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 :)

[kelsheikh]

At this time, we're unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. If you make changes to a page, it may take up to 1 or 2 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index.

[support.google.com ]

Sounds like their crawler is really slow. They mention 1-2 weeks when talking about 'Re-crawling sites'.

[Maleda]

Curious, does the email specifically state that your site is sending ad requests from URLs that have not been crawled, or does it just say that the new policy may be what's causing your problem? It seems like you received the email from AdSense only after contacting them to report the issue.

This is part of the email response I received:

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.
We detected that your AdX /Adsense account is sending a significant number of ad requests from URLs that are not crawled.


New URLs are being created all the time due to the nature of the websites, what we're finding is that Adwords ads may not initially appear on a new page and then after 5 minutes or so, they will start to filter through. The initial advert space is either blank or filled by third party networks from Adsense.

[NickMNS]

@Cralamarre
The email states:

We detected that your AdX /Adsense account is sending a significant number of ad requests from URLs that are not crawled.

I only received the email after contacting AdSense support.

And the solution is...?

No clue!

I have plenty of ideas but not sure how to test and validate them.

My biggest concern is that from what I can gather from my data and stats, this is not the only issue causing a drop in revenue. I evaluated my exposure to this policy change to be a drop of 16% to 25% in revenue. I'm seeing a drop of 60% over the past few weeks. I'm thinking that there is unintended side effect occurring and as far as I can tell it is being caused by 3rd parties. Since my post above I blocked third party ads and I have seen a slow but steady increase in revenue since. Now it is way too early to draw any type of conclusion, but I would have expected the exact opposite.

[azlinda]

I just turned off the ad balancer. It looks like Google is "balancing" our ads for us. I was seeing many blank spaces where ads should have been before I began using ad balancer again.

[ivok]

So if I get this right - if you are hit by this Brand Safety update you will see drop in coverage, right? I’m not seeing any drop in the last three days

[ember]

So it seems to be an actual policy change that only applies to some sites.

[kelsheikh]

@ivok most of everyones drop in coverage started December 18th including mine. Looks like they mention Dec. 15th as starting this Brand Safety update.

[azlinda]

I'm wondering if Google intends to collapse the big white spaces left when they don't place an ad. My site is loaded with these white spaces, and, frankly, it looks horrible.

[Cralamarre]

I'm only seeing the coverage issue on one page, but unfortunately, it's one of the most popular articles on my site. Coverage on the page is down to 34% today, from 96% yesterday.

Since it's a very popular page with a simple, static URL, and has not been updated in at least a year, it shouldn't be affected by the new policy. And yet, no ads.

[azlinda]

@NickMNS How did you block third party ads? I don't see that option anymore.

[ember]

Cralamarre, maybe tweaking the page would trigger a crawl and ads soon after.

[kelsheikh]

I'm wondering if Google intends to collapse the big white spaces left when they don't place an ad. My site is loaded with these white spaces, and, frankly, it looks horrible.

@azlinda that is why I still think some of this update isn't what they intended to happen to publishers. Maybe they thought this would go under the disguise of the holidays but the URLs being crawled is taking too long. I'm just hoping that our coverages regain soon. From the documentation about their Adsense crawler, it doesn't seem fast. I would hope one visit to a page (since this update was made) would get the crawler to immediately index and determine what ads to show on the URL going forward for all the visitors afterward. We really shouldn't be seeing blank ads at all.

[Ironside]

Absolutely terrible here, worst in years. Not many clicks and earnings are not even enough to buy half a pint of beer. Just happened overnight, don't understand it. If things are the same as those by June with no improvement then AdSense will definitely be coming off my sites. Hopefully, things will recover because a reason for everything to drop outs like it has done.

[nubchai]

@Ironside do you have Ad Balancer turned on? Maybe experiment and turn it off?

[NickMNS]

@azlinda I don't recommend turning off third party ads, I'm not certain that it will help. Logically it should make the situation worse, that is even less coverage. But if you feel the need to try, go to "Allow Block Ads" -> "All my sites" -> select the "Ad Networks" tab then toggle the toggle at the top of the page to block all "new" ad networks, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the small blue "block all" link.
And... good luck!.

I had not clicked the blue link earlier so my action had no impact. I am watching for what will happen from this point forward.

Wish me luck!

[jbayabas]

Did you guys implement ads.txt? Do you think it will help to increase revenue?

[azlinda]

@jbayabas I implemented ads.txt two months ago. So far it has not helped to increase revenue. This month has been a total disaster.

[azlinda]

NickMNS, thank you. The reason I couldn't find it is because I just clicked on one particular site and, of course, all those tabs weren't there.

[CommandDork]

@jbayabas - I too did the ads.txt thing for all my properties. No change either way for me. Just another Google hoop to jump through.

[nubchai]

@jbayabas I also updated ads.txt for my sites and didn't see an impact one way or the other.

[jbayabas]

We’re screwed. So frustrating. Everyone’s back to school and work but why is earning so abysmal. Holy sh*t!

[child please]

Because it's still not even 1/3 into January, that's why...I don't expect things to rebound until probably February.

[kelsheikh]

@jbayabas I feel the same exact way.

I have been examining my coverage percentage, seeing if there is an slight uptick, and haven't seen anything. I see their bot in my logs crawling urls but it looks soooo slow.

I mean all this updated crawler has to do is visit an uncrawled url at least once right? If someone visits the url, the crawler should come and index. Then for every visit after to the same url there should be ads.

[MisterTux]

Yesterday (January, the 9th) I had a little smile on my face because it seemed that CPC, CTR and RPM come up again. Not a perfect day but much more better then the first seven days of the year. And today? Holy Crap!

Today - Yesterday:
CTR = -40%
CPC = -25%
RPM = -55%;

Edit: And keep in mind - yesterday wasn't a perfect day ;-)

[Ironside]

Yesterday was a disaster with extremely low CPC. Today has started off with very high rpm and very high CPC, well for me anyway.

[MisterTux]

Yesterday was a disaster with extremely low CPC. Today has started off with very high rpm and very high CPC, well for me anyway.

Where your audience from? United Kingdom only?

[MayankParmar]

My site is loaded with these white spaces, and, frankly, it looks horrible.

Yep. I have a big logo, and a 320x250 ad on mobile right below the logo, when there's a blank ad, it looks damn horrible. I have started to receive complaints from readers, I'm now planning to remove the header ad and replace with header bidding solution from PubGalaxy.

So it seems to be an actual policy change that only applies to some sites.

Accounts! All of my sites have blank ads, on the other hand, ads on my friends site and rivals' site load instantly.

Plus, I have observed that the blank ads won't reduce the coverage. I have seen drop in impressions for same or more pageviews.

[edited by: MayankParmar at 12:52 pm (utc) on Jan 10, 2018]

[Grapetimes]

Anyone else seeing a drop in coverage today?

[Ironside]

@Nub yeah, that's a good idea, I will try it.

@Mister most of my traffic comes from the USA

[NickMNS]

@ember

So it seems to be an actual policy change that only applies to some sites.

This is a policy that applies to all sites but will only impact some sites.

If you have a small sites (number of pages) and all the pages are visited frequently by users then you should see no impact. If you have a large site were many pages are rarely visited then you will see a large impact.