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 :)

[MayankParmar]

My AdSense is touching new low-levels :(

[NickMNS]

Same here. A server outage yesterday didn't help the situation. But even on a RPM basis, it was bad. On a positive note, I am seeing some positive creep on coverage, I'm up a few percentage points.

[Unshiny]

Just as a follow up adsense continues to tank for us. We are going to add in some Media Net placements and see what happens....

[nubchai]

Has anyone played with Ad Balancer lately? I went back to 100%-100% because I didn't want to screen anything out. It hasn't helped.

[Maximum44]

Unrelated to Adsense, but make sure you have your ads.txt setup and in place before Wednesday as places like Appnexus is stricly going to enforce it by then. Just a matter of time Adsense does the same, especially with 3rd party networks.

[nubchai]

Some ideas here about possible reasons for the revenue drop with Adsense: [tips2secure.com...] He started this in 2016 but has an update for 2018

[MayankParmar]

Thanks, Maximum.

I'm not going to put Ads.txt unless Google forces me :P

[nubchai]

So after going through some of the other forums here and looking at the discussions of declining revenue and coverage issues etc is it safe to say there's no clear explanation of what's causing the decline? Therefore there are no steps Advertisers can take? It doesn't appear that Adsense technical people have issued a statement admitting the problem and providing guidance. I've seen everything from low inventory, crawler errors, low coverage %s etc etc.

[MayankParmar]

If there's a serious problem with coverage, impressions - advertisers will be also suffering?

[Unshiny]

@nubchai as far as I can tell - delving into this since about Jan. 11 - I've seen no clear answers from anyone. Our earnings still are about 50% down. Traffic etc. all the same. If you find an official explanation, please let us know.

We put ads.txt up in the last week or so but surely that's not a contributing factor...

[Maximum44]

If you guys have issues with coverage, the first thing i would do is to put ad slider at 100% if you have not done that already.

[kelsheikh]

I've sat around running tests on URLs seeing if they get crawled, then display ads, and then see if they display ads a week or two later.

I have wanted to see how long a URL stays in their index for. My issue as well as others with a lot of URLs, is not so much getting the URLs crawled. It's making sure URLs stay in their index for a long period of time. Especially when most of the URLs do not get a lot of traffic. Maybe getting a few visitors spread out over a month. If they are dropping URLs from their index in short periods of times. We are all going to have this blank ad/coverage issue forever.

[NickMNS]

@Maximum44, if there is no demand, then putting your ad-balance to 100% will simply result in more ad slots being filled with spammy ads that don't pay.

@nubchai

is it safe to say there's no clear explanation of what's causing the decline?

No it is not safe to say. If you are impacted by the "Brand Safety" update then there is clear and documented reason for the decline, but no solution. AdSense support has responded to publishers contacted them for help and acknowledged the problem, but as I said nothing they proposed has solved the issue.

The "brand safety" update is not the solution to everyone's issues and those that are impacted may also be impacted by other issue further confounding the problem.

[radix]

It's the 22nd of the month - still no Payment in progress in my account.

[nubchai]

I don't think Brand Safety is the issue for my sites, but I could be wrong. I have visitors coming in via social media to a variety of different pages per site. I think mobile density is good, but won;t know until my sites are reviewed.

[Maximum44]

@NickMNS yeah but good for checking the actual coverage. :D

[Ironside]

@radix my payment has gone through today, although it's not hit my bank account just yet

[azlinda]

It's making sure URLs stay in their index for a long period of time.

You wouldn't think that would be a problem. Google still has pages indexed that I got rid of a very long time ago. I'm talking a decade or longer! My robots.txt file is huge.

[nubchai]

@azlinda so is mine. I work with one company that runs campaigns for other companies. All sorts of entries for them alone.

[NickMNS]

@azlinda you are describing the behavior of Googlebot and the index for search and rankings. This is not the same as Mediapartners-Google bot which is the bot and index for AdSense.

@maximum44

yeah but good for checking the actual coverage. :D

I currently have my ad-balance set at 75% and I am seeing an actual coverage of between 45 and 50%.

[radix]

@Ironside: you're right. I didn't look closely enough: I checked Payments under Balance and it showed Dec 21 for last payment. The Transactions box in Payments shows Automatic payment pending for Jan 21.

[Naijasturf]

I thought I was the only person experiencing this ish... My January Adsense earnings is very poor.

[azlinda]

Welcome to the forum, Naijasturf! You have plenty of people here who will commiserate with you!

[MayankParmar]

Looks like Google is sending PDFs to publishers with instructions to implement Ads on AMP pages, I just got an email.

[MayankParmar]

Tsunami warning in effect in many parts of the US west coast after a quake in Alaska, stay safe my webmaster friends! :)

[Ironside]

Possibly the worst days AdSense earnings since the first month I started with AdSense.

[MayankParmar]

January is almost over... hoping for a better February :D

[Ironside]

I really think AdSense is all over for me now. Thing is, it's not happened slowly, I've literally taken a massive drop in earnings and it's happened overnight. I haven't had a single day this month where earnings have exceeded £6. In fact, the last week earnings are about half of that, it is absolutely pathetic. I've had some days where CPC and RPM have been fairly high but that still hasn't made any difference to the earnings. There's no way I'm gonna sit back and just let Google display ads on my website and put up with these embarrassing earnings. In the last week media.net has paid me more money in a day's earnings AdSense and that's never happened before.

[Rbag]

I received payment today and they withdrew 75% of the revenue for invalid traffic.

[Unshiny]

@rbag 75% for invalid traffic? That's brutal. Any idea where it's coming from?

We had a claw back too and are currently showing a negative balance...no idea what that is about.

Thanks,

Un