October 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Mentat]

Last days of September 2018 were not very good, now let's see what October (Q4) will bring to the table.
For me, September 018 was a good month.

[leebow]

I think ad rate does not necessary equal to total amount of revenue earned. I am seeing a trend really picking up this year that advertisers or platforms are now granular and picky about the ads that they serve, when and to who, as well as visibility that comes into play. This results in significantly lower coverage in instances, especially from frequency capping.

That’s an interesting thought - that advertisers are being more picky about where they spend their money - and it makes sense.

But as publishers - what can we do to see what the problems are? Why don’t google let us get feedback from publishers about what they like/don’t like. Maybe you’re loosing big advertisers because they feel your top ad is too close to X or something.

The reports just don’t help when it comes to feedback from real people. The reports don’t help much at all except to see if your numbers are up or down - they don’t show why.

[EditorialGuy]

I think ad rate does not necessary equal to total amount of revenue earned. I am seeing a trend really picking up this year that advertisers or platforms are now granular and picky about the ads that they serve, when and to who, as well as visibility that comes into play.

No one is suggesting that there's a one-to-one correlation to overall ad rates and an individual publisher's earnings on any given day. The former certainly can influence the latter, however.

[Mentat]

This Monday is "super"... dead.

US - Columbus Day
CA - Thanksgiving Day

[Grapetimes]

CPC is low today

[csdude55]

My Page RPM was cut in half last Tuesday and has remained there since. The only thing that I can see changed is that I received the "Mobile-first indexing enabled" email. Anyone else ever experience anything like this? Coverage, impressions and clicks are all still the same.

Same here. You have no idea, I'm almost in tears over here... Last year was almost half of 2016, and this year is almost half of 2017! That's a huuuuuuge drop in a relatively short period. I've seriously been making payroll using personal credit cards for the last few months.

From August to now, my Page RPM has dropped 43%.

Traffic is the same, mobile percentage is the same (roughly 48.5%)... the only difference is Page RPM.

[frankleeceo]

@csdude55, is coverage the same? are you using ad balance?

[leebow]

@csdude55 — I am seeing EXACTLY the same.

Coverage is the same, unique page views the same, hits the same, active views the same, number of clicks is the same, everything is the same (because I haven’t made any changes to the sites layout or ads) — but my rpm is down. My cpc is down.

For whatever reason Google or advertisers are just paying less.

[MayankParmar]

Monthly report: your revenue grew by 2%. Nice job!

[csdude55]

@csdude55, is coverage the same? are you using ad balance?

Coverage for September and October were actually higher than the rest of the year! List is below.

March had my highest Page RPM of 2018, but it was generally pretty consistent from January through June. Then it dropped 20% for July, and has gotten worse since.

I do use Ad Balance, and it was set to 100/76%, where 75% would have gone to 99% of earnings. I see that I can adjust it down now, though, to 100/62% :-(

My Coverage over the year:

Jan: 72.68%
Feb: 74.71
Mar: 74.69
Apr: 77.84
May: 82.99
Jun: 81.20
Jul: 74.04
Aug: 71.82
Sep: 82.37
Oct (so far): 83.48

[csdude55]

For whatever reason Google or advertisers are just paying less.

@leebow, my revenue started dropping in November 2016, right after the election. Even though my site isn't specifically political (I do have message boards where people sometimes discuss politics), I've been suspicious that the US election may have had an impact... possibly that businesses are hoarding money instead of spending it for political reasons.

I expected a drop right after the election because of less political ads, but it never picked up after that like it usually does.

Recently, the media reported on Dr. Ford's letter regarding Supreme Court Justice nominee on September 12, and that same week my Page RPM dropped by 48%, to the second lowest point of the year (the lowest was January 2, when it was $0.02 lower).

I'm not meaning to discuss politics here, but at least on my site it appears that politics have a direct impact on my Page RPM.

[leebow]

It’s an interesting thought - and I think it shows how easily our earnings can be influenced by global events, and how little control we actually have over our earnings.

[Mentat]

Control over earnings? LOL, what a nice illusion.

Adx is still not picking the pace as eCPM. Very frustrating.

[MayankParmar]

Yeah, October is terrible, so was September and August. The 2018... is terrible :) Lost huge chunk of traffic.

[Ironside]

October is horrible for me as well.

I've only exceeded £5 once so far this month which is absolutely pathetic. If it carries on like it has been for the last week and a half then I doubt very much whether my earnings all reach triple figures for October.

[RedBar]

Lost huge chunk of traffic.

I think that's the general consensus for many and we have to bear this in mind:

1. I read the other day that 52% of USA searches are voice searches, do they look any further?

2. Supposedly Apps account for 89% of mobile media time with the other 11% spent on websites.

Bearing in mind that mobile is the most used platform now, 60+% or so, it's no wonder we see less traffic.

For low searched terms it is possible to be seen on mobile results however for popular searches even an organic #1 may be at the bottom of the page after images, Google's own ads plus AdWords etc.

Honestly, it's amazing we get any traffic from Google these days and why anyone bows to their rules is beyond me since they certainly do not have any interest in assisting our sites meanwhile they use the information on them to solely promote their own interests.

[NickMNS]

The past two days were pretty good for me, Monday specially but that didn't last. It has been very spotty lately, the pattern has been a couple of good days (never great) followed by several more days of total crap. Like Mayank, a drop in traffic isn't helping the situation either.

[Ironside]

I doubt whether any of us will still be here in five years time talking about what we learned from AdSense they truly believe it will come to an end. Hopefully, something else will come along that will enable website owners to make a bit of money but the good old days of huge paychecks each month from AdSense are long gone unless you get millions of hits every day so can still make good money from 1p a click, or £1 for every 1000 visitors.

[Mentat]

@Ironside - I know your are right about the end of the Adsense for content, but I really do not share your optimism about viable alternatives.

Any alternative I used to monetise traffic in the last 15 years was a shame revenue wise...

[MayankParmar]

I've gained backlinks over the last few months but it's not helping. So I am trying to improve the existing contents, I'm reviewing all the articles, if the articles don't have any value, backlinks and traffic, I'm nuking/noindexing them. This might work, hopefully :)

Same here, Mentat. I've tried many ad partners but all alternatives fail to match AdSense level :)

[Ironside]

I went into Currys the other day and they were selling record players. Smart phones are relatively new so are obviously appealing to a lot of people. However, could it not be the case that people will get fed up with using smartphones for browsing the Internet and actually come back to larger monitors? Technology can really only go so far for the average Joe blogs on the street. Smart phones can't really get bigger so you're always going to help those limitations of size. I really don't know, I'd like to think that the whole world will go around in a circle and we will realise that all this technology isn't all it's cracked up to be a fall you want to do is go on the Internet and look at a website.

[dethfire]

Just saw sept I got a 10% invalid revenue decrease. Nasty.

[koan]

Ironside, I use my desktop computer and my smart phone a lot (probably too much); on the phone, it's mostly apps, like emails, text, note taking, reddit, etc. Web sites are often insufferable to browse: slow, laggy, janky, spammy, each pieces fighting for your attention, it's not a smooth experience. I just don't get how people can spend that much time on the web with a phone.

[ember]

September was excellent, and October is strong, too. Good EPC, good CTR. It's not all doom and gloom out there. Fourth quarter is usually good because of Christmas auction pressure, which starts earlier and earlier. In my business, it is January that is the pits. EPC drops off a cliff, but it always comes back (knock on wood).

[RedBar]

I just don't get how people can spend that much time on the web with a phone.

I have a friend who's just bought the new Samsung Note, expensive, basically all he uses it for is occasional phone calls and messages however he has a huge bandwidth contract with it and 99% of the time he spends his time gaming on it.

He's 35 .!.!.!

When the Lumia 1520 phablet came out some 4-5 years ago no end of people used to look at mine in disbelief, now the ~6" screen is seen to be a standard for the top end models, certainly I never use my 8" Android tablet any more.

Ads look good on these phones and so long as one is not on a crazy ad-laden British newspaper site, they're very easy to use all day long.

[EditorialGuy]

I just don't get how people can spend that much time on the web with a phone.

I didn't, either, until I tried it.

For reading news (or viewing news videos), I actually prefer a phone, because mobile news sites are usually less cluttered than their desktop counterparts.

I do prefer using my desktop or laptop computer for researching and buying things. That seems to be a pattern among our readers, too: We get a lot of mobile traffic, but the vast majority of our information site's affiliate revenue comes from desktop/laptop and tablet users. (Ditto for ad revenue, though the disparity isn't quite as extreme with ads as it is with affiliate bookings.)

[MayankParmar]

Go native: Ads designed with your feeds in mind!

Just got the email

[KingZen]

@Mentat, have you tried Taboola recently? Since second half of this year, some of my websites have been getting upwards of 60 cents CPC. That's after they've been averaging like 8 cents CPC for past few years. I think Taboola enabled video ads, which is causing this spike in CPC.

[justpassing]

Go native: Ads designed with your feeds in mind!

What is it? Ads you can fully customize ?

[KaseyM]

Still about 20% so far in October. Seeing a lot of underreporting for impressions this month too.

[csdude55]

I do prefer using my desktop or laptop computer for researching and buying things.

@EditorialGuy, I think that this is a common trend. Unfortunately, it's also why mobile ads seem to be worth so much less than desktop ads... you don't click on the ad and buy anything, so the mobile ad has less value to the business.

According to this, in 2016 mobile phone sales were only 1.3% of retail purchases, and 15.3% of online purchases:

[marketingland.com...]

Of course, a lot can change over 2 years, but I couldn't find a more recent study. If I couldn't find more recent information, then odds are that marketing managers can't, either... so they don't invest a lot in to mobile advertising.

Add that to the fact that you can put 1 mobile ad on a page versus 3+ on a desktop page, and you have a compounding problem...

What is it? Ads you can fully customize ?

@justpassing, native ads are more like text ads that look like part of your content. Google has a native ad option built in if you look under "Auto ads" (called "in-text" and "in-article"), but they looked terrible on my site, had no customization ability, and were virtually worthless (literally pennies).

I plan to test out Nativo in the next week or two, though.