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 :)

[Mentat]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4880343.htm [webmasterworld.com] by engine - 8:53 am on Jan 2, 2018 (utc 0)

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So... It's a new year.
Let's see what the first month of 2018 will bring us.

For me, since 23 of December, all figures are dramatically low.
1st and half of 2nd day of 2018 are a nightmare (-50% revenue).

So... "hope the best expect the worst"

[ivok]

I'm still fighting with invalid clicks for more than 2 months now with partial success. 5% was the clawback this month which is high and leads to some negative impact on my properties, like removal of arrows on the mobile ads which hurts drastically my earnings.
My greed in October to increase CTR as much as possible led to disaster that I'm still recovering from , so please check constantly your CTR/Page RPM and keep it within good numbers ( Don't know what is good, as it differs per site/niche, but I think anything more than 3% ( Ads in content ) and 1.5% ( Ads within Sidebar ) is too high. Of course this could be to my niche only. )

[Ironside]

I hope things improve because this month and started off pretty poorly

[MayankParmar]

3% clawback.

Looks like today will be the lowest earnings day, all's dead :(

[Fear_Sells]

Got -40% ($2.5k of 6).
Never had such a big penalty before.
Anyone else seeing anything similar?

[CommandDork]

@Fear_Sells, do you run Link Ads by any chance? Those tend to get huge clawbacks for me every month.

[Fear_Sells]

@CommandDork, no, sorry, running regular banners.

[kegnum]

Only about a 1% crawl back here but RPM is trash the first 2 days of this month.

[ivok]

@Fear_Sells - that's huge, a lot of invalid clicks. Something is definitely wrong with your traffic or ad positioning. I'm into investigating this matter a lot recently so I have some stats. Do you use Ad Balancer? Check coverage and also visibility. What's the average CTR of your ads?

[MayankParmar]

Lowest earning day in last 6 months. Unbelievable.

[MayankParmar]

@Fear_Sells Do you run a download site?

[CommandDork]

On top of poor performance figures today, there's just no one online. Christmas break continues in the US.

[Ironside]

Dreadful so far today. CPC is 7p. You'll never make anything with CPC that low

[Fear_Sells]

@MayankParmar, No, not download.

@ivok
I'm not sure if Invalid Traffic necessarily means Clicks. I heard that it can also mean bad overall traffic even if clicks are legit.
I have 2 sources of concern, one is click related other is "traffic quality" related:

1) I had an RPM Increase (CTR ~2x, CPC ~3x) that started near Black Friday and still haven't ended. Potentially it could be a click bot but if so why did CPC also increased. If it was a click bot then only CTR would increase I guess. Also against this version stands the fact that I know at least 1 other person who is having similar picture (RPM increase and huge deduction) but his site is in absolutley different language, targets different audience, has different topics and he even has it for mobile traffic only while I have it for desktop version of my site. It's unlikely that we both were hit by different click bots at the same time.

2) Throught November and first half of December I was constantly hit by someone's bot up to 20k times a day all from one same IP address. Then I blocked him in the firewall around Dec 15.

I don't use Ad Balancer, I just manually left 2 banners above the fold. CTR is 1-2%.

What exactly caused the deduction I don't know. I guess I'll find out on Feb 1 if I won't get banned until that date.

[edited by: Fear_Sells at 6:03 pm (utc) on Jan 2, 2018]

[azlinda]

Ironside, my CPC is at three cents! LOL It hasn't budged for hours.

[frankleeceo]

2.7% Clawback for December earning. I think my lowest % in a couple months.

Google usually does a decent job tracking and discounting mass spread click bots in real time. I think a couple days ago I saw something like 100+ clicks burst at something ridiculous 1000% higher cpc, which results in a temporary earning of like....$200? They were quickly removed after roughly 2~3 stat refreshes within 10 minutes or so. I check stats way too often. I have not seen any other events out of the ordinary.

[ivok]

@fear - I had great increase of CTR on 28th of December ( 2x) and on the following day I was penalized with removal of arrows on my mobile ads ( Or so I think, because I can't check from a US mobile phone to confirm ), but CTR was lowered to 50% than normal and is still at these levels. Waiting for the penalty to be removed.

Sudden spike in CTR means something was wrong, as you suppose may be some bot ( never experienced that before )

Don't really know what bad traffic is as it is been the same for several years, with the same sources ( FB ).

Anyway 40% clawback is ridiculous.

[Ironside]

@Linda things are really really slow, still at 7p for CPC and my RPM page is £1.01 p, that is painfully low. I'm hoping it's just because it's very early in the month and just after New Year. But this year has started off horribly.

[azlinda]

@Ironside My earnings so far today wouldn't even buy a very cheap cup of coffee.

[Ironside]

Same here Linda, absolutely terrible. Not sure what's going on, I'm at 22 clicks but it doesn't seem to be increasing. I just calculated just over 2% clawback which is quite good. However, I think I'm still due about $8 from this month's YouTube earnings so that should take me into the second tier of £000.

I don't know how many people do YouTube videos on here but I can see some potential as more and more people are using YouTube nowadays. I don't appear to be making very much at the moment from my YouTube videos. However, I'm not surprised because I'm not getting thousands of hits on each one so money are making is about right. I'm quite confident I could make some good YouTube videos that could top my earnings up.

[gorin_sis]

Seeing something similar here. My RPM is about 1/3 of what it usually is over the past two days. Traffic is normal.

December had about 20% lower RPM compared to last year. Less than 2% clawback for the month.

[azlinda]

Is anyone else seeing content type ads in the 300x600 responsive space? They are all over my website. I have seen very few regular 300x600 image ads the past several days. I wonder if going to image only will solve this problem.

[breeks]

RPM is so low Google is going to start charging publishers to show their ads.

[dethfire]

Yeah everything very low. Not too unusual though for first week of the year.

[rspwfaq]

It was slooooooooooooowly creeping back up to more normal levels today, but CPC and RPM are still scary low and it's only because I had a lot of clicks that things evened out a bit over the course of the day.

[gorin_sis]

Here's what is going on:
[productforums.google.com...]

if you have a website with long tail content that hasn't yet been crawled by Google's Adsense bot (Mediapartners-Google) then they are not showing ads because of a new 'Brand Safety' change that they made in the middle of Dec. You have to wait for them to crawl you before they can confirm you have content that is appropriate. Otherwise they don't serve any ads and your RPM goes into the toilet.

The Google Adsense team was apparently calling this an engineering bug during December but only a few days ago they now call it an intentional feature to protect brands. I never saw any announcement of this ahead of time. Did anybody else?

[MayankParmar]

CTR is normal. Impressions is normal, only CPC and RPM are down, there are no blank ads issue here anymore. This couldn't be the reason :/

[ivok]

@gorin - this issue can cause my low CTR recently, blank ads, but it's not for all of my websites, so I think the problem is with me.

Where is the statement that this is intentional to protect brands?

[ember]

gorin_sis, where do you see anything talking about brand safety? All I see in that thread are posts about low coverage and one response from Adsense saying that it is a glitch that they are working on.