July 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

Let's hope this month is profitable

[Ironside]

So far today things are looking quite promising although it's still very early for me. I've only had seven clicks so far today but my CPC has actually been rising and is now at 40p, I like that a lot.

[MayankParmar]

Coverage dropped here as well but earnings is average.

[breeks]

Working again - no more blanks - at least for now.

[Sillysoft]

Yeah ads loading again, getting some clicks now. But dang this is horrible...

[Sillysoft]

I think I know what the issue is. Today big sites like Spotify, Drudge, Snapchat and Breitbart (I read from an article I dont go there) were down. It was reported:

Update: BNO News is reporting Google services suffer outage, taking down major websites and services including Spotify and Snapchat.

I have seen this issue before and it affected my Adsense at that time too... Hopefully that was issue.

[dartttt]

Clicks and CTR from US dropped by 70% today. CPC from US dropped by 50%.

I don't have any coverage issues, traffic is same and clicks/CTR/CPC from other countries is normal. My main revenue comes from US and so far I have observed it is the main reason for overall drop today.

Anyone else observing similar drop in earnings from US only?

[beerSEO]

One of my sites is nearly 100% US traffic, clicks are down to single digits and CPC is under $0.10, seems to be even under $0.05. Pretty dismal, to say the least...used to be a reliable earner.

[dartttt]

@beerSEO You are observing this behaviour today only or since last few days?

[beerSEO]

That exact behavior for that site for past 2-3 days...but trending downward since around July 1.

[CommandDork]

Seeing second/third straight day of lower-than-normal Site Coverage.

Typically running at 95%, been 84-85% now.

It's always something it seems : /

[Insomniac]

Mobile CTR has dropped to the floor here across all of our sites.

[beerSEO]

I put ONLY responsive ads on the one site and made sure that the ads were not in any type of responsive elements. Instant increase...in 2hrs the site made what it had made all day; I doubled the day's earnings in 2hrs with the change to all responsive ads. Before I was using responsive divs to show specific ads, now the ads just live in divs that stay the same on every screen size and the ads themselves are responsive. Whatever's clever...hope that helps someone.

[MayankParmar]

My ranking and traffic from desktop dropped since 29th June. I have decent backlinks tho :(

[dartttt]

Looks like Google plans to recover $5 bn fine from publishers.

[GJ_Albania]

My earnings have been really low during July, around -35% from the same period last year. Lower RPM, CPC, CTR, you name it. I don't know if this coming ONLY from disabling personalized ads for EU users. I hope that google releases a consent tool that is easy to integrate, like a plugin or something.

[KaseyM]

So many blank ads on AMP pages right now. Normal site is fine.

[bugthinker]

@dartttt

"Looks like Google plans to recover $5 bn fine from publishers."

Do you have a source about this ?

[MayankParmar]

I am expecting a massive clawback this month. Gotta recover the money somehow ;)

[trebuchet]

I took a close look at exit clicks on my five business pages yesterday. Plenty of apparent clicks via Adsense links but earnings suggest only one-in-six to one-in-seven of these clicks were actually paid. That's some damn aggressive click-shaving and goes to show why my CTR has nose-dived.

[dartttt]

@bugthinker

I said that line as a joke.

Google was fined $5bn yesterday for antitrust practices on Android phones sold in EU. Its all over the news, google it.

[beerSEO]

I ended up making more than double what I started with yesterday due to the change I made and today I've already surpassed what I've made ALL WEEK - and it's not even noon where most of my visitors come from. As in, on this one problem site, I've made more today than I have all week and it's not even half way through the day.

If you have specific ad sizes in responsive elements on your site, try [test] swapping out the set ad size for a responsive ad and then make sure the responsive element around the new, responsive ad is removed. For example, if you have a specific ad size showing on desktop and in the same spot a smaller ad for mobile [or vice versa] - try getting rid of the 2 ads and replace them with 1 responsive ad. Appears to have worked for me; literally all metrics have drastically improved overnight: clicks (CTR), CPC and RPM have all gone back up to where they were before, actually even better. Hopefully it continues.

[dartttt]

I always use responsive ads without any modifications and my revenue has dropped in last couple of days :(

[Sillysoft]

@beerSEO I use responsive ads only. However I use a div that is resized based on media queries. So for mobile the div is sized 320x100 and for desktop the same div is sized 300x250. Are you saying just create a responsive ad and put it on the site without sizing the div around it?

[beerSEO]

@Sillysoft...that's exactly what I'm saying. Or find a way to have the div NOT resize based on the media query and let the ad do the resizing itself...

[Sillysoft]

@beeSEO Ok I will take a look at that. I also have been taking a look at my optimization section. Here are a few things that Im now trying:

1. Auto ads. I took the dive and starting using auto ads for one of my sites. Its king of like Ezoic where it uses AI to learn your site layout and put ads in different positions. The problem is, it only seems to work on mobile. When I go to desktop it just shows the manual ads I created. I tried removing the manual ads, but then no ads show at all. I emailed adsense for help. Dont know what is going on.

2. Im now using an experiment and testing out Ad Balance. I set it to test with 85%. Thats the lowest I can go with it still at 100%. Can anyone tell me a good number to use? Should I go lower even if it isnt at 100%? I read someone recommending testing with 70% and going from there

3. I was told by Adsense that they think its better to have full width mobile ads. So I added this to my responsive ad units for one site: data-full-width-responsive="true"

Anyone else doing any of these? Any luck in increased earnings? For my big sites I switched to Ezoic recently and seeing how that works. I was told everything Im doing will take time before I see any real results.

[Sillysoft]

I contacted Adsense about Auto Ads not working. They said the page already had 3 hard coded ads, so Google most likely didnt find a place to add more ads. However thats not my understanding and it has no problem doing this along with the hard coded ads on mobile, just not desktop. What I read was you didnt have to remove the hard coded ad. However to test it, I removed the hard coded ads and now zero ads show up on the desktop, yet ads show up via mobile. So their techs are taking a look at it. Is anyone using auto ads? If so has it helped? For years I just manually added hard coded ads and left it as is. I never tried any optimization techniques Adsense has to offer. Now Im trying them all so want to see if anyone else had luck with auto ads.

[Sillysoft]

@beerSEO Hey, so I tried that. I tried just putting in the ad right from Google Adsense. The problem now is its just doing a full width ad the size of the current area. So its doing like 728 wide ads. Are you sure you arent using a parent div to change the size? Because responsive ads will simply fill up the parent div you get it. So if I put the div to 300px wide it will put ads at max 300px wide.

[beerSEO]

@Sillysoft...I understand how responsive ads work and how my site works, for that matter. I merely mentioned what I did on my site and the results I got. All of the ads on this website technically live within some sort of div, sure, but I figured I'd mention that I specifically switched from all set sizes for ad units to all responsive ads. Still going strong, better than before on that site even. Do what you will with the information; sounds like you're going to have to work with what you've got or find another way to do it. Happy to take a look if you want to send me a message.

[itech digital]

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me the actual commission from Google Adsense? I am going to have a adsense access soon.

Regards,

Basha.

[RedBar]

@Sillysoft & beerSEO

All you need to do is install the AdSense responsive code as-is and the ad will resize automatically to the device.

For testing pruposes on a PC if you use Firefox the ad will generally resize as you narrow or widen the browser window however in Chrome/MSIE/etc you will normally need to refresh the page for the ad to resize therefore you should not need to worry when people visit on any type of mobile or tablet since they generally do not mess about with browser windows, ok, maybe on the larger tablets they do however the ads will resize upon refreshing.

I only use two ads per page and I serve both as a plain text .inc which means I can change or remove either sitewide with two uploads.

[MayankParmar]

Today is terrible, anyone else? CTR dropped.