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 :)

[Maximum44]

and how much traffic you get a day? :D

[TheWarrior]

@nubchai

where do you see the performance of the in-article native ads?

In the AdSense dashboard homepage there is an "Ad Units" card, which can show you performance of individual ad units. Otherwise goto your usual performance report page and change the Report Type in the top left to "Ad Units" and then you can see different metrics for individual ad units.

[kegnum]

Assuming what the norm RPM is does not make sense.. its like comparing the salary of a lawyer to that of a cashier. It depends on the niche, the traffic type and ad placement. So if I was making an average of $20 rpm with anywhere from 200K to 2M pageviews per month (depending on the site and year) for the last 10+ years.. then that is the norm for me.

Again.. not the point.. the point is that the stable income dropped by 50% overnight and hasnt recovered since Sept.

[MayankParmar]

For me:

$7-9 RPM is good.
$4-6$ is normal
$2-4$ is pathetic

[steviec79]

There was an interesting theory put forward to me a few years ago, that Google random select accounts and up their take % on clicks, around the start/end of each Financial Quarter if Google isn't making their financial targets.

I've no idea if this is true, and I'm not suggesting it is, however looking through my records, it does seem to pretty much always be late/early December/January, March/April, June/July, or September/October when my RPM randomly drops.

[Pistoche]

January, April, July, and October are the beginning of the new financial quarters of the year. Budgets are usually reset at this time and therefore Adwords bids are lower, in turn we get paid less for Adsense clicks. It's pretty normal, almost every publisher experiences that.

[Maximum44]

Have not had high page RPM like that since desktop was the main source of traffic.

[NickMNS]

I'm obviously in the wrong niche...

@kegnum

Also, if you are really making 1/100 of that, something is terribly wrong.

Something is terribly wrong. Typically I was making somewhere in that normal range that Maximum44 was stating $2 to $4 but since the "Brand Policy" update on December 18th my RPM dropped by 60%. So yes something is wrong.

@keyplyr
Is your head in the sand? We are currently at 757 posts in this thread. There is the coverage thread with another 194 posts. And there as has been a bunch of new members coming here at WW to find out information about this update. Then there is the AdSense Help Forum thread:
[groups.google.com...]
with 349 posts directly related to the issue.

A typical Adsense Month thread is about 250 posts we are 3x that. It's seasonal you may say. Jan 2017, 143 posts.

Now not everybody here is discussing this issue, and there may well be other things impacting some people. But to suggest that there are only two or three sites impacted by this is ridiculous.

[steviec79]

To me the effect is down to an account basis.

I'm doing AdShare on one of my sites with somebody else - his RPM is 40% higher than mine, yet everything else is the same.

Same ad sizes
Same website
Same traffic source
Same time

The only thing different is Adsense accounts.

But this has happened before. Way before any recent change. I'm talking sporadically over the last 4-5 years.

So I've directed my traffic to colleague's websites and we've split his Adsense income. Then, when my RPM resumes normal, I go back to what I was doing.

This all suggests to me that Google randomly select a % of accounts - whether it's on purpose, or whether they have them split into groups and something happens with those group of accounts I don't know. But all this seasonal garbage that some are coming out with doesn't follow - because if it was seasonal, my colleague's account would also be impacted - it isn't.

Also in my experience, there's no point doing any testing, or changing ads, because it's down to the account.

[nubchai]

@TheWarrior Thank you. I see it now :)

[Ironside]

I made more money yesterday with my media.net ads than I did with AdSense.

[steviec79]

What was the RPM?

[steviec79]

I've mistakenly done another experiment.

The variation is 75%... the RPM is DOWN 34% vs showing ads all the time.

How is that even possible? The maths aren't making sense.

[Ironside]

I think a lot of you are wasting your time spending hours trying to work out why this has happened, you'll be here next year and you won't be any the wiser unless things have sorted themselves out.

[steviec79]

@ironside I agree. Testing has never worked before so I don't see the point.

But the Ad Balancer isn't explained properly. If it's showing the 75% highest paid ads, then surely it can't fail for the RPM to go higher. If no ads are shown at all, then it can't be classed as a page impression, thus, an RPM has to either stay exactly the same or go up.

[Ironside]

The only things I ever pay any attention to are the CPC and the finalised earnings. I simply don't get enough traffic to even bother worrying about page RPM because what I earn from this is probably not enough to buy a bottle of milk.

[breeks]

My RPM bounces around 5 - 15 dollars with an average around $7.

[NickMNS]

I simply don't ... bother worrying about page RPM because what I earn from this is probably not enough to buy a bottle of milk.

You don't earn anything from RPM. RPM Revenue Per (Mil) 1000 impression, is standardized measure of revenue. You are confusing RPM with CPM. CPM Cost per Mil (1000 impressions) which is a bid type, like CPC. These are different things.

Page RPM (as reported on the AdSense dashboard) is calculated by taking your revenue, all revenue CPC, CPM, AV-CPM, E-CPM and dividing it by the number of total impressions and then multiplying it by 1000. It is said to be standardized because you can use it to compare to other more specific forms of revenue against each other, say compare CPC to CPM. This is not possible with other measures.

You say "I don't earn enough to pay attention to CPM". You can't actually make that claim without comparing the two using RPM. Say you had 20 clicks and 2000 CPC impressions at $0.10, CPC earned you $2.00 and you earned $1.00 from CPM from 500 CPM impressions. Clearly you made more money from CPC, right?

Wrong, because:
For CPC $2/2000 impr * 1000 = RPM of $1
For CPM $1/500 impr * 1000 = RPM of $2

You will argue, "but $2 of earnings is more than $1". That is true, but you had 4x more CPC impressions and/but if you could had CPM impression instead of CPC you would have made 2 times the earings for the same number of impressions. Obviously one can't flick a switch from one over to the other and this is just an example in reality one probably does earn more from CPC than CPM. The point is that RPM allows you to make informed decision as to what and where you are earning revenues in a way that just looking at earnings or CPC simply can't.

[steviec79]

@Nick - I don't think he's on about understanding RPM. He simply doesn't get enough visits to worry too much about it either way.

[NickMNS]

enough visits

@stevie My point exactly, with a better understanding of what RPM (and other metrics are) is one would realize that the number of visitors should not be relevant to the choices of metrics to use.

[steviec79]

I think RPM is pretty obvious. I'm sure he knows what it means. He was merely pointing out that he doesn't spend enough time looking at things other than earnings, as it's low anyway.

I remember working with somebody a few years ago and he genuinely emailed me and said, "We need more traffic and a higher RPM". Don't we all!

Needless to say, I quit working with him.

I've got over 2 million Twitter followers and yet Adsense still screw, even with an obscene amount of traffic.

[seaex]

My Alt Ad (1 position) has had 2,576 clicks in the past 7 days. 1 (small) conversion.

[TheWarrior]

CPC and everything else is back up to pre-December number. I sincerely wish it stays like this from now on.

I hope you guys also get to see this in your own account.

[kegnum]

@steviec79 I agree.. As I mentioned.. I have access to data from 5 separate adsense accounts. Same niche, traffic sources, ad layout.. and pretty much the same content. It makes no sense that one account would drop OVER NIGHT to 50% earnings back in Jan of 2017, another would drop to 50% earnings OVER NIGHT in Sept of 2017 and the third would loose the same percentage of income OVER NIGHT in Jan 2018.

The only logical thing is that they are marking these accounts some how. I don't know if they are doing a manual review or its the algorithm but i can't see any other logical explanation.

No bans, no warnings and all sites have a significant amount of traffic. We aren't talking about a few 100 visits a day. We are talking about 10K-50K page-views daily per site. So the averages aren't skewed like that of some smaller sites.

@Ironside Agreed. Doing tests will not work because adsense is not transparent enough. The tests would work if it was an issue with traffic or something else on our end. If adsense is simply removing marking accounts or if there is just not as many advertisers or they are paying less, there is nothing we can do.

I will say this.. If Google keeps on posting record earnings each and every quarter, how are they earnings less with adwords? Makes more sense that they are taking the loss out on publishers.

[keyplyr]

@keyplyr
Is your head in the sand? We are currently at 757 posts in this thread. There is the coverage thread with another 194 posts.

@NickNMS - again, let's keep this discussion civil and not fall to rudeness. Most posts in these two threads are from the same members.

None of the sites I watch, including my own, have any problems currently. On the contrary, since December all are making higher than normal Adsense income. This is true of other website owners I talk with. There are a lot of factors at work here, but the truth is, the problem you and others are reporting, while significant to you, is not universal to everyone else.

I think Google has explained it pretty well. You seem to not accept that. It's your choice.

Sorry you and others here are experiencing issues.

[TheWarrior]

I think Google has explained it pretty well.

What explanation we are talking about ?

[keyplyr]

@TheWarrior

As part of Google’s efforts to increase brand safety for advertisers, AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager have adopted more restrictive bidding on ad requests coming from URLs that are uncrawled. This is necessary to avoid the risk of ads running on sensitive content.

from this discussion: [webmasterworld.com...]

[jengajo]

long time lurker first time poster, just adding my 2 cents here:

I manage abt a dozen websites which collectively bring in a bit over 1k clicks per day (one ad per page usually)

Revenue for January 2018 is 50% that of November 2017, especially because CPC is half now. I'm seeing exactly what others here have mentioned: lots of empty slots or Criteo / 3rd party ads

Most of the websites I manage are huge reference sites, very long tail, most pages get very few visitors per month.
The one site that gets lots of traffic and has a few very visited pages is at 99% coverage, the rest 70-75%

So as far as I'm concerned it's clearly a matter of the Adsense bot not crawling fast enough and expiring the index too fast.
It may be that site owners such as myself are a minority (under 5%) so Google will just throw us under the bus for the sake of brand protection, we'll just have to wait and see

Edited: 1k clicks / day, not per month

[edited by: jengajo at 8:15 am (utc) on Jan 27, 2018]

[keyplyr]

Hello jengajo and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Sounds about right

[kegnum]

@jengajo I have sites that run more like news sites where 95% of the traffic goes to the most recent pages and 5% goes to older pages that rank for longtail KWs. I see absolutely no black or unfilled ads on my site. CPC is still way down (at about 50%).