April 2020 AdSense Earnings and Observations

Here We Go Again Again!

[Pistoche]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4986142.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 2:40 am on Apr 1, 2020 (utc -5)

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Things are all over the place for me. Since March 25ish, my Google Analytics sessions and page views/impressions don't match my other analytics tool (analytics tool is showing twice as many sessions as Google Analytics). The two analytics tools used to be fairly consistent before then. As others mentioned, CPC has halved since January, but my page views have quadrupled according to one analytics tool (and doubled according to Google Analytics). All in all I'm doing fairly well but something seriously weird is going on.

[Runfun]

Mentat, Ad Manager is empty when you start using it ;-)

Due to the poor performance of Adsense I've switched to rotating affiliate ads for the first 5 impressions each slot each unique visitor. The literally 5 to 10 euros a day with more than 4K unique visitors a day isn't worth using Adsense much when affiliates pay 30 to 60 each lead/sale.

[Frost_Angel]

Is there any evidence that G**gle throttles adsense earnings? Or does convenient "clawbacks" to pad their side of earnings? Every time my site starts earning well... the earnings are clawed back or the stats get stuck. Traffic doesn't change... location of traffic doesn't change... I'm just trying to figure it out.

[ember]

Things are definitely out of whack. One day RPM is almost normal, the next day down by half, the next day almost normal, then half again.

I think stats are sticking and then the numbers are being added to the next day’s numbers. Or something.

[gatormark]

Today is horrendous!

[Sissi]

Expect zero revenues at some stage
I m wondering that I still making small revenues.
The situation is even worse than ever economically hopefully this will give a huge opportunity for our online business.

I would use this time to improve the quality of the websites so that we are ready one the global situation improves.

Take care all

[MayankParmar]

CPC and RPM are down, while traffic is all-time high. I love how AdSense rate drops every time when there is an increase in traffic, clicks, impressions from tier 1 countries - US, UK.

[Runfun]

MayankParmar just Google at Covid 19 or coronavirus, maybe you missed something lately.

[MayankParmar]

I know, but the rate drops almost every time when traffic is high.

[ember]

Reports say that I am getting normal ad impressions for April, but the review center says that I am getting no ad impressions for April. I see the ads on my sites, but the review center apparently does not.

[gatormark]

The end is nigh.

[ember]

Hang on. This too shall pass. It’s just going to take a little time.

[gatormark]

Since COVID-19 (in three weeks), my Exponential ad revenue has gone from $45-50 a day to $5-7 a day. Adsense has dropped 45% during that same time...and I don't think we've hit bottom.

[ember]

I’ve noticed something interesting. When the stock market goes up, my RPM goes up. When the market crashes, my RPM crashes. I wonder if it will hold this week. Dow futures are up so tomorrow might be a decent day.

[Saver]

First post here, but been publishing Adsense since 04 as a Canadian Publisher. Getting rekt over here. I noticed someone mentioned as soon as you send large traffic, the ads tend to dump even more, get shaved, rpm's drop, so much that all that traffic you sent becomes pointless. This also is happening to me. I have a very large newsletter subscriber list, massive push notification list and a very large community on Facebook. As soon as I drive traffic from those tiers, my CTR become stagnant. For example I could already have 5k uniques that day and made a measly $40 (thats what 5k uniques in my niche gets me now, where before it was around 150-200 a day from 5k uniques) anyways; I send another 5k traffic and the revenue I get from the mass of people flocking to my site will result in half of what was made from the previous traffic that was already sent.

I was in chats with Google a week or so ago and they "took a deep dive" into my ads and found nothing. However they came back saying that my niche got hit really hard for drops in RPM. I am in the Shopping Deals, Coupons, Freebies, Contests niche, where really there are no advertisers to publish for atm.

However I am left to believe something else is in play here. I would love to share my data but I simply can't. So instead I will share small bits of info in this thread for the remainder of the month.

As we sit and want to blame Covid for the fall of all this, we can, but truly this all started at the beginning of the year for most publishers. I had days back in January that were lower revenue then days during this covid stuff. Christmas was always our lowest revenue day of the year, well we have many days in Jan, Feb and March that are all lower then our lowest revenue Christmas days.

I will share more in the coming weeks. Stay safe and healthy everyone, google don't care if you're dead or alive, so lets all just make sure we're keeping ourselves alive so that we can collect our 68% payouts.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

where really there are no advertisers to publish

The advertiser inventory is no longer related to the niche, since most of ads are served as a Internet based ads. You can visit a site about cooking, and see ads for sports, because your "online profile" suggests this is interesting to you.

[Saver]

Yes this is very true. However my traffic is very loyal to shopping. We are selling more items now then what we are getting in ad clicks which is astounding. I ran a test the other day with Personalized vs Contextual Ads and well I learned turning off Personalized Ads for my account did absolutely nothing, as they still ran more then 70% personalized ads on my website. The same spread that was days prior to turning off personalized ads on my Adsense account. It's almost as if Adsense network is running in Safety Mode.

[breeks]

Since I am in the travel/events/tickets niche this will be the first time in 15 years that I will not make the April min payment of $100.00.

[Saver]

I also came across Netflix ads with invalid SSL certificates running on the Adsense Network. The adwords account publishing these Netflix ads is unblockable as well. Check this out.

The SSL error from Avast:
[imgur.com...]

Here is what it looks like on the Ad Block Page
[imgur.com...]

If you go into your blocking controls page and start looking at Ads published within the last 3 days, you will get zero impression stats.

[Mentat]

The funny thing is that my coverage is up, the bad news is that the eCPM/CPC is down the drain.

[worker]

Stats stuck?

[scottb]

Since I am in the travel/events/tickets niche this will be the first time in 15 years that I will not make the April min payment of $100.00.

The revenue for my travel guide, which had a record month in January, is down 95%.

Otherwise, all is good here. I'm sure people will start flying and cruising again in no time...

[worker]

I'm very confused by what I'm seeing today and I thought I would see other people say 'yes, the stats look stuck' when I asked previously.

When I woke, my Adsense revenue was X (which was really low for that time of day) and within a few hours, it was 2X (which was much more in line with what is the normal Adsense revenue for that time of day). I thought there had probably been a temporary glitch but that things were on track for normal (normal being a significantly reduced daily revenue, but not jump off the cliff levels).

A few hours later, the revenue had dropped back to basically X plus revenue from a few clicks, so now things looked really bad again (and about 1/3 of the clicks that had been there disappeared and the RPM dropped by about 80%). That is when I asked if people thought stats were stuck.

Since then I've seen page views increase and impressions increase and clicks increase (all in very small amounts and not typical with what I tend to see). Revenue and RPM are horrible right now.

So back to the original question. Is anyone seeing delays on their Adsense stats, or is everyone seeing reporting that they think is working, even if it is low?

[ember]

Worker, reporting stats seem okay today, but apparently yesterday hardly anyone clicked on ads. I'm also getting no impressions according to the review center. So things feel out of whack

[Pistoche]

My stats have held steady this entire month, yesterday was inline with the rest of the days of April. Revenue has been down since the start of the year, but it has been consistent every day this month, including yesterday.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Was in loneliness thinking of what to do now) And suddenly decided to get back to forum to see how's the things are happening for others. It became a sad threat of forum, I must say)). As I see most of us seeing incredibly low RPM... and lowest traffic... I'm hoping that all this sh...t with this virus will end in a month. But I doubt that the economics will recover in such fast way, so I have a reason to believe that we'll be facing with such low income much more than 1 month...

[Saver]

Yes I have a feeling this will drag out quite a bit longer then expected. However if you published ads around 2008, you would know of what can happen when it all bounces back. And that is sky high RPM's and CPC's.

BTW yesterday I watched about XX get removed through out the day. Same ad positions as its been for years. I've been thinking about using auto ads. But I simply put way to much time and thought into placements of Adsense ads prior to auto ads, that it baffles me the placements Auto Ads runs, which just over 2 years ago, would of gotten you banned from the network, as auto ads will put large square ads above the fold, massive double high leaderboard ads smeared all over desktop views. I don't think switching to auto ads will do me any good. Other then the vignette ad, which runs at extremely high CTR's such as 15% with mid range XX rpm's... Just imagine if we made an ad placement ourselves that performed that well...

Ive taken a deeper dive into my ads then what any Google Email Support would, and I have noticed that Text Ads are paying double the amount of HTML/IMAGE ads. However there is no way to run only text ads anymore. It would seem that Google is the only one allowed to use text ads to smother their search results with confusing, matching style text ad units.

As much as everyone praised auto ads. It really only helps the ones that know nothing about how to design/develop their own websites. Just another great service being ruined, by being over tailored for folks that have no clue what they are doing.

[ember]

I, too, have spent years finding the best ad placements. Then I tried auto ads. The result? Earnings crashed. So back to manual placement. Vignettes are the only auto ads that work.

[Runfun]

Google is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for advertisers using Google Ads. I received a mail that advertisers will get free cheques within the next month's. But I'm cautious because there's no such thing as a free lunch. They will get it back with claw backs or what ever ;-)

[deriklogov]

@Ember , do you know if "Vignettes" ads are only triggered when you clicking internal links or it does apply for external as well ?

[gatormark]

I never rely completely on Google placing my ads. That has always led to decreased earnings for me. I have 3 ad locations that I always use and then I let Google place other ads as they wish. That seems to work well. I get a lot of clicks even as the amount spent on ads decreases. I work on page speed optimization because ads slow down pages and I use two sources of ad revenue: Adsense and Exponential.