January 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[ivok]

Happy New Year !
I wish you have high CTR, CPC and RPM throughout the year!

Let's start the discussion about the January earnings :)

[riccarbi]

Now it's as clear as crystal. A huge update of both AdSense and AdWords requiring a complete recrawl of the web has been rolled out in the last weeks. They devised to start it just before Christmas, arguably to reduce its discernibility by, and impact on, users, advertisers, and publishers as much as possible, taking advantage of the low-traffic period. Yet, it took a bit longer than expected and now things are progressively getting back to normality. Nevertheless, what this "adjustment" means for publishers is still a mystery. I suppose it will impact websites positively or negatively depending on their content quality and niche.

[edited by: riccarbi at 9:51 pm (utc) on Jan 11, 2018]

[CommandDork]

Has something official been said then? I haven't come across anything yet.

[nubchai]

Interesting. I haven't seen anything about this either.

[ember]

riccarbi, where are you getting your information? Sounds a bit like speculation.

[ember]

Coverage does seem to be improving, slowly but surely. I probably shouldn't say that out loud.

[nubchai]

It does seem like something that they'd do. Stealth update with no communication.

[NickMNS]

I just got a reply to a few questions I sent to AdSense support and it doesn't look good:

Q1- How long is are pages kept in the index?
A1: This is an engineering side question, so unfortunately we don't have insight into how long it's kept in the index.

Q2: I noticed that AdWords impressions dropped sharply and subsequently impressions from 3rd party ad networks have increased?
A2: The launch restricts bidding by Adwords & DBM on uncrawled impressions from Adsense and Adx so that is why you are seeing more impressions from 3rd party ad networks.

Q3: What impact does this have on the use of Ad-Balancer feature?
A3: The ad balance hasn't been modified based on the chance. Everything that the ad balancer did before is still the same.

[NickMNS]

Does anybody body think there is a possibility for a class-action over this issue?

Where's Lawman?

[gorin_sis]

@Nick If anything should be yet another item to add to the Justice Departments anti-trust investigations. Google controls most of the ad market and they are not afraid to abuse the rest of us. At the very least this needs some press coverage. More publishers need to hear about this was rolled out.

[sdksjdksjd]

Google pretends to know what is every page online about, but has to crawl them to load the ad. I'm the only one seeing contradiction here?
The next who will be smart enough to invent another way of the content monetisation will be billionaire, because obviously AdSense/AdWords became just the marketplace. There is no more unique IT solutions behind it.

[NickMNS]

I broke a traffic record tonight! To bad all those page views were given away for almost nothing! Page RPM under a 1$ on the day.

@sdksjdksjd prior to this fiasco, I have spent a lot of time explaining to people that the Adsense crawler is not the same as Googlebot, somehow they didn't get it then. Now they got the message.

The next who will be smart enough to invent another way of the content monetisation will be billionaire,

JS client-side bitcoin miners, that mine bitcoin for you, using the users cpu while they view your website.

[nubchai]

Bitcoin Cash too lol.

[ember]

The Ad Units page is now telling me that today I've made changes to ads that I haven't touched in months, maybe years. And what are these run of network ads? They're in addition to contextual, placement and personalized.

[Maximum44]

Just wanted you all to know we are more than +50% this month so far compared to last year. Our traffic is not 50% better. Impression RPM is just slightly lower, but page RPM is higher. Guess that is because of auto ads. It just makes me think this is a seasonal thing. At least for us.

[MayankParmar]

Guess that is because of auto ads

I prefer Adpushup or Ezoic, AdSense auto ads don't work as expected.

@Maximum Are you seeing blank ads?

[Maximum44]

@MayankParmar We have a large number of indexed pages and have no blank ad issues whatsoever on both old or new pages. Never had an issue. Our coverage is normal.

We passed both the ad experience report and abusive experience report in Search Console under web tools and belong to ad region A. If that has something to do with anything yet.

[MayankParmar]

I'm seeing blank ads on old pages too. Though after my first visit, I can see ads.

[robzilla]

Coverage has dropped a little since November, used to be a pretty steady 99%, this week it's hovering around 95-96%. Effect on earnings has been minimal though, the drop in RPM was to be expected going from December to January.

You have better chance of winning the lottery than ranking #1 for niche where you can get a $6.50 RPM, if that even exists.

My average RPM is higher than that, and it's not even a particularly high-value niche. I've seen double that in other niches. (I also rank #1 for most related keywords, but the site's been around for a decade, so it's true that it wouldn't be easy to catch up with a new site in the short term.)

I think he was talking about a $6.50 CPC being reported, though. I think CPC reports can help determine the value of keywords (or niches) relative to other keywords (or niches), but don't expect to consistently get $6.50 clicks; Google takes a percentage and $6.50 would be the highest current bid, probably not what most of the inventory consists of.

[sdksjdksjd]

@NickMNS
Yup, miner. This is exactly what I thought about.

@Maximum44
Do I understand correct, that when ad experience and abusive experience are passed, then reports show nothing? Only when something is wrong.
I submitted experience request couple of times, but got same request template after some days.
Also how do you know, that "belong to ad region A" ?

[MayankParmar]

Is there some problem with AdSense pageviews? It's 50% less than Analytics and AdX.

[nubchai]

Fwiw our ad revenues for another ad network are down about 50%. I spoke to our account contact. She said that basically ad managers review ad performance in January and usually have new budgets. They review ad performance and decide what campaigns they want to run. In short, she said the drop was normal and to wait it out.

I'm not sure the same is true about Adsense.

[sdksjdksjd]

@nubchai
This is true, but it looks like every year they accept new budgets later and start bidding at lower levels.

[nubchai]

@sdk yes. When I compare Adsense to 1 year ago, I'm down 60%. So a year ago, this was a much better situation. I think something else is going on ~ perhaps the recrawl.

[frankleeceo]

I am seeing huge rebound in RPM. Yesterday was +30% to two days ago. Today seems to be in the 60% to two days ago.

[sdksjdksjd]

My impression RPM dropped 8 times since 2010. Same website, same traffic. This is the global trend.

[sdksjdksjd]

Btw, yesterday was the lowest income ever on my 10+ years old website. With the traffic in the middle range (lowest <--> highest)

[MayankParmar]

Earnings back to normal. Blank ad is still bothering me.

[NickMNS]

@nubchai of course prices are down on other networks. AdWords has dropped billions of impression of demand leaving all that supply open. Other networks are able to bid on that supply so their prices drop as a result. The 3rd parties have a lot to gain from this fiasco, they should see their volume rise substantially as word gets out on the ongoing online-ad fire sale. But I am guessing that most networks are completely clueless as to what is happening. And I certain that this is why AdWords has been so hush about this update. When AdWords customers realize that they can get the same inventory they were buying a month ago at 60% off by switching to third party networks, the run will begin.

[Cralamarre]

Earnings seem to be returning to normal (for a January). Every day this week has shown an improvement over the previous day, and coverage is good.

[ember]

NIck, except that I don't think this will last that long. Once the re-crawl is done, and, of course, depending on how long pages are kept in the index, Adwords will once again be filling most inventory. I doubt Google will let third-party networks get too much of a foothold.