April 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Ironside]

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System: The following 18 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4889486.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 6:42 pm on Apr 1, 2018 (utc -5)

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I am up to 14 clicks with a 12p CPC so far today. But it's still early afternoon in the US so hopefully, things will get slightly better. At least marchers earnings were a lot better than January's.

@May Is it possible to work out how many clicks were disabled.

[EditorialGuy]

Now I am planning for an exit. I do not believe it will be a good idea to depend on AdSense in the long run.

We have an editorial (a.k.a. information) site, but AdSense represents only a smallish part of our overall revenues. We still do okay with AdSense, despite the fact that mobile continues to get more popular and we don't even run AdSense units on our mobile impressions.

I think mobile is a revenue challenge for most informational sites. Our affiliate revenues from mobile are far less than from desktop, for example, and I don't think that's unusual.

[MayankParmar]

The affiliate don't work for everyone. There are some good AdSense alternatives but they really slow down the site which would ultimately impact the traffic. Media.net concept is good but the support sucks!

Maybe DFP + AdX + AdSense will be a good combination, but DFP is really complicated!

[Ironside]

@Nick

You have more options when it comes to positioning ads on a desktop then you do on a mobile layout. I use Joomla! which is totally responsive and works really well on a mobile device. I don't know whether you checked the statistics on what kind of devices people use to browse your website but I can tell you the majority of people that use my website are doing so from iPhones. The Samsung is the next most popular phone people use. You don't really have much choice when it comes to layout for a mobile phone as far as I can see. I have implemented ads that come up when people open the website on a mobile. I also have advertising appear at the bottom of the screen when people are using a mobile device. These are the only specific ads that have been designed for mobile users. I don't think there are many other places that ads can really appear apart from in between paragraphs, above the first paragraph or below and maybe above the heading. It's not as if you can really embed and AdSense unit into a paragraph of text on a mobile because you are limited to the width of the screen.

With a desktop layout there is not as much need to scroll down the page as you have to do with a mobile device. Therefore, ads are going to be in the users view for longer. When people scroll down a mobile view ads will just pass them by and probably not even catch their attention.

[KaseyM]

Still bad for everyone else? Absolutely sucks here.

[NickMNS]

@Ironside
IPhone, Samsung also here. I'm not talking about ad placements, I'm talking about how you layout your content and navigation. Designing a site on a big screen and then simply rearranging the divs to stack vertically is not the optimal solution for mobile. I use things like carousels, sticky nav menus, and content loaded with AJAX to allow the mobile user to easily move through the content with minimal effort. Previously I had one long page that never ended on mobile, it looked great on desktop but I doubt that any mobile users ever reached the bottom of the page. Since I made the change my AVV went up from barely 40% to over 60%. That is 50% more ads being seen by users.

[Mentat]

Terrible day 4th of April.
Something is broken, as Both Adsense And Adx present very Low Numbers.

[NickMNS]

I get a feeling that things may be delayed. My PV's are oddly low.

[MayankParmar]

Things are still very bad.

[Mentat]

The final numbers are grim.
I hope this is not a new "level" of optimization!

[Maximum44]

I did not think the CPC/Page RPM would drop any further. I was wrong. Yikes

[MayankParmar]

The traffic is always high when AdSense is doing a pathetic job -_-

[Travis]

The traffic is always high when AdSense is doing a pathetic job -_-

the increase of traffic might be low quality traffic, robots, etc, ... which has a trend to pull down the quality of ads displayed.

[Ironside]

The first few days of April have been very poor indeed. However, today shouldn't be any different. It's still very early for me here in the UK because most of my traffic comes from the US and its only morning there. However, I am at eight clicks so far with the CPC of 39p and the page RPM of £4.87. Rather than the figures dropping as the clicks increase, the CPC and Page RPM has increased as the clicks have risen. This could be a really good day.

[EditorialGuy]

The affiliate don't work for everyone.

That's true, but neither do other forms of direct-response advertising (including AdSense PPC ads).

[Ironside]

I used to do quite well with eBay affiliate because I could link products that I mentioned on my website straight to eBay. The problem with eBay affiliate is unless people are actually spending a lot of money you don't really earn much. In other words, if you are linking to something that only cost £10 then don't expect to get much back. I actually made more money from people who went to eBay from one of my links but actually ended up buying something completely unrelated to my niche. If your website is promoting expensive products then you could make a lot of money from eBay, especially if it's something like mobile phones, tablets etc

[Ironside]

My page RPM and CPC is quite a lot higher today than it was when I was earning really good money two or three years ago. It was 41p CPC and £4.79 page RPM a few minutes ago when I looked. If I could generate the same amount of clicks I was getting back then the money I would be earning today would be on par with the good old times. I know it won't last, this is just a phenomenon for today, however, it's nice to see the figures so high.

[Paul Stewart]

For the first time, I noticed something odd and disturbing today.

About 6 hours ago, I noticed 10 page views from an Asian country.

Now I checked again and found that Google AdSense deleted all these page views. I am not sure if Google AdSense is doing this for other countries.

Is Google AdSense silently deleting page views and/or impressions + earnings?

Google AdSense! Good job! Well done! Create more new ways to decrease publishers' earnings. Bravo!

I am so scared of the future of Google AdSense that I have already invested in a business and giving almost all my time for this business so that I can make the role of AdSense in my life negligible as soon as possible. Nowadays I invest no time, money or energy for content creation.

[edited by: Paul_Stewart at 7:08 pm (utc) on Apr 5, 2018]

[Rbag]

how do I see the adjustments of invalid traffic during the current month or only at the end of the month?

[NickMNS]

@Rbag you can only really see it at the end of the month.

Also there two types of adjustments:
"rollbacks" that happen in more/less real time. These are not reflected in the month report, they seem to occur when there are errors in reporting clicks, at times I have noticed that duplicates are counted, then after a few minutes the estimated earnings and click counts are adjusted to show a single click. The only way to see these "rollbacks" is to watch your earnings in real time.
"clawbacks" that are the adjustments between the estimated earnings and the month end balance (what you are paid). These are very clearly accounted for in the payments section of your adsense account. They are typically the result of invalid clicks, from things like bots, or blacklisted IP's.

[Runfun]

Lol the sarcasm about Google isn't surprising me. The 'best' I've experienced so far was with Adwords. At the beginning of a day there where 2 clicks at 1 impression of an advertisement. Can you imagine that? So I've messaged and they replied and said the visitor clicked the advertisement, went back to Google's search results and clicked again.

If that would happen with me as publisher one of those clicks would be clawed back. And how funny they respond when you're advertising but they don't respond if you want to use the Ad Exchange.

[MayankParmar]

Pretty sure Google is making a lot of money with these clawback. There's no way the publisher can verify it and Google stops replying to the emails when you have proof. I don't know how is this even legal! There's no transparency and it should be against the law.

[andymorris]

I always had a feeling Google was giving whatever they wanted for the day loosely based on visitors and those clicks and impressions counts are fake.

It just makes no sense sometimes. With what's happening with Facebook, Google could be next.

[andymorris]

On a side note, there is something seriously wrong this month, the CTR is at an all time low.

[Ironside]

Yesterday was my best day this month. 39 clicks with a CPC of 23p and a page RPM of £3.05. It's a shame because two or three years ago I was getting more than twice as many clicks with a similar CPC.

[papux]

Yes.This month sucks. We can confirm that CPC and RPM are very low. The big G has f.... us all small publishers

[Travis]

Since yesterday, I get random error messages while logging to the Adsense dashboard or accessing several tabs of the site. I wonder if they have an issue, or working at implementing new functions like the cookie-less ads for EU visitors. I noticed that often when Adsense is a mess, not long after they release new functions/tools. Might be related.

[MayankParmar]

@Travis Did they refund your clawback, Travis?

[RedBar]

As many of you know Google is crucifying me with US localisation and seemingly the removal of my sites from the Google.com SERPs therefore this morning I have been checking back over the past couple of years and here are the results.

Bear in mind the USA is ~600% the population of the UK, for many years my US PVs and earning were ~600% of the UK:

January to March 2016 USA PVs v UK 574.8%
January to December 2016 USA PVs v UK 361.8%

January to March 2017 USA PVs v UK 249.9%
January to December 2017 USA PVs v UK 197.25%

January & February 2018 USA PVs v UK 134.5%
March 2018 USA PVs v UK 120.4%

April 2018 USA PVs v UK 62.9% SO FAR and reducing every day, yes, so far nearly half of March's PVs.

So, as you can see, Google's decided that my sites are not worthy of being in the US SERPs but are, for the moment, seemingly ok for other SERPs however I distrust G so much now that I feel filtering of all the SERPs for my sites is inevitable.

I'm not looking for sympathy or recommendations, I'm posting this as a warning to all non-US business website owners as to what Google is capable of doing to your "online" business attempts.

For 20 years Google "approved" of me, now I am persona non grata and I have absolutely no idea why other than I am not based in the USA!

Meanwhile Google continues to promote US business websites in their UK SERPs, more double standards.

[azlinda]

Pretty sure Google is making a lot of money with these clawback.

I totally agree. Ethically, Google should have to share the information with us. It is information they have, and they choose not to share it. They DO know where the supposed "fraudulent or invalid" clicks are coming from. I can only conclude that they are NOT sharing the information because they're scamming us. This would be like getting a statement from your bank without any debits shown...just a balance.

[Ironside]

It's unbelievable how two days can be so different. Yesterday my CPC rose as high as 41p and finished off the day at 23p. However, today it's not got any higher than 11p and is actually on 10p at the moment.