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 :)

[Cralamarre]

@browndog, Has adding schema to your pages improved your traffic at all? I haven't added it to my site yet, but I'm not convinced it would make a difference. For me, the only things that have improved my traffic are writing new articles and updating existing articles, neither of which I can do if I'm focused on some technical issue like schema.

[papux]

Really, really bad day!

[jbayabas]

So bad I’m listening to Whitney’s I Look To You to lift up my spirit, esp. the lyrics:

I'm lost without a cause
After giving it my all
Winter storms have come
And darkened my sun
After all that I've been through
Who on earth can I turn to
I look to you
I look to you

[UpOnOne]

Quick question for anyone seeing a drop in earnings above the seasonal norm. Are any of you still using the Synchronous ad code?

[ivok]

Watching news about the storm and blizzard in US this could also affect the earnings. I’m also seeing some decrease in FB reach as well

[KaseyM]

Still bad here!

[NickMNS]

Watching news about the storm and blizzard in US this could also affect the earnings.

Should be the opposite. Everyone is stuck at home with nothing better to do then drink coffee and surf the web.
Still bad here too!

[browndog]

Cralamarre: Traffic is up around 20% from a month ago. I've had a few issues which are finally ironed out.

In June I switched to WP (well paid somebody to do it), what took me a while to realise was I lost all of my page description tags. My traffic went from 13,000 a day to 8,000-9000 (at the lowest). So, I spent a lot of time adding those tags.

I then switched to https in October.

I then started adding Schema in November. So, since June I have been cleaning up this mess. Around 2 weeks ago, traffic started to increase. I'm averaging around 10,000 uniques a day. Still not at the level it was at prior to the move, but it is finally climbing in the right direction.

It was a long and laborious task, but it took so long because I went through every single article using Yoast as well as my own common sense. Some of the older ones were pretty bad. I'm 95% satisfied the content on my site is as good as I can possibly make it. Still not entirely happy with the older content, but I can keep it and not care if it ranks, delete it, or now focus on adding new content...which is what I will do. I'm already in the process of a new article, FINALLY. Yay.

I look at Google and Adsense as an abusive relationship. They don't care about me (or any of us), and I'm finally at the point where I'm not expecting them to ever care, they care about their shareholders, not us. When you get beyond the bargaining/pleading stage, and realise it won't change, you feel so much more free. Yes, I will still work on my site, I will still try to follow Google's best practice guidelines, but I'm not going to sacrifice my life, health or happiness trying to please them. I have been working 12 hour days, and thrown away any time with my family to please Google. The money I've been earning is so poor that my son's hourly rate for his paper round exceeds my income (by a lot). I have my part time job, and will switch to full time if necessary. I will never, ever be a Google slave again.

[Kash1111]

Hey all, I know don't post much but I am reading the Adsense threads. I think this is a seasonal dip in revenue due to ad competition and bidding and the tech isn't to blame. The new AdSense policy to protect brands isn't affecting us.

I still see ads displaying on new posts, and we post a lot. We have a DA 32 and PA 39; the internal pages have much lower PA rating. I am not sure where all these facts are coming from that a MOZ domain rank affects Adsense?

We are with Monetizemore. Starting Jan the revenue has almost halved, this includes FB audience network. Content.ad is performing great with an ecpm of $2-4. Which might make up for the loss of Adsense revenue.

[csdude55]

Quick question for anyone seeing a drop in earnings above the seasonal norm. Are any of you still using the Synchronous ad code?

FWIW, I have no complaints about my revenue so far this month (today is still better than Jan 5 2017). I'm using ASYNC, although I think I made a thread last year discussing the benefits of SYNC vs ASYNC. I think some said that the best results were to use ASYNC above the fold and SYNC below the fold, but I haven't tried it.

We are with Monetizemore. Starting Jan the revenue has almost halved, this includes FB audience network. Content.ad is performing great with an ecpm of $2-4. Which might make up for the loss of Adsense revenue.

We used Monetizemore last year, too. It started out well, but by September the revenue dropped HARD. I had other (smaller) sites on Adsense, though, and was seeing higher RPM on those sites regularly.

I dropped MonetizeMore in November and moved to Adsense, which resulted in an almost immediate increase of revenue by nearly 50%.

I also noticed that all of my payments from MonetizeMore were coming in about $150 lower than they were supposed to. My bank blamed MonetizeMore, MonetizeMore blamed my bank... that was over $1,000 lost over the year that I'll never get back, so it left a bad taste in my mouth.

[Kash1111]

Sorry you had bad experience with them. I am not blaming Montizemore for the drop in revenue. I have the same experience last Jan with adsense. The drop in revenue happened exactly Jan this year. Most of us here have adsense and are suffering a revenue loss. We will wait and see.

[Jaideemaak]

Has adding schema to your pages improved your traffic at all? I haven't added it to my site yet, but I'm not convinced it would make a difference. For me, the only things that have improved my traffic are writing new articles and updating existing articles, neither of which I can do if I'm focused on some technical issue like schema.

I went through the exercise a few years, mainly because several websites assured me that with the 'Internet of things' having schema would help SEO. It took a long time and sometimes the validation can be picky. For example, anything tagged as a blog posting needs an image whereas sometimes you might not have an image, and other tags needs certain information which you then have to create. I removed it from blog postings for this reason. I have never noticed any SEO improvements as a result of schema and my guess is that if search engines do take any notice it is way down the list of important factors in the algorithm. The only perceived benefit is that adding itemprop="image" to image objects seems to get my images higher in the SERPS in Google images, but this is only my perception.

My view, after following so many SEO tips over the years from SEO 'experts' who don't have a clue how the actually algorithm works, is that there is absolutely nothing I can do personally to improve SEO. I have worked incredibly hard at times, adding new articles and updating existing ones, but nothing changes. It's all in the hands of big G. Having lots of links, no doubt, helps, but no one wants to give links these days because it's all so competitive. Over the past few years I have lost a huge amount of traffic, but then suddenly my traffic jumped more than 100% at the start of November 2016 for no apparent reason. Don't try to control something over which you have no control, just hope that the next algorithm change will be kind to you.

[iwrkalot]

I haven't seen daily earnings this low since the first quarter 2015. Since then I have added 3 new sites and "overall" traffic has more than quadrupled.

[Ironside]

Very strange happenings this morning. I checked AdSense earnings this morning and it was about 37p created by five clicks. I had another look a few minutes ago and those five clicks have now generated £1.23 because the CPC has suddenly jumped up to 25p. Not entirely sure why this would happen but I hope it stays like this because it should be a good day with the CPC that high.

[Cralamarre]

@Jaideemaak, thanks for the info on your experience with schema. I have not found any main competitors who use it, and my articles and images seem to do fine without it. I might try adding it to one of my articles, just to see what happens, but I'm not expecting any changes from it.

People who focus on technical issues will always tell you that technical issues are the problem. I think part of that is because writing good content is hard. But for me, the only thing that has improved my traffic has been writing and updating content.

[edited by: Cralamarre at 3:24 pm (utc) on Jan 6, 2018]

[Ironside]

I think you're bang on the money there. If somebody visits a website to download something then unless the ads showing are the ones that dupe people into clicking on them, why would anyone bother clicking on your ads? On the other hand, if somebody is visiting your website in order to obtain information that is in the form of the written word then the chances are an advert will catch their eye and they will click on it. In other words, if you want lots of visitors that are going to stay on your website then take the time to write good quality content

[FourDegreez]

Hey all, I made a decision not to even look at earnings this week knowing they'd be bad. Ad budgets reset every Jan 1 resulting in an awful earnings drop. I did check today, and did see the expected drop. Yesterday appeared to be climbing back though, and today is looking decent so far. Very relieved to see that.

[MayankParmar]

The only good thing is rise in traffic. Traffic doubled and my earnings returned to normal level yesterday, the rise is however because of traffic.

Hopefully things will improve next week :)

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Please, don’t be shy and congratulate me, gentlemen, today I have 2 new achievements! The first one is that today is the highest level of traffic on one of my websites, which I have been running for 3 years. The second one is that today is the lowest Adsense revenue level in its entire history (even comparing with January 2015, 2016, 2017)…

[ember]

gentlemen

And gentlewomen.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@ember

Oh, don't take offense because of that... Right now it's the voice of sarcasm and desperation—nothing common with gender discrimination... :)

[Ironside]

Looking quite good here actually. CPC higher than normal, in fact, more than double what it's been this month so far. It's incredible how one day can be so different from the previous five.

[MayankParmar]

CPC is up, things slowly recovering :D

[browndog]

People who focus on technical issues will always tell you that technical issues are the problem. I think part of that is because writing good content is hard. But for me, the only thing that has improved my traffic has been writing and updating content.

That's definitely not true for me. I LOVE writing and hate the technical side.

[Cralamarre]

@browndog, so it's NOT true for you that content matters more than technical issues? Personally, I would spend all my time writing if I could. I do enjoy the technical part, but for me, writing my content and focusing on technical issues are like two different worlds, and constantly switching between them is incredibly frustrating. It's like stopping a freight train to start another one, and then stopping that one to start the first one up again. At the end of the day, neither of them gets very far.

[NickMNS]

@Cralamarre and @Browndog.

I would spend all my time writing if I could

I would spend all my time writing CODE if I could. I hate writing content, in fact I work very hard to avoid writing content. But ultimately it is unavoidable.

It's like stopping a freight train to start another one,

I fully agree, and I would note that this isn't necessarily only between content and code but also when one switches between projects (or sites).

As to which is more important. I think both are necessary but neither alone is sufficient. One will never have a great site with only code, and cool functionalities just as one will never succeed if the site is unusable.

[browndog]

Well considering I lost close to 40% of my traffic when I switched to Wordpress, it was clear that there was a technical issue (there was, I wasn't told I would lose all my description tags). Fixing the technical issues (along with Schema/https) has lead to traffic slowly climbing back up. It's not where it was at, but it's getting there.

There is no way I could have seen that traffic growth by ignoring those issues and adding new content, just not possible.

I'm not a techy person, I have always said just let me write and I'll pay somebody to do the rest, but my revenue slid to a point where we nearly lost our home. Hiring somebody was the last thing we could afford.

The technical stuff is finally finished, so I can get back to actually adding new content. But I don't for a second regret the time I spent fixing the site.

I have a friend, same niche as mine. She has ignored all the Google warnings about switching to mobile friendly/https. This is part of an email me she sent to me last week.

I'm quite in acceptance now that XXX is in decline. I'm not willing to to do any work to change the way things are going.

I'm not going to sit around and let that happen to my site.

[Cralamarre]

@NickMNS, that's why I switched my site over to WordPress a couple of years ago. Being the coder and the content writer was just too much, so I chose to focus on the writing. Now, if I was writing about coding, maybe that would be easier. :)

But honestly, I'm quite happy these days to rely on WordPress plugins for most of my technical needs. I do feel like I've abandoned part of who I am, but such is life. In fact, the only reason I still worry about technical issues as much as I do is all thanks to Google. Google makes it impossible to focus entirely on content. And, since Google also makes it impossible to know which technical issues to care about, it's just a never ending line of freight trains, most of which get me nowhere.

[Cralamarre]

@browndog, I do keep up with the technical issues (which is why I'm here). I created a mobile-friendly WordPress theme back in March (2 days before losing 25% of my Google traffic from an update), and I switched my site to https back in October. I would never say I give up on the technical isuses, but I certainly wish I could.

[browndog]

I agree with you, it's frustrating isn't it? I read on here about Schema a while back, and how it will (or may) carry more weight in the future, which is why I decided to implement it.

[webmasterworld.com...]

I don't want to do nothing, wake up one day and find my traffic down by 50% because I hadn't switched to responsive/implemented schema etc. But I do hear you, I would rather actually be adding content than jumping through Google's hoops.

As for techy stuff, that's just not me and I can spend a day figuring out how to do such and such on Wordpress, or I can pay somebody $10 to do it. You learn that subcontracting stuff out is more efficient. I have a great guy on Fiverr who doesn't charge much and always gets the job done, so he does the techy stuff apart from Schema, which is not so much techy but time-consuming, and I do the writing.