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 :)

[browndog]

Yesterday I was looking at my site on both mobile and desktop and some of my ads just weren't displaying, I have no idea why because I've not touched any ad related stuff for a long time. I refreshed and refreshed and nothing showed. So I did some tweaking...and all ads are displaying as they should. I then spent almost a day manually inserting ad code (still doing it, but should be finished in an hour) in the spot directly below my content as there was a big gap before which has always annoyed me. I've made more today (with 10 hours to go) than I have the previous few days of January.

I am still getting the same $$$ per click as before (in January), my page RPM is only slightly lower than December levels (and double what it was) and I have I am already 1 click ahead of my totals for yesterday.

Certainly doesn't hurt to check your ads are still displaying.

[frankleeceo]

Still seeing declining RPM here with downward trend. Still grinding 10+ hours days 7 days a week to get more content out. It's soul draining to work on anything during Q1 of the year, considering all money will be spent on business and life's fixed costs / taxes coming in April. I will literary only be able to save money after April. I just have to work in good spirit knowing that I will be paid at a future date.

For the technical discussion earlier...I've learned to always take technical advice if they actually help the user (Speed and usability specifically in mind). "Tricks" or "Recommendations" by others (SEO) usually lead to code bloat and wasted efforts if they do not actually benefit the audience.

@browndog, About ads not displaying, coverage can be a part of the equation. Some of my sites are running at 50% coverage. Maybe setting and recreating ad codes start the AI "fresh", but it'll probably go blank with reduced after the initial surge after the AI decides on the content / traffic quality. Please let us know if the increased earning stick after a few days :). Then I will be doing that just as well to recreate ad codes.

[Cralamarre]

According to my Custom report, my coverage is only running at 88.68% today. That sounds bad, BUT... I noticed that it's by no means a site-wide problem. If you use URL channels, you can see exactly which pages are affected. There's only about 20 pages on my site that are showing lower than normal coverage. Two of them, both very old articles, have coverage of less than 40%, and like bad students in a class, those two are bringing the overall percentage down. The vast majority of my pages have coverage of 96-100%, with most being a full 100%.

I still have to go through the affected pages and figure out why the coverage is so low, but don't let the overall coverage report fool you. It may only be a small percentage of pages that are affected.

[ember]

I second cralamarre. I have one page - a high traffic page - at 57%. The rest of the site is at 98%. I took Adsense off the 57% page and put media.net on it. It is making more money with media.net than it did with Adsense.

[browndog]

I hope that's not the case frankleeceo. As of now, I have had more clicks today than the previous 90 days (I didn't go back further than that) and we still have four more hours to go. The quality of the ads is pretty awful, I'm seeing one for beautiful Thai women. I'm a middle-aged married woman, not exactly something which interests me.

I'm tossing up trying AMP again, just for load time.

ETA: I'm considering using somebody else to put a sticky ad in the right-hand column. A lot of my articles are long, and admittedly there's ads in the content, but I'd like a sticky ad. I really dislike so much white space.

[TheWarrior]

Something interesting has happened over last few hours. The US CPC is rising back to its usual average but CPC for UK, Canada and others have drastically come down. CTR is a bit low. But hopefully that should get back to normal soon.

[MayankParmar]

An article I published 10 hours ago now has 1804 views but not even a single ad, AdSense hasn't crawled it yet and I'm losing bucks, thanks G.

This is really annoying, and idk what I'm supposed to do :(

[MayankParmar]

@Browndog Try the AMP For WP plugin and buy the Advanced AMP Ads extension, it's great for revenue, sticky and other ad features :D

[browndog]

Thanks MayankParmar, I did have a quick look today but am so tired from staring at the site it was all a bit confusing. I did switch to AMP a few months ago and loved the speed, but my revenue tanked.

My day finished almost twice what it has been in January, but is still a long way from what it was pre the switch to Wordpress. I still don't know why it tanked so badly. I was on $xxx and am now making $xx.When it happened I dropped from 40,000 PV's to 12,000 (in Adsense, not Analytics). Analytics remained the same, but Google told me the only accurate figure was Adsense, not Analytics. I was told my site was slow, and there were other issues they were not at liberty to reveal (to protect Adwords advertisers). I switched to AMP, it dropped even more. I've never ever engaged in black hat techniques, I switched from the WP site back to an updated Joomla site, and still no change. So it wasn't the CMS. Google's advice was 'write more content and spend money on marketing'. When your revenue tanks so much you can't pay your bills, spending money on marketing isn't an option. It does tick me off that over and over again. Urgh, sorry, ranty message.

Today better, but still awful compared to a year ago.

[kelsheikh]

@browndog thanks, definitely interesting. I have been hit with that coverage issue that started dec 18th were my ads just weren't displaying. If you could, please keep us updated if generating new ads helps.

[Ironside]

Even though my CPC improved dramatically yesterday, unfortunately, it was one of those days when there weren't quite enough clicks to get me into that "quite a good day" bracket. Anyway, CPC isn't looking too bad today so hopefully things are starting to improve over the first few days of the month.

[Ironside]

My CPC has dropped like a stone and is now at 10p. Looks like another rubbish day

[MayankParmar]

24 hours passed and no ads on a post. Is Google bot ever going to crawl the page?

[Cralamarre]

Yesterday my RPM was the lowest I've seen it in years, and today is looking no better, even though coverage on most of my pages is normal.

[Ironside]

@May I can see adverts in all your blog post so I shouldn't worry. Mind you, all I'm seeing is stuff related to my search history

[MisterTux]

Hi there!

After 12 years of adsense publishing I have to note: worst January ever!
CPC is rising a little but CTR and RPM are still at the lowest edge. I've also a problem with the coverage, some ad-units < 70%.
The main problem that is really, really annoying: The quality of the ads. I have to fear for the reputation of my pages... There are "Clickbaiting Ads", "How to lose weight without any sports", "How to become rich without a brain or any kind of motivation", ...

[ivok]

Today I saw an ad - " How to f*** your wife for 4 hours" - wtf is going on. My CTR is still lower by 20-30% than Jan 2017. So I think these ads are hurting my CTR and also everybody else.

[ember]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, MisterTux.

Ivok, are you blocking those ads?

[ivok]

Never blocked ads in the Ad Review Center and everything was fine.

[kelsheikh]

@ivok I hear ya. With all the coverage issues I have had for the last 2-3 weeks. When I do finally see ads displayed on a page, I keep on seeing the same Coupons ad over and over again. Its just been crazy.

[MisterTux]

Today I saw an ad - " How to f*** your wife for 4 hours" - wtf is going on. My CTR is still lower by 20-30% than Jan 2017. So I think these ads are hurting my CTR and also everybody else.

That's it!
The quality of the ads, served by Adsense, is just a big crap. Sometimes I've the feeling that anyone who owns a few cents is allowed to spit into Adwords. But this problem does not exist since yesterday.... it only gets worse and worse.
In German media you can often read that there are lot of paying advertisers who leave Google because their ads were displayed on dubious platforms (politics, racism, #*$!, ...). But nobody talks about publishers that also suffer from dubious content, served via Adsense by Google.

[browndog]

I agree, it's not a good look is it? I just went in and blocked a heap of categories such as sexual, spiritual (kept seeing some iffy ad for tarot cards).

I was searching for a computer tower for my son yesterday, so all I am seeing now is ads for an electronics shop, which I guess is better than the Thai dating ads I was getting yesterday (I'm the only person who uses this computer, and have never, ever looked up anything dating related so no idea why they'd show me that).

[NickMNS]

No recovery here either. I have noticed that there are a lot of ads from Criteo showing up in Ad-Review. Typically third party network ads are far and few between but I am seeing lot, as of December 18th!

Here:
[imgur.com...]

Red = Adwords,
Blue= Criteo

[Cralamarre]

I'm seeing a lot of ads for WordPress, which is great since ads for free products always pay well. :(

[nomis5]

I have noticed that there are a lot of ads from Criteo showing up in Ad-Review

I use Criteo on one of my very secondary websites. They recently sent me an email which said that I should remove all references to them because basically they were exiting the market. Anyone else received a similar email?

[nomis5]

The quality of the ads, served by Adsense, is just a big crap

Not on my websites, the ad quality seems to be the same as normal.

[NickMNS]

The quality of the ads, served by Adsense, is just a big crap

My guess is that the poor quality ads are coming from third party networks.

[riccarbi]

I suspect a low demand on the advertisers' side could explain the current situation. I see a lot of low quality ads in major informational sites as well, that of The Guardian for example. Not much better than the crappy ones appearing on my pages.

[edited by: riccarbi at 11:19 pm (utc) on Jan 7, 2018]

[thecas]

Excluse me but i nave one easy question to ask you.
What is the real average revenue for a website that today has 10k uniques?

[NickMNS]

I suspect a low demand on the advertiser's side could explain the current situation.

I don't think there is really an actual low demand. From my stats at least, there is an unnatural drop in Adwords ads thus freeing up the market to allow low price ads from secondary networks to gain impressions. If it were a real drop in demand the low quality ads would be coming equally from Adwords and we wouldn't be seeing the this unusual spike in third party activity.

To check your own stats go to Performance Reports -> Advanced Reports -> Ad-Networks. Select the last 30 days as a time period and then check the first few networks (less than 5) off the list. Click the compare button and finally click the timeline icon in the top right corner of the graph to get a line chart.