February 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[MayankParmar]

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System: The following 33 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4880340.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 9:06 am on Feb 2, 2018 (utc -5)

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No improvements here guys, it's all dead and getting worse.

Last day of January is really pathetic :(

[kegnum]

@azlinda what do you do for your taxes?

[ember]

If you incorporate then they won't send you a 1099. I've been an S corp for 15 years and never get 1099s. Plus I save on taxes. P.S. This is not tax advice.

[Mentat]

I'm getting old (mature) now...
This ad is all over my site.
Is marked as High in Ad Review Center.

[i.imgur.com...]

[MayankParmar]

@Mentat Great! You Gotta Catch 'Em All ;)

My links have been updated again, and it looks somewhat stylish, and beautiful. Bluish rainbow effect :D.

Today's looking good, already crossed yesterday's earning.

[kegnum]

@ember no i am not s crop.

[kegnum]

@mentat I had Russian dating cartoon ads for awhile.. blocked them but they just keep coming. Amazing.. just like the zloan ads.. same exact images and google can't put 2 and 2 together...

This is one of the reasons why I don't have an overabundance of faith in them... those zload ads plagued us for month... they didn't even use different images and google couldn't stop them... one of two reasons.. either they couldn't or they didn't care... either way.. does not inspire faith in them. Also, this is why I kind of understand Unilever. Although I am quite sure that as a billion dollar company they couldn't give a rat's backside about people in general.. Adsense is a bit of a "swamp".

[sdksjdksjd]

I'd prefer Russian dating ads, rather than vague, not related, ads I'm seeing on my pages.
I believe dating ads are more clickable.

[NickMNS]

@mentat that looks like a 3rd party ad. (But looks can be deceiving).
Block ad
Block ad-words account (if not 3rd party)
Block url
and if 3rd party
I would block the ad-network.

Use ad-balance, it does a lot towards blocking this type of spam proactively. It isn't fool-proof but if you are seeing a lot of ads like this, ad-balance will help reduce it.

@sdk

I'd prefer Russian dating ads, rather than vague, not related, ads I'm seeing on my pages.

To each his own. Remember that ads are often served based on the user's interest, so an ad that may seem vague and on related to you, may in fact be very engaging to the user. What is deemed acceptable is subjective and is very much related to the target audience of your site. My main site is more family oriented, these types of ad are not acceptable, even if a user has specific interest in Russian dating. The association of Russian dating and my brand is not something I want to promote, so I will gladly forgo a click to protect my brand.

Moreover, these types of ads tend not to be user targeted or contextual but rather the result of buyers simply buying un-sold inventory on the cheap and in high volumes in the hopes of getting sufficiently large number of clicks to turn a profit.(This is why ad-balance is effective at blocking much of this crap). Whereas, the seemingly vague and unrelated ads have a higher probability of being user targeted.

[azlinda]

@Kegnum, I'm an S Corp. Have been for years.

[Bobb11]

Weird. Have ads 300x600 and get 8 click and have very very low CPC. Do you have somebody same problem? Have 8 clicks, and previously this cost i have for 1 click. Its weird.

[sdksjdksjd]

Do you have somebody same problem?

People are talking about this since the beginning of the year ))

[MayankParmar]

And today turned out to be good! Finally.

[Mentat]

For me yesterday finished promisingly, but today they fixed the “problem”.

I see no Valentine Day ads!
Sad...

[UpOnOne]

@Mentat Exact same situation for me!

My problem is still the fill rate. At least 20% lower than normal. I still can't wrap my head around the Brand Safety update. Some old pages don't show ads for several minutes while 90% of my new pages show ads instantly.

Yesterday I noticed in Adsense I lost 2 of my check marks in the User First Progam. I now only see one under Content Speed with a message "Bear with us. We need to see more traffic to measure all 3 User First ratings. When your traffic increases we'll update this card."

[MayankParmar]

Do you all have 'User First Program' on AdSense panel? I still don't have one :(

[kelsheikh]

Yesterday I noticed in Adsense I lost 2 of my check marks in the User First Program.

@UpOnOne Same thing here. I had checkmarks on 2 but now they turned to dashes. I really don't know whats up with Adsense lately with all these weird occurrences.

Also, my CPC has been all over the place, up and down like a rollercoaster.

[UpOnOne]

When I look at my stats via Google Analytics rather than the Adsense average, I can see that my pages with the most traffic do have a 99%+ fill rate. I guess this explains the Brand Safety situation.

I would love to make a crawler with Phantom.js and some US proxies, but then I guess I run into the problem of lower CTRs and even worse ads :( This update is costing me 1000's a month.

[sdksjdksjd]

Blank ads are back again. More on Chrome, less on Edge, but on both anyway.

Edge is showing completely different bunch of ads. I would say, more targeted. I never saw most of them on my website, using Chrome.

Saw miner, loaded by the Adsense today.

Looks like Adsense is just falling apart. Bugs are all around. As usually the bigger thing is, the faster it collapses.

[nubchai]

@Mayank I don't have the User First Program option on my Adsense home page either. Or is it supposed to be on another page?

[sdksjdksjd]

Btw, does anybody see St.Valentine's ads ?
I didn't see any. Neither personally, nor in the 'ad review center' with 10000+ ads in it. How is this possible?

[MayankParmar]

@Nubchai It should be on home page like a card.

@sdksjdksjd I'm not seeing any valentine's day ad, though why would like to see these ads - are they high paying?

[capulkit]

Do you all have 'User First Program' on AdSense panel? I

Mayank, What is that? Adbalance is user first thing?

[Mentat]

I also don't have any access or info about "User First Program".
Ad Balance is crashing when accessed.
It only worked in the first days, last year.

Now I get this:

We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

[MayankParmar]

@Pulkit [support.google.com...] No, it's not Adbalance.

Also, does it make sense to use AdBalance when the ads are already blank, things would get worse with Adbalance, no?

[MayankParmar]

February 13 blog post: Starting on February 15, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly display these most disruptive ads after they’ve been flagged [blog.google...]

[MayankParmar]

"At a technical level, when a Chrome user navigates to a page, Chrome’s ad filter first checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page — such as those for JavaScript or images — are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns. If there is a match, Chrome will block the request, preventing the ad from displaying on the page. This set of patterns is based on the public EasyList filter rules, and includes patterns matching many ad providers including Google’s own ad platforms, AdSense and DoubleClick"

[blog.chromium.org...]

Images too, it means the Amazon ads (the manually created ones with simple image and direct link to product) will be counted and blocked as 'ADS' ?

[kegnum]

I got an email form google with my 1099 form that I requested 3 days ago. Was sent to an address I haven't lived at in 10 years. Checked my account and my W9 and account have the right address. Funny thing is I have lived at 3 address since then.. so it's not like they accidentally sent it to the previous address.

I don't know what is going on with Google this year but it seems like since April they have been dropping them ball every few weeks. I can only imagine the mess this new chrome update is going to be.

[kegnum]

@mayankparmar That's what it looks like, at least to me. I lost faith in Adsense in April. Began adding affiliate offers to my sites. Managed to reduce my dependence on them. Adsense used to make up 80% of my income. This month its closer to 30%. This is mostly due to direct advertising and affiliates. Unfortunately, it looks like those sources of income may be in jeopardy thanks to Google as well.

[MayankParmar]

@Kegnum probably a technical issue with AdSense payment team. AdSense engineers you know they are born to do mistakes. Just send an email to AdSense support and they will confirm it's a technical issue.

[NickMNS]

Unfortunately, it looks like those sources of income may be in jeopardy thanks to Google as well.

Let's not get carried away. Mayank's posts make it seem like ads will instantly be blocked by Chrome. Which is not the case. To be blocked this must happen first:
Step 1 - Google must review your site to check for compliance with the Better Ads Standards (BAS).
Step 2 - You must fail the review
Step 3 - You will have 30 days to fix the issue(s)
Step 4 - After 30 days if you haven't fixed the issue(s) then your site is added to the list of sites to block. At which point all ads on your site will be blocked including but not limited to AdSense et al.
So if your sites status is not reviewed, as is the case for most sites at this time, then there is no chance that ads will be blocked. This applies only to Chrome users.

@UpOnOne
It sounds like you are being impacted by "brand safety" update. You should send an email to Adsense support asking why the drop in coverage. They should then confirm that this is the issue. In that message they will send you check list of possible causes (crawl errors, params etc...) Check those, if they do not apply, reply to AdSense stating that you checked the list and nothing applies. At that point they should review (this review has nothing to do with the BAS review described above) your site and then most likely white-list it and everything should return to normal.