earnings now. Question: why is the stock market doing so well? I thought good stock market = good economy.

[ember]

But everyone is reporting bad times now.

Not everyone.

Dollars will become pennies and cents.

My epc is going up.

why is the stock market doing so well?

Tax cut expectations, which may not come to pass. Many people think the market is due for a correction.

[leebow]

You seen the news this morning about the two guys from youtube being able to adjust what makes it onto the front page.

Now tell me google don’t have a way of capping Adsense earnings ;-)

My earnings halved from 2015 to 2016 - nothing changed on my sites. Something google changed did that.

Still - nothing I’ve tried beats Adsense in earnings and reliable payouts.

[taljanich]

14th of October
Text ads (with arrows) has disappeared from our website
Earnings down for 30%
Can't understand such AdSense behaviour.
Ads CTR is always under 1% (doesn't matter if it is text, rich media or images).

[MayankParmar]

CPC down since past three days.

[Lame_Wolf]

Yesterday (Sat 14th) I wondered why I had earned hardly a penny (12p to be exact) and took a look at my site, and nearly all adverts were showing my alternative advert - one I made myself.

Today is the same. WTF

[MayankParmar]

CTR is extremely high, double of average and the CPC is drastically down.

[Ironside]

Honestly, page RPM and CPC tell you absolutely nothing. This morning when I tracked my performance I had received one click. That click was worth 55p. The CPC was 55p and my page RPM was £20. Now we are up to 13 clicks with the page RPM at £4.24 and a CPC of 27p. The only thing it is telling me is every time I get a click, all the figures drop slightly, might as well not have them there.

[No5needinput]

@IronSide - The ONLY 2 numbers I bother about in Adsense are:

"Pageviews" to see how site visits compare for the same day for last 4 weeks. Eg. this Fri compared to last 3 Friday's.

Bottom line "$'s" to see how earnings compare for the same day last 4 weeks. Eg. this Fri compared to last 3 Friday's.

Those 2 figures give me an overview on how the site and earnings are performing, the rest of the numbers are just fluff.

(12 year old site - Mid 5 figure monthly earnings).

[Ironside]

Yup, I am basically the same, the daily earnings and how many clicks I've received. My page views very rarely change much above 10% either way, it seems that I get the same amount of people coming to my website every day.

[elman]

If your cpc is low it means that your page/niche/site is low value.

[Ironside]

I probably get 2500+ visitors every day to my website. However, even though my website does receive plenty of traffic, I wouldn't consider my niche to be a very high-paying one. Three or four years ago when I was receiving considerably more money than I do these days. The CPC didn't really drop below 30p, so along with around 100 clicks a day it wasn't a bad earner. Nowadays, clicks average between 60 and 70 & daily average CPC is about 10p. One thing that has increased massively is my CTR. Back in the good old days my CTR never reached about 1%, in fact it was always around 0.5%. Nowadays CTR averages around 2% and quite often gets higher.

Certainly not as good as it used to be, however, earnings more than cover the cost of the server and diesel in the van plus day tickets two or three times a week when I go fishing so I can't really complain.

[taljanich]

The only one number is important for me is a website CPM
total_earnings/(total_adimpressions/1000)
If It is normal and stable - everything is OK
Another way - something is going wrong
No matter how many PV we have, CPM have to be stable, NOT CPC
CPC is the metric which has to be important ONLY for advertisers, not for publishers.
Our role in this ecosystem is to show ad to the visitor!
Not make the visitor to click the ad.
Can’t even imagine the situation when offline BigBoards ad agencies will work on CPA or CPL basis.

Just FYI: normally we have 6,5M ad impressions per day

[Ironside]

If you are very familiar what your average daily earnings then I don't think you need to bother with all the CPM to work out if something's gone wrong. My average daily earnings are fairly uniform. However, I get days when earnings are considerably lower than what I normally expect. I may get a couple of days like this but they normally recover back to normal. I think there is far too much fuss going on and people getting all flustered and upset because they can't understand why CPC and rpm are so low.

Today is going to be one of those days when things are just rocketing. I about 50% higher in earnings already than I normally am and the clicks are just coming steadily. However, that's all I'm interested in, I'm not really bothered why it's happening because it's been doing this for 10 years and I'm yet to work out why. The figures don't really mean anything, is just something that happens over the weekend occasionally. Maybe the weather is bad and more people are in using the computer, I have absolutely no idea but all I'm keeping my eye on is the readies.

[NickMNS]

@Ironside

Honestly, page RPM and CPC tell you absolutely nothing.

Absolutely true if you are looking at it intra-day for the daily figure.

But absolutely wrong if you look at it for a full day, ie: looking at yesterday's daily page RPM.

RPM is very a powerful metric that allows you to measure and compare, across many features and dimensions. But as you inferred don't look at it intra day.


@elman

If your cpc is low it means that your page/niche/site is low value.

That is one of many possible reasons. There may be little demand for your specific site or your audience. It may be a seasonal thing. Bad luck. Bottom line there are many potential reasons.

This month is looking better than September. I had a few big days inter-spaced with a bunch of average days. Hopefully revenues will start growing as we begin to move towards Christmas shopping season.

[Ironside]

This morning I had one click that according to CPC was worth 57p. Each click that came that figure dropped as did rpm. So that is confusing already, was the click worth 57p or wasn't it?

Actually, today is Stella so far, I've dropped down to 18p but clicks are way up from where they usually are at this time of the day. I'm wondering if advertisers have worked out that they are earning more money on a Sunday so therefore we are going to earn more from people who click on our ads, that's the only theory I have.