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 :)

[jengajo]

@kegnum

That's interesting. I can see a sharp drop in coverage after Dec 18 to abt 75%

Are your sites in English (mine are not)

[kegnum]

@jengajo Yes my sites are in English and 97%+ traffic is from the US.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

I don't know if the guys from Google were afraid George Soros' speech on Davos conference :), but today my RPM has suddenly returned to its "better times" level...

[MayankParmar]

My CPC and RPM both dropped again. It's getting worse and worse, over the top of that, AMP traffic is giving nothing.

[scottb]

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.

Keyplyr, do those sites have a common characteristic? For example, are they large and well-established brands? Are they in a niche with lesser competition?

If what Google is doing to smaller brands on YouTube and Search is any indication, AdSense may also be undergoing a shift based on brand and trust.

[sdksjdksjd]

@keyplyr
"again, let's keep this discussion civil and not fall to rudeness"
Then keep your ignorance to yourself. Do not expect everyone would tolerate it.

@scottb
"do those sites have a common characteristic?"
All the time common characteristic is "no traffic". Guys, like "keyplyr" believe, that 1000 visitors per day is amount of traffic, that allows to make observations.

@all
Google ads were used for crypto mining.
[arstechnica.com...]
What does it mean for us?
Obviously G. had to cut-off bunch of ad.networks. This could be quite a big number of ad inventory, leading to the inventory shortage.
Furthermore, G. has to reconsider its approach in new ad.networks acceptance. Also it should invent technology to prevent mining by ads. It can take time.
From the other hand G. has problems with the big brands, leaving because of the questionable content on Youtube.
I would say, that we're in a perfect storm right now

[nubchai]

Still dismal here too. My sites are broader, evergreen niches. The vast majority of my traffic comes from social media. I can see live traffic from those sources. I don't see blank ad slots and have used a variety of browsers and computers to check that on my sites. I have also used incognito mode. Some friends have also checked some pages on my sites and see ads. My coverage % in December was 91%. This month it's 87%. CPC last month was .16. This month it's .13. I will say CTR is down this month for tablets and high end devices so I'm going to look at the ad displays there. So I don't think indexing/crawling is my problem.

[sdksjdksjd]

Those, who can read code pay attention to this : [diegobetto.com...]

As I wrote before, I saw huge amount of errors in browser console, starting from mid of December. Now they've almost gone.
I believe Google implemented detection of the mining code inside the general ad code and simply cuts it off from the ad code. That's why the ad wrapper stays on page, but without the ad inside. That's why there are blank ad spaces on the pages. For example, there are 4 ad blocks on page. 2 ads are good and shown. 2 ads were with mining code, that was cut off, but the wrappers remained. We see blank ad spots.

[edited by: sdksjdksjd at 4:15 pm (utc) on Jan 27, 2018]

[MayankParmar]

Google ads were used for crypto mining.

Saw that news. I doubt those advertisers were paying decent value anyway. Funny how Google finds publisher misusing their platform in hours, but the case is not same with advertisers.

So I don't think indexing/crawling is my problem.

Same. I see blanks ads, coverage is 95% +. Still earning is down drastically. What's even more upsetting is that I earn less with more pageviews :( Yesterday traffic boomed by 30% (US and Australia - Top stories) and the earnings actually dropped lol.

I cannot compare Jan 2018 and 2017 as traffic has doubled during this one year, the comparison wouldn't be fair.

[sdksjdksjd]

@MayankParmar
One of the security companies said, that because of such ads the total online mining rose three times. Should be a lot of ads.

[FourDegreez]

This whole week has been terrible. I have three green checks under "User First program" yet RPM is low. Occasional days will see an increase, but then it's back down again. January hasn't worked out like other months where earnings trend upward toward the second half. This whole business is becoming non-viable for me now. =(

[ember]

I think what we are seeing is just Google cleaning up its ecosystem. They've made changes on YouTube. Now they could be booting low-quality advertisers - lowering competition that leads to blank ads and lower ECPs - and verifying publisher pages for quality before placing ads on them.

It could be related to niche. Maybe some industries attract more spammy advertisers than others and those sites are seeing more blank spaces. Maybe sites that need the ad balancer to get rid of spam are affected more than others. I haven't been affected by this much and do not use the ad balancer because I don't need it.

[nomis5]

I suspect that the business model of having many thousands of pages, each of which is only viewed very infrequently, is over and done now. And I can see why from Google's perspective.

To me, the common thread of those who are complaining recently about lower earnings, is that they rely on a massive amount of web pages to generate their income. I do sympathise, but maybe it's time to reassess the situation and start publishing less pages, but where each page is good enough to attract a significant number of page views on its own merits.

I think the writing is (and has been for some time) on the wall.

It's not "content is king" now, it's "quality of content is king".

AI has finally enabled G to identify quality content, or at least identify some content which is not quality.

[MrJefe]

@nomis5

Meh, knowing Google, we're only going to see a protracted period where crappy click bait content with heavy traffic gets all the ads.
Then quality content with poor traffic gets denied ads on its limited page views.

[NickMNS]

@keyplyr

@NickNMS - again, let's keep this discussion civil and not fall to rudeness.

I am not being rude, and I am sorry if you interpreting my comments as rude. But you are claiming that there is no issue here and there clearly is.

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

Correct, they have explained the policy change. And i am the one that posted the that explanation.
And, whether or not I accept is somewhat irrelevant because the policy change has occurred and I am personally impacted by it.

But the issue is not the policy change specifically it is the side effects of the change. That is the drop in coverage for many publishers. And I am pretty sure that when Warrior asks, "what explanation" he was expecting an explanation for the drop in coverage, not for the policy change itself.

Now Google has also provided an explanation for the drop in coverage, that is it is caused by crawl errors or other difficulties crawling. But the problem with that explanation is that it doesn't apply to vast majority of those sites impacted by this policy change. Believe me if I were seeing crawl errors, I would be resolving those errors instead of posting here. But again, the issue is that there is major problem for a subset of sites for which there seems to be no solution and no explanation from Adsense, and to some extent a denial of a the problem from AdSense, and also from you.

To further illustrate my point that is only a very few people impacted, since my last post new people keep posting here looking for solutions to this issue.

@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%).

With 95% of the traffic going to a few pages you will not be impacted by AdWords policy change. How have you checked the coverage of the other 5% of pages? CPC is down 50%, I don't think anybody is claiming that this one issue fully explains the drop in revenue for everyone, seasonality is at play, as are certainly a wider array of other factors. What is you definition of "longtail" kw?

@jengajo have you checked your coverage by country?

@Nomis

I suspect that the business model of having many thousands of pages, each of which is only viewed very infrequently, is over and done now. And I can see why from Google's perspective.

I understand that position, and it may hold for some but in my case I have a site that displays information about a variety of entities, each entity gets a page, each page is very much similar to next but the data is provided for that entity and then compared to the aggregate. This is valuable information for those interested in these entities, so 1 URL for 1 entity does not seem like any sort of abuse or thin content, but simply a logical means organizing data. And if there is a more suitable way I would be very interested hearing it. My main site is currently a static site with millions of pre-generated html pages. I am currently working on creating a dynamic site, but really this is moot as there will still always be 1 one 1 relation between entity and URL.

Moreover, if this were a quality issue I would have expected my site to be loosing traffic and ranking within search but to the contrary my traffic has been growing steadily over the years. I have had 3x growth in 2017 alone and the trend continues in 2018.

[sdksjdksjd]

@nomis5
If you see Internet, as the elite place where everything should be according to ... whatever, then write to attract, according to ... whatever.
I see Internet as the place for everyone, no matter what. I can't and will not say person, writing with poor grammar or on questionable for me topic, that his/her opinion is not suitable.

Many years ago I was sitting in-front of monitor having the dilemma - publish or not publish article, written in poor grammar by Indian person. Topic was very casual, nothing important.
I decided to publish, because I didn't want to be an Internet judge. Who am I to judge?
In a couple of years this short, poor written article collected so many comments, that became one of the most popular on website. It appeared, that this topic was important for many other people around the Globe. I couldn't imagine that.

This is all one should know about quality. There is simply no such thing, since quality by itself is subjective.
And guys in Google perfectly understand this. So their, so called AI, doesn't identify quality, but users engagement.

So, please do not spread this "quality" myth. Well, unless your are SEO, selling quality improvement service or snob :)

[keyplyr]

But you are claiming that there is no issue here and there clearly is.

No, I have not claimed there is no issue and have never said that. And it *is* rude to accuse someone of having their head in the sand, especially a moderator who volunteers their time to help out in these forums.

One can have a different opinion without demanding others agree with them.

The "issue" is not seen by most sites. It may seem that it is by the people posting in these threads, but the empty ad space is not a universal problem. I talk with a lot of site owners and they are not seeing this.

The "issue" is that Google has changed the way they are supplying ads. Some sites are affected, others not. Nothing is broken and there is no "bug."

[sdksjdksjd]

@keyplyr
"I talk with a lot of site owners and they are not seeing this."
There can be plenty of reasons. Just to mention:
- tiny site and narrow topic (means lack of infected ads in particular topic);
- one ad spot per page;
- they see backup ads, but can't identify them;
- disabled 3rd party networks.

Did you suck all of the details from "a lot of site owners"?
Then why do you push your conclusion? Do you always believe you're right?

P.S. "especially a moderator who volunteers" - such moderators killed this place. Lack of knowledge and pushing of dogmas kills any community of creative professionals.

[keyplyr]

@- sdksjdksjd... Yes, there may be many factors involved with what this thread is reporting, regarding missing ads. I don't know what "dogma" you're referring to.

Once again, I believe all your reports in this thread. I am not saying sites are not missing ads. You seem to be arguing something I've never said.

The only "conclusion" is what Google has announced.

[NickMNS]

@keyplyr

No, I have not claimed there is no issue

Nothing is broken and there is no "bug."

Enough said...

One can have a different opinion without demanding others agree with them.

Have I ever asked you to agree with me? In fact I welcome and encourage anyone to challenge my claims, constructively. In turn, I am simply challenging your position that this is a small issue that impacts only a few sites.

I fully appreciate the fact that you take your time to moderate here, and I sincerely appreciate it, thank you. At the same time, if you look at the top posters for the month, I am number three, with only you and Engine ahead of me, so it is not like I don't contribute here. I have spent hours studying, stats, data and logs to diagnose what has been happening and i have taken the time to share my finding in detail here, and it is not like I am getting paid for that either. I can move on, there are other forums out there.

Going back to your closing comment

there is no "bug."

I fully agree there is no bug. The policy change achieve exactly what was intended. A bug referrers to an error in the code. And this is not that. What we are experiencing is a side effect, an unintended effect. Based on the reaction I have had and of others that have discussed this AdSense support, they had no idea of the impact that this has had on wide segment of websites. AdSense's reaction to the blow back I believe fully supports this. Instead of listening to the community, be it here or in thier own Help Forum they doubled down on the crawl error and then rolled out an improved error reporting system that simply confirmed that crawling was not the issue.

The true breadth of this fiasco will be seen at the end of Q1. If number of sites is really significant it will put a dent in their earnings. Otherwise, all hope will be lost and this will be water under the bridge and it will be chalked up to the Google arrogance discussed in the Steve Yegge thread.

[sdksjdksjd]

You concluded - "The "issue" is not seen by most sites."
This is false statement, since you can't have enough trustworthy data to make it.

You concluded - "The "issue" is that Google has changed the way they are supplying ads."
This is false statement, unless you have confirmation from Google. "Brand" policy has nothing to do with "the way they are supplying ads".

You concluded - "Nothing is broken and there is no "bug."
This is false statement. Do you have confirmation from Google?

So, keyplyr, if you want to embarrass yourself, then this is your choice. Nobody cares.
But you're not allowed to waste others valuable time, posting absolutely useless conclusions or "what Google said" in the thread where professionals are discussing stuff. We did read what Google said, but still have something to discuss. So, you'd better step aside and study.

[keyplyr]

From Google...

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...]


[fix typo]

[edited by: keyplyr at 2:59 am (utc) on Jan 28, 2018]

[sdksjdksjd]

Exactly. This has nothing to do with "the way they are supplying ads".

[keyplyr]

That's exactly what you are experiencing according to Google.

[frankleeceo]

@NickMNS

Just so we have a better idea, how many pages do your sites have? And you mentioned more than 80% of pages with issue and only 1 pageview is seen every month or so or did I read that from someone else? From the sound of it, is all of your content automatically generated unique URL's? If that is the case, would making a crawler to force adsense mediapartner crawler include that in its index a workaround solution, at least from your page database point of view? Or is that against the adsense rule?

I have a site that generate pages with slightly different content based on parameters instead of unique URL's, I point all the variations to the main page without the parameter via rel=canonical, and my adsense serving seems OK in such setup. I don't really know, I am not paying much attention to earning / coverage during January, and I have made too many changes / additions this past year to make my past data irrelevant. But I am not seeing a major discrepancy (50%+) as described by some of you guys here.

It seems that certain site architectures get hit from the new policy change.

I follow conversation once in a while and miss details. Thanks!

But I should add, adsense appears to be treating parameters as unique page URL's (for the page level violation notice anyways). One of my page was indeed flagged via the page level policy center. But maybe my setup is still within that crawler threshold at roughly 3000 pages.

[edited by: frankleeceo at 3:05 am (utc) on Jan 28, 2018]

[sdksjdksjd]

omg ...
@keyplyr, please, go away.

[frankleeceo]

I think the new policy change is working as intended, that is @keyplyr's main point. Which I agree.

that is hurting certain site setups, and that is @NickMNS and sdk's and a few other's main point. Which I agree too.

And now the key should move to how to address it so the damage is less.

I personally believe adsense / adwords is moving in the right direction to address issues with sensitive categories via crawling of pages. Page-level violations addition was the first hint that dropped. Perhaps people were circumventing the violations via changing page URL's, and advertisers were not happy about that and demanded changes. I personally believe just like any policy changes, webmasters in general need to adapt to the new rules. It is what we signed up for.

[sdksjdksjd]

Guys, with only new policy in mind ...
Thank you for you contribution. You were heard. There is no reason to repeat in every post same new policy conclusion. You probably want to be helpful, but you're not.

[NickMNS]

@frankleeceo
How many pages exactly are impacted is hard to tell because it depends on the length of time a page lives in the index. But if I use earnings decline as a proxy, it is about 60%. My site has millions of pages. I don't know about "automatically" generated as the content is currently static but a one point in time it was auto-generated and in the future it will be dynamically generated with from DB backend.

As for the crawler, I wrote one for a friend who is in a similar situation, but after giving it more thought I decided not to crawl my own site, as the exercise would be futile. More so now that as far as I can tell page seem to live on about 1 week or 2 in the index (Iwasn't sure about this when I wrote the crawler). Crawling all my pages in such a short amount of time would required considerable bandwidth and not be negligible number of impressions. It would almost certainly run me into trouble with AdSense. I have thought of methods to prioritize certain content and other improvements but I have my doubts to the effectiveness. Adsense may simply begin ignoring request from your crawlers IP.

As for parameters. AdSense warned about them in their support email and suggested using canonicals for multiple URLs that point to the same content (eg using session id params). So I am not sure about that. My understanding is that Adsense is using the URL as the index (primary field in db table by which data is classified) on the "index" (term used to describe Google/AdSense collection of data). Any time one has a unique url it will have its own entry in the db("index") if it is not found it will considered new. So using params or static urls shouldn't make a difference. (to be clear using params to point multiple unique url's to the same content is a different case that is problematic but can easily be resolved by a canonical link).

I don't really know, I am not paying much attention to earning / coverage during January,

Check your coverage from early December to today to see if you have experienced a drop.

It seems that certain site architectures get hit from the new policy change.

You should see an impact if you get few page views to many pages. A site that gets many page views to few pages will not see an impact.

Thinking out load.... One solution I see, that might not be optimal for usability, would be to consolidate data, merging many pages into one. That is somewhat similar to what you are describing Frank.

[sdksjdksjd]

@NickMNS
Agree on the URLs.
You definitely have problem with the crawling. And you will have it in the future, if index life span is too short for your pages.
I'd suggest you to :
1. ask yourself "Do my pages add value to www?" .... Pay attention please. Not "Are my pages helpful?", but "Do my pages add value to www?"
The difference is - are you creating brand new piece of info or are you getting info from the already published resources and after some preparation publish it again.
If you're scrubbing and preparing, then you're doomed. You compete with Google itself.
If you produce brand new info, then ...
2. contact AdSense support and explain by images, graphs, figures ... like a professional, what is going on. Ask them straightforward question "What to do?"
Be prepared to general replies. Prove your point of view and insist to get personal attention.
I did this. I got my answer.