January 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

@NickMNS Is this some sort of experiment they are doing with select publishers? Because I see ads on my friends and rival sites (news sites). I have even asked them, they have confirmed to me that they haven't noticed such issues.

And how is AdX working fine?

@MayankParmar, I also have not noticed the issues reported here. Only certain types of sites are affected.

OK, I have to change my point of view.

Since two years I'm very unhappy with Adsense. No ads related to my content. Re-Targeting, Re-Targeting, Re-Targeting. In 2017 I also had to recognize a big increase of ads that are shady and dubious. As I told you some days ago, it seems that also my account was impacted by the "Re-Crawl-Way" of Adsense/Adwords. Since four days I can see a rise in all values (CPC, CTR, RPM). My earnings are now (2018-01-01 / 2018-01-12) +6%, related to the same time-window in 2017. On January the 3rd it was -45%!
But more important (for me): Ad-Quality is as good as in the earlier years of Adsense-Publishing. Ads are related again, courted brands have good reputation and are well known (in Germany), no shady #*$!. It seems that the re-crawler does also a "quality-check". I hope that this is a constant way. Crappy ads for crappy content, good ads for good content. Bye Bye MFA.

So, ad quality is much better and just +6% to earnings ... ?
Happy you, if you're satisfied with this.

So, ad quality is much better and just +6% to earnings ... ?

The better ads are displayed since four days... I moved from -45% on January the 3rd to 6% now.
I think it's still a hard and long way to go, but it's a good trend and direction - i think.

@sdksjdksjd Region A = US / Canada. B = Europe.

The brand safety update impacts each site differently depending on you site structure and traffic patterns. For the same level of traffic, a site that gets most of its traffic to very few pages (like a news site) will likely see no impact, whereas a site that has its traffic spread thinly across many pages will see a devastating impact, (this is my case).

The big unknown is whether or not this is the result of AdSense launching the update with an empty index or whether the life of a page in the index is finite, say 60, 30 or 10 days. The shorter the more devastating the impact. Only time will tell, because AdSense certainly isn't being transparent about this.

@MisterTux if ad quality is important then you should be using the Ad-Balancer, it basically eliminates all low(no)-paying, low quality ads.

@Maximum44
Yup, I noted there is a "Region" field in the report. It just never showed anything for me. I requested report once. It was pending couple of days, then became as in the beginning - request form. I requested again - same. I searched online and read somewhere (most probably on Google help), that report shows something in case of trouble only.
Now you're saying, that you see the report with no trouble marked, including the "Region". Hmm ... Requested another report yesterday )

Similar condition here, Nick.

I'm OKAY with this update, despite I know I'm going to lose revenue as everyday we publish 10+ stories. Some trending articles had 300-500+ real time views from Tier 1 countries with no ads for more than 10 minutes. I'm fine with this too, you're welcome Google.

What's bothering me the most is those ugly white spaces, how am I supposed to explain to complaints from readers about these blank ads? A site with with 20 ads would look better than a site with 10 blank ad (a big blank matched content).

Are advertisers more important than publishers and users for Google?

[edited by: MayankParmar at 6:31 pm (utc) on Jan 12, 2018]

@MisterTux if ad quality is important then you should be using the Ad-Balancer, it basically eliminates all low(no)-paying, low quality ads.

I already use it, actually with a value of 83%
My problem in 2017 wasn't just a couple of "bad ads", it was a gigantic rush of "bad ads". Reputable brands and products were only displayed in the serps, not in display-network.
This fact did not only impact my own pages, felt 90% of the websites with Adsense were affected. Sometimes I thought "Oh my god, what's goin' on?" There are better ads on Xhamster.

@Mayank regarding blank spaces, you can run backup ads, and simply point users to other content on your site. But unfilled ad-slots should collapse by default. Have you checked your page code to see if your are forcing height on the parent divs?

With only 10+ stories a day, you should have no issues. Just be sure to go visit those pages as soon as you publish them. Then after a few minutes, they should start seeing ads.

@Nick

Have you checked your page code to see if your are forcing height on the parent divs?

I'm using Adpushup. Even with normal ads set by WordPress's Ad inserter plan, WordPress Widget, they don't collapse. I'm not forcing height on divs, though they are aligned.

Any idea why? I have checked some affected site, and they too have white spaces.

"unfilled ad-slots should collapse by default"
Slot can't collapse. Google loads wrapper with width and height, but no ad inside.

Sorry, this is my mistake, My ads collapse because of my ad blocker. When I unblock the ads, the blanks space are shown (not ads?).
But it my case I am mostly running backup ads, so I don't come across the situation much.

AdSense says "collapsed when possible or blank space (default). I guess it hasn't been possible lately.

@sdksjdksjd It will show if you passed as well. We have status passing and everything is green. Seems like they are doing it monthly. Or atleast now and then. We did not have to submit or request it even though it was an option before.

I wish they would collapse their ads, but they are not. We had to use DFP and have adsense run thru it to get that functionality. Most annoying is that they do not collapse unused height when smaller ads are run in a specific ad placement. Different with width though.

Good idea, thanks, Maximum. I'll ask Adpushup to do this. I hope it looks better.

What's bothering me the most is those ugly white spaces, how am I supposed to explain to complaints from readers about these blank ads? A site with with 20 ads would look better than a site with 10 blank ad (a big blank matched content).

People are complaining about blank spaces? In all my 13 years of running Adsense, I have never, ever received a single complaint about their ads or a lack of. I must have patient visitors.

As for me, well just as I think it can get bad, it gets worse. I am now at nearly 1/7th of my former revenue.

@MisterTux if ad quality is important then you should be using the Ad-Balancer, it basically eliminates all low(no)-paying, low quality ads

After some months, I'm finally planning to enable the Ad-Balancer on some of my sites (yet, my strategy is to use those slots not for advertising, affiliates, and the like). Nevertheless, there's a question which puzzles me, frequently.
Why, on earth, to get rid of those low-quality, low-paying ads, Google's AdSense doesn't just cut them off on their side?

[edited by: riccarbi at 9:04 pm (utc) on Jan 12, 2018]

My earnings are down 50% from the same time last year, but traffic is also down 50% (thank you Google), so sadly, the numbers work out. Earnings are low, but pretty much what I would expect.

Cralamarre, about the same for me, my sites have either lost Google traffic or experience lower Adsense RPM, sometimes both. The last 2 years have been discouraging as a web publisher.

Revenue is holding at around half as a normal month. The traffic drop sucks though.

Literally making pennies. Revenue dropped traffic dropped. I got pages on a site with keywords and stuff that other sites do not even have. While searching for those, results appear on 2,3,4th and so on pages. Totally irrelevant results are appearing on first page from last couple of days in my niche. Good job Google. Thumbs up?

My revenue drop/traffic drop happened in 2017 - came out of nowhere and (seemingly) without reason. There's nothing that different sets of eyes have noticed that could attribute to a Google/Adsense dislike of the properties. Hopeful that 2018 will be a rebound year.

I'm not seeing blank ads or lower coverage -- but, my earnings have tanked. RPM is the worst it's been since the advertiser fraud that was going on in april of last year. We're at 2.5x less in page RPM compared to averages of last year. This is on a site with 100k+ PV/Day so sample size is large. The loss appears to be CPC. Ad quality looks normal. Hoping advertisers are just getting their budgets together for the new year. This type of crash never happens in the new year for me, though.

For testing purpose I checked my sites with VPN to see what kind of ads are appearing in different countries. It turned out majority of ads are those big fat Download buttons. Blocked many of those in Ads review center. It seems like good advertisers are all gone leaving behind these trolls who will pay you a cent when users click on their crap ads. CPC is merely 0.01 - 0.03 from last couple of days.

I was seeing some shockers earlier this month, but the quality of ads isn't too bad now. I ran an experiment yesterday and removed some ads in the hope that less ads = more competition = higher CPC, but this morning my AS had absolutely tanked. So I put them back and it recovered. It is still 1/4 of what it was at its highest and even my part-time job no longer is enough. I'm now earning the same as I was in 2009.

Clicks are the same level as December, but the CPC is down by 50%.

Absolutely dreadful here as well, things have not improved at all this month. Some days my CPC gets quite high but earnings are still well down by the end of the day. I think the time has come where I have to change my layout a little bit and see if that makes any difference.

@Ironside You should change the layout if you have repeating users, as they will become blind to ads.

It's all dead here too. Pathetic!

Though things have improved a bit since the first week of January, at least for coverage and ads quality, revenue is down 20% with 30% more traffic if compared with the same period in January 2017, which means the rpm has halved. Really disappointing since this has nothing to do with a seasonal fluctuation.