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]

Today is looking no better than yesterday. CPC is pathetically low.

[MayankParmar]

CPC is same but CTR is very high, so RPM is slightly better and so is the earnings. My traffic almost doubled today.

[Cralamarre]

The strange thing for me is the drop in coverage. It's not drastic but I've never seen a drop in coverage before. I started at 96.35% coverage on Dec 1st, but by Dec 31st it was down to 92.75%. Yesterday (Jan 3), coverage was down to 88.87%, the lowest I've ever seen it. I'd say it's probably because there are not enough advertisers at the beginning of January to fill 100% of the spots, but I checked the same time last year and coverage was 96%. This year it's 88%.

It seems like maybe AdSense is going through the same thing with traditional web ads that it went through recently with YouTube, where they lost many YouTube advertisers because the ads were appearing in videos that advertisers weren't happy about. That would explain the new AdSense policy limiting ads on pages that have not been crawled.

Having said that, my site is fairly simple and there's no reason why AdSense would not have crawled the pages. Every page I look at shows the ads, so I'm not seeing problems. And yet, coverage has dropped.

Edit: I just noticed that my AdSense earnings today have suddenly shot up to normal levels, with my RPM nearly double what it was yesterday. So maybe there's hope.

[NickMNS]

@Cralamarre

Edit: I just noticed that my AdSense earnings today have suddenly shot up to normal levels, with my RPM nearly double what it was yesterday. So maybe there's hope.

Me too!, weird... Likely just a coincidence. But I'm not complaining.

Edit: My bounce is the result of a single big click

[Maximum44]

Numbers look promising here, but still one third off numbers we had this fall. But it is expected.

[riccarbi]

CPC is same but CTR is very high, so RPM is slightly better and so is the earnings. My traffic almost doubled today.

Not on my side, so far. Probably a sort of "perfect storm" into which advertisers' campaign restructuring, new year's ad strategy, and other factors combine. At least at a regional level ( I am based in Italy, though with an international, mostly US, audience).

[magician]

I have one high traffic page that is showing normal impressions in the reports but no clicks. None. It usually has a healthy CTR. So even though impressions say it's there I don't think an ad is serving.

Did you check the coverage? It might be showing impressions even when it is not serving any ad. Check coverage in custom tab to be sure.

My adsense coverage is good but my friend's adsense account has very low coverage (almost down to 70% from usual 96%) since Dec 18th. When I am opening her website, I am also seeing some empty ad spaces specially link ads. Some people in adsense help forum say that it might be due to 'Brand Protection' measures where adsense in not showing all ads on pages which are not properly indexed by adsense. I do not buy that argument as I specifically have no-index in some pages and ads are showing fine for me.

[kelsheikh]

@magician I am experiencing that same behavior you described about your friend. Exact same thing. My coverage dropped from 96% to the upper 70% on December 18th. Hasn't recovered since. There are a lot publishers that are experiencing this same issue and have reported it to Google. I have sorted through years of data comparing this time of year and have never seen a coverage percentage ever below 96% until whatever happened on Dec 18th.

[riccarbi]

My humble thought? Along with paying peanuts per mille (I am always been aware of that, and accepting it since all others AD companies for common people are much worse), Adsense is progressively becoming an unreliable business partner with obscure, mysterious, almost black magic, strategies and behaviour whose reasons are unknown by all us "little fish" in the bowl. My new year resolution? Managing to get more web revenue from alternative sources and progressively reducing the importance of Adsense.

[Cralamarre]

Relying only on AdSense for revenue is almost guaranteed to leave you poor. You literally need millions of page views to earn a decent living from ads. It's the same with YouTube. It may look impressive when a video reaches 100k views, but the creator probably earned a couple hundred bucks from it, if they're lucky.

I use ads on the articles I publish for free that anyone can read, but I also sell memberships to my site for exclusive content. The free content should really just be there to promote the paid content. It's bad enough that we're all slaves to Google. You don't want to be a slave to AdSense on top of it.

[browndog]

I use ads on the articles I publish for free that anyone can read, but I also sell memberships to my site for exclusive content. The free content should really just be there to promote the paid content. It's bad enough that we're all slaves to Google. You don't want to be a slave to AdSense on top of it.

That wouldn't work in my niche, they'd just go elsewhere, plenty of similar sites offering the content for free.

I would like to diversify though. But from what I can gather, not much comes close to Adsense in regards to revenue.

This is why I went out and got myself a reliable job in the real world. Adsense paid enough for me to work on my site exclusively, but now at 25% of what I used to earn just 4 years ago, it's not financially viable anymore.

[Cralamarre]

@browndog, I've been tempted this year to give up on my site and go find a real job, but I know I would hate it after one day. I'll keep going with my site as long as I'm still earning more than minimum wage, since that's probably the only type of job I'd get at this point. Being secluded for 11 years writing content for a website doesn't leave you with much in the way of marketable skills.

[nomis5]

Relying only on AdSense for revenue is almost guaranteed to leave you poor.

You literally need millions of page views to earn a decent living from ads.

When you make all inclusive statements like that then you are almost certain to be wrong.

I don't rely entirely on Adsense but I can live on my earnings from Adsense.

==

Millions of page views? A day, a week, a month, a year?

Maybe I'm into a few million page views a year, but not monthly, nowhere near.

Let's be clear, it all depends on your niche, how you exploit your website and how you deploy your ads.

I don't want to encourage newbies into this business because it's massively difficult and complicated but your two statements are absolutely not correct for everyone.

[browndog]

I was able to make a comfortable living from Adsense with around 600,000 uniques a month. I'm now down to 300 k a month which is sustainable, but barely scraping in.

Cralamarre: We came close to losing our home this year due to my Adsense/traffic declining. I won't ever put my family in that situation again. It was extremely hard finding work as I've been a webmaster for 6 years and had a big blank on my resume. I picked up a job 2.5 days a week with a friend. It is in healthcare, so somewhat more recession proof compared to other industries. Do I like having to work out of the home 2.5 days a week? Nope. But, I will never, ever, ever rely on my site as a sole source of revenue again. Things can change overnight, you can go from the darling of the search engines to a nobody. Maintaining employment means a steady income and if things get worse, I can increase to full time work.

I'm not saying everybody should do what I did, but I will never ever put myself in that situation again. Right now, Google quite likes me (although my AS is awful), but who knows what timorrow will bring?

[Cralamarre]

@browndog, if I had a friend who offered me a decent paying job a couple of days a week, I'd probably take it, too. Even if I didn't need the money, I don't think it's mentally healthy to spend as much time by yourself as I've spent over the past decade.

[browndog]

That too. I'm not the most social person in the world (becoming less social as I get older), but try to make time for a couple of coffees a week with friends. I run 3-4 times a week and my dog forces me out those other 3 days I'm not running. It can become quite isolating though.

The job sadly is only working with my boss (and patients who come in), so not a tonne of co-workers, but none of the associated drama of working with lots of other people. I prefer a smaller workplace.

It's so nice to get that weekly payment. It's only a few hundred a week, but it's stable and reliable. And my boss is funny, I like him.

[jbayabas]

My lowest earning to date. From $300 per day 10 years ago to unimaginable low earning today. Complete sadness. Complete hopelessness. My online business is my identity. It hurts to admit that I failed. Ive worked and worked for hours but still no reward on sight. I’ll give it a try for another year and see where this leads me. If no change, it’s game over for me. Time for a new direction.

[csdude55]

@jbayabas, I feel your pain, brother. I said the same thing a few months ago myself, but then November and December really picked up.

If your traffic is doing well and the loss is just with Adsense value, I would suggest that you try selling ads locally. That's what I do to fill in the gaps, and while it changes my job to an ad salesman (which I didn't really want) it's better than the alternative. And with any luck you'll do well enough to justify hiring a commission-based salesman to replace yourself.

Anyway, so far this January as compared to last January:

Jan 1: +62%
Jan 2: -4%
Jan 3: +35%

And Jan 4 is already +39%, and I still have 3 hours to go. So even though it's WAY lower than December, I'm still doing better than last year so I'm not complaining :-)

[browndog]

jbayabas: Please don't think you have failed, that is not true. It's a different world to ten years ago.

There's a lot more competition.
The answer box didn't exist.
Ad blockers weren't a big thing.

Just those three alone have a huge impact on traffic and revenue.

Ten years ago I was the leading site in my niche, now I'd probably rank between 6 & 10. My two main competitors weren't around ten years ago. One of them, is a spin-off of a HUGE site. I just don't have the funds or the resources they have. For example, I've spent the better part of 2 months adding schema to every article on my site. Admittedly, the addition of my job didn't help (I was losing 2.5 days to that). In that time, I added barely any content. My main competitor doesn't have schema on their site, but if they add it, they have the resources to do it quickly and continue to add new content. One person vs a huge site with many writers is not failing, it means the competition got tougher.

[MayankParmar]

If your traffic is doing well and the loss is just with Adsense value, I would suggest that you try selling ads locally.

This is what I was doing. But my direct advertisers (Gearbest, GeekBuying) don't want to advertise this month at all :(

I know it's seasonal but that new crawl thing is frustrating. Just preview any of your article before publishing, you'll see there are no ads. And since I have direct readers, I'm in loss as there are no ads for several minutes. After so many months with AdSense, I have started looking for alternatives to remove some AdSense ads and give them a try, all because of this crawl thing.

Google is making too many updates too fast.

[ember]

I don't get this crawler thing. So Google is now not displaying ads on pages that the Adsense crawler has not crawled. But I create new pages daily and they are showing ads. The epc is abysmal and better start coming back up soon, but there are ads. Not my normal advertisers but advertisers. I doubt the crawler has gotten to these pages, so why do they still have ads?

[MayankParmar]

It seems like the crawler thing is only for small blogs. As the ads on authority sites with 70-80 DA have ads as soon as the post is live.

[ember]

What do you mean by DA?

[MayankParmar]

@ember Moz's Domain Authority (DA). I mean the trustworthy old sites with good authority have no crawl problems.

[Rbag]

I've always had this doubt: if will changing domain and putting a ssl certificate will to increase earnings

[MayankParmar]

@Rbag No. AdSense earning depends on pageviews and niche.

[Ironside]

My god earnings have absolutely dissolved to almost nothing. My earnings for the last couple of days are very similar to what I was getting my first started out with AdSense and didn't really know what I was doing. If this carries on for the rest of the year then I will only just be covering the expenses to run the Web server

[allhearts]

It's been real bad so far this Month, but just when I thought things couldn't get worse, everything has taken a total nosedive. It's looking real, real bad here today (worst day in a couple of years).

Anyone else in the same situation?

Eddy

[MayankParmar]

Everyone's in same situation. Same time, last year, things were 30-40% better than now. I'm in tech niche, so may be this is why I'm affected the most as no e-commerce sites are running a sale this month.

Thank god there's no AdSense Insights Bot like GA, otherwise there would have been annoying notifications like 'Your earnings dropped by 80% this week'.

[Ironside]

I think my CPC is at 6p at the moment. I'm glad I'm not the only person suffering today :-)

It's not even as if other advertisers could come along and offer more money because if businesses are not willing to pay for advertising then it doesn't matter who you go with earnings are going to be low. Having said that, my media.net is fairly stable at the moment. Okay, not earning much every day but it's very stable and has been for the last month.