January 2019 AdSense Earnings & Observations

[Mentat]

2018 was a goodish year, with a record December month.
2016 and 2017 were hellish years for me.
I hope that 2019 will be at least as good as 2018 was, but as always the first months of the year are "hibernation months", so let's see how horrible January 2019 will be.

[Ironside]

Just checked my AdSense account this morning and the figures are really high for some reason. CPC is £1.40, page rpm £15.04 and I've received three clicks this morning. I've no doubt that these figures will drop, however why would they be so high like this?

[broccoli]

I don’t know what’s going on, but something is wrong. I’m still stuck on 2 pence a click on my best earning pages. I haven’t changed my layout or anything.

Averaging 6.5-7K traffic a day and earning an average of £12 a day from it.

I wonder whether a) there’s a clickbot attack going on or b) they are now doing crazy AI stuff in adsense.

Just as my traffic is recovering they find another way to destroy my income. I’ve got to get away from this company before they kill me.

[ClosedForLunch]

@broccoli

What are the quality of adverts you're getting for your niche - spammy or professional? Has that changed recently?

[broccoli]

It’s hard to tell because I’m in the UK and most of my visitors are from the US.

I’ve been seeing download ads and trash for months, ever since I moved my subdomains to my main site and implemented https and my traffic took a massive dive. Ad coverage dropped to 75%. Recently the ads have been looking much better in the UK. I’ve seen quite a few brands, but it’s all very page specific, perhaps because I have different ad units for every page.

[ClosedForLunch]

@broccoli

If you go to 'Blocking controls' you'll see the ads shown in every country.

Bringing your ad balance down should help stop those low paying junk ads from appearing, and as a by-product make your site look less spammy as a whole. I currently have my ad balance set to where it just changes to '99% earnings'. My adverts look 'good' overall, but the odd Big Green Button slips through once in a while and I quickly dump its domain in the 'All sites' blocker.

Maybe Mediapartners-Google is reassessing your site's perceived value to advertisers after your big changes.

[Runfun]

@brocolli, I've almost the same problem as you mentioned at the 3rd page of this topic. An increase in traffic is mostly no reward with Adsense earnings. Somehow I see more a pattern of each day of the week the same revenue even with fluctuating traffic. So when I've one week (numbers are just an example):

M: €50 with 4.000 visitors
T: €50 with 4.000 visitors
W: €50 with 4.000 visitors
T: €50 with 4.000 visitors
F: €50 with 4.000 visitors
S: €40 with 2.000 visitors
S: €40 with 2.000 visitors

Next week it's:

M: €50 with 5.000 visitors
T: €50 with 5.000 visitors
W: €50 with 5.000 visitors
T: €50 with 5.000 visitors
F: €50 with 5.000 visitors
S: €40 with 3.000 visitors
S: €40 with 3.000 visitors

It doesn't make sense because more visitors (and yes they are all from western Europe) should increase the revenue. Somehow it can still make me wonder and motivate to make improvements but also more motivate to decrease my exposure to Adsense. More and more impressions are going to header-bidding and affiliates. Over the long term Adsense revenue is decreasing counted to each visitor and other earnings are increasing.

[broccoli]

@ClosedForLunch

Thanks... this is what I don't understand - I tested ad balance twice in the autumn and Google passed the experiment both times, so I went with it, and the result was a significant earnings drop, so I had to switch it back up to 100%. I tried going down to two ad units a page instead of three, and the same thing happened, even though I'm only getting a 75% fill rate. I'm so frustrated. I used to get brilliant premium ads for all kinds of pop culture and entertainment stuff that fitted well with my site. I've worked really hard on improving my site this year, it's better than ever, yet I'm getting treated worse than ever.

I've set up a new ad balance experiment to see if anything has changed and if I can get the machine learning to reassess my site. The suggested better user experience fill rate was about 35-40% which seems incredibly low!

I just don't understand why I'm being punished by Google. The EMD at the top of my niche is being rewarded with premium ads even though it has a terrible user experience. It has four adsense units per page, two of which are vertical banners down either side of the page, one is a sticky ad on the bottom of the page, and the last is a horizontal banner sat directly touching a submit button. It's like peering through a window frame of ads.

[broccoli]

@Runfun

Yes, my traffic has increased by about 1000 visitors a day over the last couple of weeks and my earnings haven't budged at all.

I used to have a very stable January and February where I would be down 30% compared to the Spring/Summer, but that's not what's happening at the moment. I used to have about 10K traffic a day and earn about £45 from that, and £30 during Jan/Feb.

What keeps happening is every time there's an algorithm update, I get more traffic back and my earnings surge in tandem with the extra traffic for one day, then I get hit by some kind of ads penalty and my earnings go back to being the same as before the update, even though I have more traffic. It's happened three times in a row now. Plus my Christmas earnings were terrible - I got my traffic up to 10K with my seasonal pages, and for that I got £30 a day.

I'm earning the same now at 6.5-7K visitors a day as I was with 2K visitors a day in August/September after I switched to https and all my traffic disappeared. I should have seen *some* progress. I should be earning at least £20 a day, taking into account the seasonal drop.

Unless something else is going on that I don't understand?

I don't have GDPR/personalised ads set up in Europe, because I didn't want to add even more weight to my site or risk increasing my bounce rate. I didn't think it would make much difference because I've always earned most of my money from contextual ads and European visitors make up no more than 10-15% of my traffic. Has anyone noticed GDPR making a big difference?

[ClosedForLunch]

@broccoli

What is giving you most revenue - clicks or non-clicked impressions? If it's mainly non-clicked impressions then reducing impressions either by ad balance or fewer ad units would noticably decrease your earnings.

Your suggested better user experience fill rate of about 35-40% implies that 60% of your impressions are of relatively little monetary value. Bear in mind that CPM revenue for 1000 'download button' impressions could well be about one penny.

[ClosedForLunch]

@broccoli

ever since I moved my subdomains to my main site and implemented https and my traffic took a massive dive.

Do you know for sure that your sub-domain move and change to https has worked 100% ok on a technical level? Do you have appropriate server page redirects and correct canonical tags in place?

The EMD at the top of my niche is being rewarded with premium ads

As you sure they use Adsense? They may use another top level provider, certainly if they are a high traffic site.

[broccoli]

@ClosedForLunch Interestingly, my non-clicked impressions dropped a lot after the site move. I wonder if that's where the problem is, and why reducing fill rate hurt me.

All redirects and cannonicals are working. I have more traffic now than before the move, I'm just not back to where I was before I got hit by algorithm updates in early 2018.

The subdomain move was a total disaster at the time. For a variety of technical reasons, I think Google decided I had an entirely new site and put me in the sandbox. I hear the sandbox lasts 8 months now, so if I'm still in it I might not pop out until March...

The EMD at the top of my niche is genuinely an adsense site. It's possible they're using Ad Manager, that's the only way I can think that they're getting away with having a sticky ad.

I actually just discovered I have an Ad Manager account, but I have no idea what it is or how to use it, or why I have one. I think my ex-partner put DFP on my site years ago and I took it off again because it was earning me less than adsense.

I'm a bit out of my depth with this stuff...

[Malanje]

Till now I am getting 4% of I had done last year in January. Same sites, same content with necessary updates, same amp pages.
Organic traffic down, ctr down, cpc down (0.02Euros in some days.)

[Mentat]

Adsense is variable for me.
One promising day + 3 miserable days. This is the cycle.

The problem is Adx, where the big players (advertisers) are.
Here the problem is constant, about %50 reduction compared to December.

After 15 days, this January seem to be very close to the past year, in terms of revenue. (bad)

[fellow]

CPC drops today. Only me?

[Mentat]

Big drop in CPM/CPC...

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Media.Net gives me the same revenue as last months and remains stable comparing to Adsense. Google Ads revenue is miserable these days. 0,6-0,8 RPM... Hope that the things will improve after January.

[lakybel]

Big drop cpc and cpm.. traffic is increasing ..but revenu is low.

[lakybel]

cpc is get back better than yesterday

[fellow]

For me cpc worst than ever. Half than usually.

[RedBar]

For me cpc worst than ever. Half than usually.

Do you only get clicks from ONE country?

So far today my EPCs have gone from 4 cents per click to USD 2.45, the differenc being the lowest were from Trinidad and Tobago and the highest from the USA. Even a normally low-paying country like India EPCs can vary from 2-3 cents to 20-30 cents per click.

It's supposedly all in their black box and what advertisers are prepared to pay however when I see low-value German clicks I really do have to wonder at times!

[fellow]

Yes. It is USA. Today so far 14 cents CPC

[MayankParmar]

January is doing bad.

[NickMNS]

Today is looking like it is going to be my worst day since a long time (early October). All things considered (mainly that it is January) that is a positive statement.

[arnprsth]

Could you guys tell me your website name . I am from india . I am new to this website .I too have blog called <snip> . I am not making anything with this

[edited by: engine at 9:48 pm (utc) on Jan 19, 2019]
[edit reason] No specific sites, thanks [/edit]

[jrpfhc]

Last January (17) CPC was way down compared to December (17). This year, CPC is holding strong, but the CTR is 2/3 of what it usually is.

[Lame_Wolf]

I've notice they are using a new font today in the Adsense control panel. I don't like it.

[KaseyM]

Traffic is through the roof. AdX and the like are through the floor.

[broccoli]

Whilst I was wading through Ad Manager help pages I found a notice saying they are phasing out adsense text ads in favour of multimedia ads in January 2019, and that’s why ad colour styles are no longer working, because they will be applied automatically or by the advertiser.

Did anyone get informed about this? You would think they would send out an email to adsense users for something this significant!

Text ads are the main reason the rectangle ads have higher value than other ads. It might explain why ad revenue seems off right now.

[NickMNS]

After having a bad day a few days ago the subsequent two days were really good.

Also, AdSense has made more changes to the dashboard. Most noticeable is the font, biggest is how the side bar menu collapses. Not too bad.

[WhoKnows111]

January is bad... my RPM for yesterday is 60% down. Ridiculous since it's finance niche which is not seasonal.