May 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

How is May 2018 treating you?

[martinibuster]

Ok... here we go!

How is May 2018 treating you?

[MayankParmar]

It's not worth asking AdSense about earning drops, more or less the replies are copy/pasted from the support pages.

[NickMNS]

There seems to be an important development in the works, that was brought to light in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

It seems that AdSense is or will be lazy loading ads, such that ads outside the visible viewport will not be loaded. According to a Google support page linked in the above thread this is already rolled out for DFP and Adx but it is unclear if it is fully rolled out for AdSense. Some people are seeing it as reported by @Darttt.

As of April 25th, 2018, we've enabled lazy loading for publishers using the legacy Ad Exchange tag (publishers using the Google Publisher Tag will not be affected).

[MayankParmar]

Ads are not loading properly/too slow and earning is down. I am not sure if this is related.

[MayankParmar]

I tested it on my friend's site, and his AdSense ads are being lazy loaded. His revenue is down by 50% today.

[surfgatinho]

It's not worth asking AdSense about earning drops, more or less the replies are copy/pasted from the support pages.

I got a (probably generic) reply confirming it was the "brand safety" issue.
Bit of an issue when some of your sites are global weather sites with over 100,000 pages and others I just spent months creating facet driven search / navigation...

@NickMNS can you confirm whether there is actually a whitelisting process.

I did used to have an adsense account manager but it seems after traffic and earnings have doubled I haven't heard from them... Might send them an email anyway, even though the contact is from about 3 years ago.

[NickMNS]

@surfgatinho

can you confirm whether there is actually a whitelisting process.

There is no official white list, but I worked with AdSense report for my site. I went through all the potential issues (crawling canonicals etc...) showed that these where either no applicable or had no impact and then after some time their "engineers" fixed the problem. As a result my ads started showing normally again.

My recommendation, contact Support, go through the paces with them checking crawling, and other potential issues even if you are certain that everything is in order and then hope that they will fix the issue on their end.

[surfgatinho]

Thanks @NickMNS. I did ask them about any reports on non-performing URLs etc so will see whether / what they get back to me with.

[NickMNS]

@surfgatinho
Good Luck! Let us know how this plays out.

[MayankParmar]

Updated impressions metrics for AdSense [adsense.googleblog.com...]

[deriklogov]

I guess page views will go down as well

[dartttt]

The above article pretty much sums the thread I created which has been mentioned above by mods.

However, their claim that earnings shouldn't be affected is wrong. My earnings have reduced.

Earlier, when all ads were loaded at once, the probability of a user seeing ad was higher.

Now after new policy, users can miss seeing ad altogether if they scroll too fast.

From a publisher perspective, scrolling through a page with preloaded ads is better than scrolling through a page that conditionally loads ads.

I have also made some other points over at my thread.

Damn, earnings could reduce for everyone as soon as there is full rollout. We will have to wait and watch for long term impact.

[NickMNS]

@darttt I agree that earnings will be reduced for some. Specifically for those that were benefiting from unseen ad-impressions. But for those that do not benefit from unseen impressions, they should benefit from higher revenues.

Moreover advertisers will benefit from knowing that they are getting what they pay for.

It is very much worth noting that this change will only impact third party networks. It has been the case for sometime now that AdWords only offers AV-CPM bids (Active view) as opposed CPM. Any CPM revenue that you receive comes from third party impressions. What is effectively happening is that all CPM bids will now be AV-CPM bids. Which in turn pushes up the prices for those third parties, within the Adsense eco-system.

[MayankParmar]

Lowest earnings day in past one year. A sharp 80% drop. Something is broken? :(

[ember]

What is impression spam % in the Clicks view?

[dartttt]

Until now I was thinking that CPC income won't be affected but CPC bids can be affected too. According to google:

"If the ad size is too large or loads too late, for example, when the user scrolls down faster than the ad loads, the user won’t be able to view the ad."

User not able to view an ad will affect both CPC and CPM earnings. After all for a CPC click, user needs to view the ad first.

Another point that AVV will increase could be nothing but a placebo. What we need to take into consideration is absolute figures, not percentages.

E.g. A 40% AVV on 1000 ad impressions (before lazy loading) is same as 50% AVV on 800 ad impressions (after lazy loading).

This is exactly what I am getting in my data. Absolute viewable impressions are almost same before and after lazy loading rollout. The proportion of increment in AVV % is nearly same as the proportion of decrement in impressions returned by ad requests.

One major difference lazy loading now making is that there is now a greater probability of a user zooming past ad placement which means:

No ad request.
No measurable ad impression.
No viewable ad impression.
No CPM earnings.
Absolutely no chance of CPC earnings.

Such type of behaviour is called "ad blocking". Lazy loading is a sort of conditional ad blocker. All ads are blocked by default and they are only unblocked when a user gets close to their trigger zone by scrolling the page.

Ad blocking means lost revenue because it doesn't even allow an ad to load in the first place. And that is what we're getting here.

[dartttt]

Having said that, I agree that getting paid for any ad impressions coming from an ad placement that is out of viewport of a user's device is not right. However, I just fear for drop in CPC earnings that this new policy can lead to.

[yaashul]

1 thing I need to ask here is this change is applicable on legacy code. Are you guys by any chance using legacy ad code(sync code)?

[dartttt]

I always use async code, it is better that way for page speed and user experience.

You can test yourself. Follow the instructions below:

- Open any page with ads in Google Chrome browser
- Go to Dev Tools
- Click on Network tab.
- Type "ads?" in "Filter" input field
- Refresh the page

After following steps above check if all ad requests are made as soon as page is loaded or the ad requests are made one by one when you keep scrolling to the bottom of the page.

All ads requested at once = No lazy loading
Ads requested one by one as you scroll down = Lazy Loading

[dartttt]

What is impression spam % in the Clicks view?

I am also getting this in reports. Seems like Google is rolling out this new stat. What % are you getting?

[yaashul]

dartttt, All my ads are loading without any interruption. I am using async code.

[dartttt]

On my website ads are requested one by one since last 8 days. Seems like I am a victim of Google's A/B testing or phased rollout.

[MayankParmar]

It's not just you, dartttt. I have noticed this issue happening on my friend's site.

[dartttt]

I forgot to mention that you must have an ad "not visible" in default viewport when a page is launched to test lazy loading.

For example, an ad at bottom of the page could be fully visible on a desktop PC, but you may need to scroll down to see the ad on mobile device. In such a case, all ad requests would be made at once on PC because their placement is in visible viewport of the device. However, on a mobile device, you will see an ad request only made when user scrolls down to the ad placement (if lazy loading has been implemented).

You can test the mobile site lazy loading behavior on PC using same instructions above. Just dock dev tools to right side and keep dragging the handle to the left until you see a mobile responsive design of your site.

[MayankParmar]

Is it just me or is anyone else also noticing a massive drop in earnings since yesterday?

2nd May was good. Something happened yesterday and I am still down by 80% :(

[NickMNS]

@darttt at @ember

What is impression spam % in the Clicks view?

I see it too!
This is a bug it shows instead of CTR.

edit: I saw thing wrong the first time around.

[MayankParmar]

Yeah, it's a bug.

[NickMNS]

Is it just me or is anyone else also noticing a massive drop in earnings since yesterday?

I can't say if it is just you or not, but it is not me. May 2nd was horrid, but yesterday was good and today is starting off stronger.

[MayankParmar]

My AdX partner said that they have noticed a abnormal drop yesterday, CPM fallen by 30% for all publishers.

They also told me that AdSense earnings dropped by 50% for their publishers yesterday.

Everything is fine on PubGalaxy.

[Kash1111]

I have noticed lazy loading ads since we joined the adx partner, which was last year.

Here is the thing Google ads load super slow on mobile, user has already scrolled past and read the content before any ad is loaded.

This has been my biggest issue with adsense.

[yaashul]

Kash1111, are you using DFP code (gtags code) or async code?