March 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[vegasrick]

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System: The following 37 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4885208.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 10:26 am on Mar 2, 2018 (utc -5)

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Is anyone else seeing a delay? I'm literally seeing zero clicks, zero CPC, zero CTR etc.

[riccarbi]

February ended leaving me a mixed feeling. Revenue was 30% up compared to Feb 2017, yet RPM is slightly down (traffic was 40% up). I had my highest revenue in history in a single day, but some days were among the worst I have ever seen. Overall, huge volatility and a sense of uncertainty, I can't rely much longer on something I have zero control on, If I care for my business. Therefore, I'm working hard with a view to move from traditional advertising via Ad networks to self-managed, alternative monetizing solutions.

[glitterball]

Is anyone else seeing a delay? I'm literally seeing zero clicks, zero CPC, zero CTR etc.

Looks broken to me too.

[Grapetimes]

Me too

[Robbo55]

Grapetimes and glitterball
Similar issues for me so far today
Not showing as zero, but page rpm is about half what I would normally expect it to be
Hopefully it's a bug that gets fixed

[MayankParmar]

Me too.

But the pageviews is normal.

Those who blocked third party ads are seeing any improvements, less blank ads?

[Ironside]

Absolutely terrible month. First month in seven or eight years where I have not reached three digits

[NickMNS]

I think the delay is fixed now. I have just seen my account jump to what appear to be more normal numbers.

[Robbo55]

NickMNS
Still showing low numbers on mine
Hopefully will be fixed soon

[NickMNS]

February was my best and worst month, kinda! (not including January which I view as an outlier).

Revenue wise, if I account for the fact that February has only 28 days, this has been my best month ever. With an additional day of revenue I would pushed past my actual record. But this is all on the back of strong traffic. PV's are up close to 3X from February 2017. On a RPM basis things are grim, February has been my worst month ever and a continuation of the downward trend, down 40% yr/yr.

Dropping RPM is a major headwind. I am incredibly fortunate to have strong traffic. I can't imagine how devastating it must be to be going through a period of declining traffic in addition to weak RPM.

[ember]

Red bar.

[Sillysoft]

Uhm is there any problems with Adsense today? My current balance shows only the amount I made from search which is under $100. Yet when I go to view they payments page it shows I have over $2k as my next earnings. Is this a sign that something bad is about to happen to my account?

[MayankParmar]

@Sillysoft No, this is a sign that Google has hired interns from colleges.

I hope it's stuck otherwise, today would be lowest earnings day. I hope things go back to normal this month.

@NickNNS 3x? Your earnings should have been 1.5x at least. My pageviews go up, but earning drops lol

[Sillysoft]

@MayankParmar Could be, just refreshed and it updated to the correct amount. Its a huge adjustment for me to begin with. Sold my site last month, was getting well in the upper 5 digits and now this. Hope I can get it back up with another site(s).

[MayankParmar]

In case you guys missed, here's a new webinar on AdSense Auto Ads
[youtube.com...]

[TimeDance]

I am also seeing much lower earnings than usual, by around half. Does anyone know what’s going on today? I’m seeing a red bar in my performance reports for today as well, but that does not explain much

[kegnum]

@NickMNS same here... earnings aren't down too much from last year.. but that is only because of a big influx of traffic.

[RedBar]

Oh! I've never seen this before, my clawback is:

+0.153%

+, yes, plus 0.153% :-)

Is it April 1st?

[kegnum]

@MayankParmar watched the video... in my experience.. auto ads is very gitchy. Also i tried to setup the "advanced url settings" and they just dont work. I set one site to not show any auto ads including mobile ads a week ago and its still showing them.

[ember]

Not impressed with auto ads. Placement and targeting are okay but no improvement in earnings.

[MayankParmar]

AdSense however seems to be serious about Auto Ads. The promotion of this new feature is still going on!

[sdksjdksjd]

They always start being serious.
Still it ends laughable.

I'm already doubtful even about hard to be compromised Google Analytics.

[kegnum]

Just got a warning about ad placement. When I checked on the problem. I didn't see anything... Refreshing several times shows autoads placing ads over each other...


So its like this

header
-auto ad-
post title
-my ad-
-auto ad-
content

Should also mention this site had 3 manual ads from me and a total of 8 ads all together, meaning adsense placed 5 more ad blocks... and get this... All 8 ads were the exact same thing.. different shapes but the same exact ad over and over and over.

Of course i didn't bother contacting them to explain that this isn't my fault. I have needed to contact them 5 times in the last 9 months.. each time no issue was resolved. In fact they would give me an answer that didn't even come close to addressing my problem.... so IMO there is no point in contacting them.

I removed autoads but as others have pointed out.. this makes me nervous about the chrome update and having only 30 days to fix issues and have them checked.. i can picture google taking much longer to check or having to go back and fourth with them several times before the issue is cleared up.

EDIT
Also I should mention that autoads doesn't seem to be doing anything to improve earnings.. many more ads but the earnings for those ads is pitiful and likely pissing off my visitors. My RPM (so the revenue per 1K pageviews) is just as low as ever. I guess giving Google more ad space on my site = free ad space for them.

[MayankParmar]

I've no idea why/how ads from Amazon.com and .co.uk were blocked on my account! Probably this is why my earnings dropped!

[kegnum]

@MayankParmar blocked how.. on your end or theirs?

[NeapTide]

@Kegnum a policy violation warning due to the broken Auto Ads feature on which you have no control! What end are we coming to?

By the way today RPM on my top earner site 0.20 which used to be always between 1.20 - 2.5. Even with Chitikta and similar other alternatives you will get more than 0.20 with crappiest ads and we are talking about Adsense here.

[Maximum44]

@kegnum do you use a CMS? Like Wordpress / Joomla etc?

[MayankParmar]

@Kegnum My end. The account manager mistakenly blocked it while removing the malicious non-relevant ads lol.

I made some placement changes, hopefully things will improve.

Ezoic's ads solution is better than AdSense auto ads, even a WordPress plugin with ad rotation feature will do a better job than Auto Ads.

[kegnum]

@Maximum44 yes i use WordPress. I understand that this maybe causing the errors.. but who do you think autoads is for? Do you think its for a company earning 200K a month that can hire a specialist to find the best ad placements or for smaller guys? I think its for smaller guys and what do most smaller to mid level guys use? I'm guessing that if you took a poll here.. 90% would be using WordPress.. maybe more. Maybe this is something google should consider before putting out more useless tools that don't work properly.

[MayankParmar]

Well that's right. WordPress is the first choice for new webmasters, though it's buggy and slow in comparison to other CMS. But we can expect things to improve as Google is already working with WordPress on AMP and PWA.