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]

The problem is with AdSense. I even changed the site theme, created new ads, placed them on new positions but nothing worked. nothing. absolutely nothing.

[Bobb11]

Yes. Same problem. I change ads, create new, different position but still same. I dont think so its problem my website, but i think its adsense problem now.

[seaex]

The pages in one of my large sites were starting to show ads on most pages. Now they have all gone again. Even refreshing the page after 6 hours did no good. CTR very low but impressions (as reported in adsense) seem to be OK. CPC about 30% down on usual. My site has been going for 21 years (11 years with adsense), no violations etc.

However, I did go through and remove 1 adsense ad from my pages and after publishing changed pages, the ads went again. As a lot of my site is updated daily (it's a niche industry directory, info manually added, not auto). If the ads disappear and the pages need to be "verified" again after a page update, then I am in big trouble.

[Unshiny]

@mentat and all... we are in the same situation. Has anyone seen any coverage of this in the trade press or anything of that nature at all?

Is there anything we can do? Anyone seen any announcements anywhere?

[Ironside]

Yep, same with me. I have changed my AdSense layout taken out some ads and put some responsive manners right under the heading but nothing is made the slightest bit of difference. Yesterday I earned £2.50. That's the kind of money I was making in the first month or two when I started with AdSense seven or eight years ago. And that was because my ads were placed in obscure places where people won't really looking.

[TheWarrior]

I replaced responsive ad units with in-article native yesterday and the CPC has gone up to half of the normal rate(It had dropped by 90%). Now I am not sure if that happened primarily because of switching the ad-units with native inarticle or due to other factors.

[ember]

I posted this earlier in the month, but the situation has not changed. I advertise on FB, Adwords and Bing for other projects and am paying lower bids this January than in previous years. A lot lower, like 30% to 40% lower. Years ago AdWords and Bing were pretty much the only game in town for advertisers. Now there is FB, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. More competition means lower bids and lower Adsense epc. I do expect bids to increase after the SuperBowl. At least that's been the pattern since 2006.

[NickMNS]

@ember thanks for giving us the perspective from the ad buyer side.

I typically don't like focusing on intra-day numbers as they tend to be volatile. But...
CPC so far today -> %0.06
To be clear that is not 6%. No!, that is 6 hundredth of a percent. That is less than 1 click for every 1500 impressions. At 50% coverage. So that is actually 1 click in every 3000 impressions (filled or not).

[Ironside]

@Warrior has this change made any difference to your earnings though?

[steviec79]

Interestingly, a colleague of mine has the same theme as mine, creating the same type of content and we're getting traffic the same way (social media). His account was as bad as most on here and mine, but about a week ago his RPM suddenly improved.

So it rules out seasonal patterns, and websites.

[nubchai]

I wonder how many publishers are going to walk away from Adsense, if there's no recovery. Ember's point about increased competition is a good one. Maybe these prices are the "new normal" for Adsense?

[steviec79]

Are there any competitors to Adsense that can get ANYWHERE near Adsense? I tried a few and they were all absolutely nowhere near... like 0.0025 per click, whereas Adsense gets at least 0.01

I'm wondering if selling advertising space directly to people is the only way. Or put affiliate ads up instead.

[steviec79]

@nubchai, I'm not convinced it's only down to competition, as like I say, I have a colleague who is doing the same thing as me. His RPM was as bad as most were reporting on here and then bam!... the RPM shot back to where it was last year.

Competition, seasonal etc simply doesn't make sense for it to rise back so quickly.

[koan]

So if I understand correctly, part of the budget that would have been spent in Adwords and benefited independent web site owners like us is now spent in walled gardens like Facebook or others?

[nubchai]

@steviec No, in my experience I haven't found an ad network that pays what Adsense does. I've tried medianet, sovrn, conversent and others. If you have decent traffic, I think affiliate ads in your niche and/or affiliate sales are an option.

[nubchai]

@steviec well hopefully what happened with your friend will happen to you and the rest of us. Did he do anything like change ads, change ad balancer, make a sacrifice to the adsense gods?

[ember]

So if I understand correctly, part of the budget that would have been spent in Adwords and benefited independent web site owners like us is now spent in walled gardens like Facebook or others?

I actually gave up on advertising with Adwords for a time. It got too expensive and way too complicated. I moved my dollars to FB and Pinterest where the ROI was better. I imagine that I am not the only one. Between the high prices and the uproar over ads on inappropriate sites, I think Adwords lost quite a few advertisers. I'm back with them now because the prices are low. Some advertisers might be gone for good.

[MayankParmar]

So we can conclude:

Seasonal drop + Coverage issue/Blank ad issue/adsense bug = Disaster!

If seasonal drop is of 30%, and adsense bug drop is 20%, total drop would be up to 50%. While last year, we had no such problem, so the drop wasn't as big as 2018.

[bittopper]

Having the same problems as everyone else has mentioned. Something is defiantly happening at Google. Even keywords are not building correctly this week. Someone at Google needs to be booted to the curb maybe.

[Kash1111]

Not having this issue, published tons of new articles, and zero traffic to them and ads are still displaying. Maybe it's not affecting if you are with ad partner. It's just a seasonal drop for us.

[TheWarrior]

@Ironside Yes, the revenue has definitely gone up as the CPC has tripled, although it has only reached half of what we used to get normally. But again I haven't experimented enough to say that it's in-article ad units which may have caused this.

Also I have noticed as number of ad impression and clicks increase, the CPC rises. Is this the new way Google wants to boot out smaller publishers ?

[kegnum]

@steviec79 im seeing the same thing. I have two friends that are working in my niche.. almost identical sites, ad placement and traffic. Some sites get more traffic than others but from the same source. Between the 3 of us we have 5 adsense accounts. Some sites have an rpm of $25+ others under $9.

Keep in mind that the pageviews per visitor are similar as well. So some site are getting paid less per visit.

On top of that.. some sites have a low rpm due to CPC and others due to CTR.

It's very odd. If I didn't know better i would think adsense had sites or adsense accounts judged on a scale of 1 to 10 or something. If your site is rated a 7.. good for you.. if it's rated a 3 too bad.

I have also noticed sharp drops at different times...

Example:

account A lost 50% of its income in January of 2017. Never recovered.
account B lost 50% in April.. then recovered until Sept and is dropped down to 50% of its average income.
account C lost 50% at the end of December.

I should also note that though i do measure earnings with RPM.. the actual dollar amounts are lower as well. So I am making 50% less at the end of the month.

Account B is my personal account and had an average rpm of $16-$28 depending on the time of year...this has been true since 2008. Same traffic, same layout, same content. Now, since Sept., I am lucky to break an RPM of $12. This literally happened over the course of 2-3 days.

I have tried changing the ads and ad placements. Nothing matters. The only thing that gave it a small boost was autoads.. but i removed it as the placements were insane. Example: 3 ads stacked above the post title. I mean, I'm all for aggressive ad placement.. but thats just going to piss people off.

I have been with adsense since 2002 and have never seen anything like this.. at least not for this long a period of time. While I can't really say why it is happening.. it is definitely very odd.

As for the theories about competition.. that would make sense if the drops occurred over a span of time.. not so sharply.

EDIT: We are not seeing any type of black ads.. sometimes they are slow loading... which is an issue but not blank.

[nubchai]

@TheWarrior I just put an in-article native ad on one of my sites. Ad quality is certainly good. But where do you see the performance of the in-article native ads?

I usually use the default performance report set to "Days" or Custom Channel. But I didn't see the option to create a custom channel for this type of ad.

Thanks!

[keyplyr]

Not having this issue, published tons of new articles, and zero traffic to them and ads are still displaying

We are not seeing any type of black ads.. sometimes they are slow loading... which is an issue but not blank.

Correct, not everyone is experiencing this issue. In fact, very few sites it seems.

I only found 2 pages (out of hundreds) missing ads. The ads came back after I reloaded the page a couple times.

[NickMNS]

@keyplyr

In fact, very few sites it seems.

That is a very subjective statement. I'm seeing very many sites impacted.

The ads came back after I reloaded the page a couple times.

Yes well that what happens. I can go to page that hasn't been crawled, see no ad, refresh a few times and then see ads. But unfortunately my users don't sit around refreshing pages until the ads show, they move on to the next page or leave.

@Kegnum Holy $chnitt RPM of $16 to $25, and your complaining. I would be driving new red rarri if my RPM ever looked liked that. I'm currently at 1/100th of that.

[NickMNS]

I just poked around my AdSense data, and I happened to check my coverage by custom channel. I only have this rolled out on a small section of my main site, but the section is one with few pages that are viewed by many visitors. Guess what coverage is at 95% with an ad-balancer set at 75%. So it looks like I'm not impacted either, but I am. Paradoxical....

[keyplyr]

@NickMNS - outside of the dozen or so reports here, I'm not seeing missing ads reported much anywhere else... just one other place and one of the reports there is a repeat from a member here.

I think it is not so much a wide scale problem, but just part of the process of changes Adsense is going through now and the next few months.

[kegnum]

@NickMNS The point isn't the rpm i am currently making, its that im making half of what i was for the last 10+ years and that it pretty much happened over night and for no apparent reason. If it can drop from $20 to $10 for no reason and instantly.. then maybe next year or month it will drop from $10 to $5.. Then from $5 to $2.

Also, if you are really making 1/100 of that, something is terribly wrong. I have had 100s of sites over the years in a wide variety of niches. The lowest being a pet forum. It had 75% regular visitors and the ads were not aggressive at all and the rpm was around $3.

[Maximum44]

Rpms of even "just" $10 is certinately not the norm. $5 is good. $2 - $4 is pretty normal.

[WhoKnows111]

My main earning site has RPM $50 over the past 12 months ... actually more if added couple of digital products on offer there