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 :)

[Ironside]

My payment hasn't hit my bank account yet and clawback was extremely minimal, but I am showing an -8p balance at the moment.

[Rbag]

I have no idea, it was the first time it happened.

[nubchai]

Not sure if this is a fluke or not. I generated new versions of the same ads on two of my sites and placed them in the same spots on the page. Revenue is so far better today.

[TheWarrior]

@Ironside, same here.

It shows a negative "Balance". Noticing it for the first time.

[nubchai]

I had a 5% clawback which is high for our sites. Starting balance of .33

[radix]

Usual clawback (1-2%), MIB this morning, 8:00 CET, balance 0.00.

[MayankParmar]

The balance is not showing here, asking me to refresh the card. Checked on payments and balance is -$1.

[jor70]

Hi, I'm using Ad balance, how is possible the same slot sometimes collapses and others is a big ugly white space ? thanks

[azlinda]

My main website looks ridiculous without AdSense ads not showing up most of the time.

[Rbag]

How do you know the clawback?

[MayankParmar]

My main website looks ridiculous without AdSense ads not showing up most of the time.

Same, I'm hiding the articles from homepage and social media for a few minutes so that the regular readers don't find it fishy.

[riccarbi]

My main website looks ridiculous without AdSense ads not showing up most of the time.

Add some kind of backup ads in adsense's dashboard, such as an image link to your newsletter subscribe page or the like. Even if it is not as simple to setup as it should be, nevertheless it will help you to get rid of those awful blank spaces in your website

[radix]

How do you know the clawback?

Balance -> View payments -> Transactions - Look for "Invalid traffic"

[MayankParmar]

such as an image link to your newsletter subscribe page or the like.

Hmm, how about a thin small white png image? :D The width can be 0.1cm xD

[azlinda]

Thanks, riccarbi and MayankParmar. Those are good suggestions. This is irritating and outrageous.

[WhoKnows111]

wow yesterday my earnings were very low... almost 1/5 of what I was getting couple of months ago

where can I find fill rate?

[solomon1a]

Almost a 25% earning dropped this month and sometime it is showing blank ads. I guess it is something that advertisers takes rest on the start of new year.

[BosSnian guy]

For me is almost 70% drop in earnings -_- So I removed Adsense ads from my site and replaced them with AdNow. With them I also have very bad ecpm but there ads at least always showing and i get way more clicks... And also what i want to ask all guys here... I found out that some ads like banner 970 x 250 on mobile automatically change on resolution like rectangular 336 x 280... So is this becouse of low inventory in January or is this new change by Google Adsense?

[TheWarrior]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4884107.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 12:21 pm on Jan 24, 2018 (utc -5)

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I am getting 3 to 5 cents for US clicks and the CTR for US traffic has dramatically gone down.

Anyone else ?

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:21 pm (utc) on Jan 24, 2018]

[azlinda]

I am getting 3 to 5 cents for US clicks and the CTR for US traffic has dramatically gone down.

Yes, my CPC has been under a dime for days now, and CTR is at an all-time low.

[Ironside]

My CPC is a little better at 12p, however I've had a pathetic six clicks all day. No idea what's going on

[kelsheikh]

For those that were hit with a coverage drop from this Adsense change and also have a lot of dynamically created URLS, do you have any content on those URLs that doesn't stay static?

For instance, a news site may have post with a widget on it that generates random content kind of like 'Last Articles' or even this forum has with the 'Hot Threads This Week' on the right rail.

I am trying to understand if some kind of dynamically served content like a widget on a URL might trigger the Adsense crawler to think there is new content on that URL when really there isn't.

[NickMNS]

@kelsheikh
Dynamically served content like a widget should not affect it. It is the other way around.

It is an issue if you have a dynamic URL that changes each time you serve the page to a new users despite the fact that the content stays the same.

It is really simple. Adsense gets a request to serve an ad for a URL. It looks in its index if the URL is there it allows AdWords to bid if it is not it sends the crawler to see what is on the page so that the page will be in the index next time, provided that next time comes before the URL is dropped from the index. I doubt that it ever checks the page for changes. In fact in the crawler documentation they warn that changes will not be reflected until one or two weeks later when the page is crawled again.

[Ironside]

I am wondering whether Google has deliberately sabotaged some of us so that earnings are so pathetically low we end up jumping before we are pushed. That way nobody can accuse Google of kicking people off the scheme without a good reason.

[KaseyM]

Anyone use auto ads? It's placements often make zero sense.

[kelsheikh]

@NickMNS Ok, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.

At this point I think there really doesn't seem to be anything we can do. Especially those with a lot of URLs that get a small amount of visits over the course of a month.

It just all really seems to depend on the time URLs stay in their index and that is obviously out of our control. Why they would drop URLs from their index in such a short amount of time is beyond me.

I have seen URLs that get almost 10 visits a month show ads at the beginning of the month but not show any ads at the end. Basically cause they dropped the URL after a week or two. Which then results in blank ads all over again.

[azlinda]

I am wondering whether Google has deliberately sabotaged some of us so that earnings are so pathetically low we end up jumping before we are pushed.

I've been wondering that myself. I've been visiting some sites that are very highly ranked and they don't appear to be having problems with blank ad spaces.

[scottb]

AdSense and YouTube are completely cutting off millions of video producers from all ad revenue starting in February. Google search has been downgrading many smaller websites.

So it's easy to think AdSense might either downgrade or completely cut off smaller websites as well.

EDIT: This is really no different than the squeeze that Facebook is putting on page follows. More and more, a posting gets distributed to a handful of followers.

Meanwhile, Facebook plasters the admin's page with a massive number of "Boost This Post" messages, which means, "If you want to reach anyone, you have to give us money".

[edited by: scottb at 11:07 pm (utc) on Jan 24, 2018]

[Kash1111]

I don't think our site is affected, I have checked pages that have 1 visit in 30 days and they display ads. I checked with chrome incognito. Not sure what is going on, even with ads displaying, our earnings have dropped by 30% for January.

[Mentat]

I've hit a new low on payment on the 23 and 24 of January!
My coverage in 90%, the traffic and clicks are ~ stable, but the CPC is now 0.14c vs 0.22c this month!

It's not a problem on our side, don't try to find problems in a setup that worked until now!

The problem is the Adsense for content bidding system!