November 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[MayankParmar]

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System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4870784.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 5:27 am on Nov 1, 2017 (utc -5)

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Good for me too, last two days were very bad and today (1st November) the same trend continues.

[MayankParmar]

Great day, no negative impact of Ad balancer (60/100) yet.

[rspwfaq]

I'm also liking the new Ad Balance, sitting at 100/52 and having a great day.

[child please]

@NickMNS, my traffic has actually gone down since 2012 and drops lower and lower every year. So increased revenue has nothing to do with any traffic increases. My biggest gains have come as a result of using DFP and pitting networks against each other and against AdSense as well as the introduction of header bidding.

[kegnum]

@child_please DFP?

[NickMNS]

@Kegnum
DFP = Doubleclick For Publishers. [doubleclickbygoogle.com...]

@child_please
I assume that there is a considerable amount of work involved managing your inventory and networks. Is that a correct assumption?

[kegnum]

@nickMNS Thanks! Real interested in some kind of alternative/improvement to adsense ... RPM/earnings have been off since April.. Currently making about 35% of what i was.. especially during November. Getting 40-70K PVs daily.. so its a significant loss of income.

[NickMNS]

@kegnum, my experience has been that the negative impact has been largely due to a surge in mobile traffic.
Have you ensured that your ad placements are optimized for mobile users?
Are you using mobile monetization features such page-level ads?
Are you using ad-balancer? This eliminates low paying, largely spammy ads and allows users to focus on the high-paying inventory.

[Frost_Angel]

My earnings have seemed stuck since around midnight EST. Anyone else?

[NickMNS]

@Frost_Angel, not on my end.

[allhearts]

A question:

Is the trick with "Ad Balance" to go as low as you can in "Showing Ads" while still earning 100%?

Right now I have it at 99% $ - 86% Ads.

Thanks in advance.

Eddy

[robzilla]

There's no trick to it, allhearts. You decide how much revenue you feel comfortable missing out on in exchange for an improved user experience (due to them seeing fewer ads).

[allhearts]

Ok, thank you.

[kegnum]

@nickMNS My site are optimized for mobile, as is the ad placement. I have had growing mobile traffic for the last 2-3 years. It's nothing new. This is like a penalty or something. I know many people in my niche. Same traffic types, similar size. One other guy is having a similar issue to me. The others traffic never changed.

This was an over night type of thing

April we all got hit.. I recovered. Then in August i got hit again.. Recovered. Then at the end of September my rpm dropped from 18-25 to 8-12... CPC is down a little but CTR is much lower.

No changes were made to my site. Nothing new. I have checked to make sure that the ads are showing up using multiple devices with no issues. This hit all 4 of my sites at the same time. So its not a site issues as they are all hosted separately.

If I had to guess I would assume its an issue with my adsense account.

Havent had low numbers like that in 10 years. This year has been brutal since April.

All metrics up, traffic, affiliate income, media.net income.. Only adsense is down by 50%

[keyplyr]

Only adsense is down by 50%

You may be inadvertently blocking one of the many marketing services that packages site data for advertisers.

[child please]

Nick, it was an incredible amount of work to get it all up and running and I actually did it all wrong. Google reached out through a series of conference calls though and helped me understand how DFP works and how to optimize. After the first month, just my AdSense revenue increased 33%. After I implemented header bidding last year, my total revenue has gone up an astounding 50% or so.

But now that I have been using DFP for probably 5 years, I only make slight adjustments at the beginning of every quarter by adjusting the value CPM that the ads are competing at.

[andymorris]

@child please. is DFP that hard to set up ? Is there a minimum (page views, etc) to be accepted by Google ?

[kegnum]

@keyplyr how would i check if i have done that? I dont block anything, so i dont think this is the issue.

[MayankParmar]

Today is not good :(

[Frost_Angel]

I just wanted to touch base regarding my "stats stuck" issue yesterday. Apparently, the stats weren't stuck... the ads weren't actually displaying. It was due to the ads.txt not being implemented on my site. Never saw a notice or anything about it. I've been with adsense since like 2002 and never had an issue. I guess this was more on my end -- not on theirs.

[ember]

How can it be due to not having an ads.txt file when Adsense is not requiring an ads.txt file?

I tried dfp a few years and it was incredibly bulky and complicated. A Google phone rep had to walk me through it. I eventually stopped using it because it only made sense with at least two networks competing. The only other network I had was media.net, and Adsense always beat it. So I didn't see the point. Unless I am missing something?

[kegnum]

@Frost_Angel might be a coincidence. As far as i know ads.txt is not required. If you do have ads.txt and adsense is not on it.. it will display no ads.. not some ads... or am i missing something?

[keyplyr]

@keyplyr how would i check if i have done that? I dont block anything, so i dont think this is the issue.

By diligently examining your server logs.

We discuss this in the Search Engine Spider & User Agent ID Forum [webmasterworld.com]

[child please]

Andy, I believe if you have an AdSense account, it is free to get DFP and I don't think there is any minimum traffic requirement. One thing is there are two products, one is just DFP and one is DFP Small Business and you need to get the latter for it to be free.

Ember, it is pretty complicated to set up, but once you have it going, it's a beautiful thing. I do agree with you that it only makes sense if you have two or more partners...if you only use AdSense, it is pointless. But if you have at least one other network, DFP makes sense because it makes AdSense compete with the impression from the other partner and very likely bid higher. Think of it like if you walked up to an auction and were the only bidder, you could bid whatever you want for the product. But if there's one other person there, even if he bids pennies, you have to outbid them to win...same thing with DFP, the presence of one competing network causes AdSense to not automatically win the impression and most likely have to pay more for your inventory.

Header bidding takes it one step further than that, which is why I have seen awesome results. Instead of Google having first look at the impression and last bid, header partners get an equal first since the impression hits the header before the ad server, causing AdSense to come at the impression with their best offer right off the bat, rather than wait to see what the bids are then just beat it by a penny.

[child please]

My analogies on the three situations:

Scenario 1 (Adsense only) - Bob (Adsense) is at an auction, he is the only buyer. Joe (publisher) is desperate to sell his painting at any price. Bob bids 5 cents and wins it, Joe gets the 5 cents.

Scenario 2 (DFP, with AdSense and one partner) - Bob (AdSense) is at an auction but Mike (Partner A) is there too. Mike puts in his bid first (25 cents), Bob gets to see it and then decide whether he wants to outbid Mike. He does and bids 26 cents and wins the painting.

Scenario 3 (DFP with Header Bidding and one partner) - Bob and Mike are both there and it's a silent auction. They both have to write their bids for the painting down in private and whoever bids higher gets it. Mike bids 50 cents but Bob really wants the painting and doesn't know what Mike will bid so he bids 75 cents and wins it.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that is my general understanding of how things work! As you can see, it's the same painting (impression) but Bob (AdSense) is forced to pay more for it in Scenario #3.

[Frost_Angel]

I don't know about ads.txt being required "officially" -- or whatever, but both the adsense rep I spoke with three times and my ad serving service, Adthrive made is sound like it was absolutely the issue with my ads not displaying.

[ember]

Thanks, child please. Maybe I'll give it another go, at least on a few pages.

[rspwfaq]

OK, so since implementing ads.txt a couple of days ago, plus using the newly relaunched Ad Balance and turning my ratio down to 100/50, my revenue has shot up nearly 75%. Obviously a very short sample time, but clicks and pageviews are steady otherwise so the evidence is pretty clear.

On the subject of ads.txt, which is supposed to be optional, I'm now getting scary-looking red banners on my Adsense dashboard warning me that I need to put ads.txt on my Livejournal site, which I haven't updated since 2013, or suffer massive drops in revenue. Two problems: First, Livejournal doesn't allow the use of Adsense for bloggers, and in fact they place their own ads on your pages to finance them. Second, even if I did have LJ in my approved list for Adsense (which I don't) I couldn't place ads.txt at "www.livejournal.com/ads.txt" like they want anyway. In fact, I've been scouring the dashboard trying to find where I even have my livejournal site referenced and I can't, so how does Adsense even know about it? Links on the site leading to my monetized sites?

Anyway, the lesson appears to be rapidly becoming "ads.txt is becoming mandatory no matter what Google officially says".

[tharshan]

Having the same issue on Mobile / Tablet devices since Nov 1st. Arrows in the text ads are going and coming back occasionally.

[andymorris]

@child_please, thanx for the very detailed answer, very interesting. I guess i will have to dig into DFP one day when i have the time. Adsense is really not interesting for me anymore.

on the subject of ads.txt, i that's any help, i've set it up a few days ago and didn't see any major change.

[papux]

Hello people, i'm new to this forum, can you please tell me what is the deal with this ads.txt, should i implement it on my server? The reason i ask is because my traffic has grown but my earnings are a mess compared to August or July when my traffic was much less then it is now. Also what about ad balance? should i interfere with that? Thanks in advance and sorry for my bad English.