September 2020 AdSense Earnings and Observations

Forum Moderators: martinibuster

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September 2020 AdSense Earnings and Observations

martinibuster

5:27 am on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

Be sure to download your earning records! Google is going to delete them soon and moving forward will only show you data from the last three years.

Good luck!
;)
Roger

BoredMeteor

2:07 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

9.4% clawback for August. The highest I've ever seen, and made even more disturbing given the paltry amount I earned overall and the atrocious CTR for the month. That's with no changes made compared to previous months, and following what had been one of my lowest clawbacks ever in July.

This year has been a nightmare on all fronts.

CommandDork

2:20 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

15% here, this even after running a whole month trial with all ads labeled "Sponsored Links" AND getting the green light on ad position, placement, and padding from an Adsense specialist by way of 1-on-1 consultation last week (havent had one of those in years!).

Needless to say, I took the labels off this morning. They apparently made little impact.

[edited by: CommandDork at 2:21 pm (utc) on Sep 1, 2020]

NickMNS

2:20 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

Higher clawback for August ~4%. But my RPM was the highest since January 2019. Hopefully this is sustained until the year end.

TravelMan

3:15 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

I'm wondering what to do.

Another month of 30% clawback after years of having to deal with a max 2% clawback.

Have blocked all manner of bots, countries that offer little value to the domain for some time now (way before all this #*$! started) and yet relatively recently, they've begun to take back a big chunk of reported earnings.

I have even began digging deep into logs and pruned low "time spent on page" IP addresses from log files for the past 3 months, and all are blocked in htaccess and yet still, these big clawbacks persist.

Organic traffic was up significantly from around March, due in the main to a big investment in improving what we have and good marketing - the big clawbacks started in May.

I'd contact them, but am concerned that I'll get nowhere and or risk getting the account banned for some reason that I've no influence or control over..

Been an Adsense customer for 17 years but know how these things can go south really quickly.

I even disabled auto ads. aafter a previous month where lower ad frequency made no difference, and yet to no avail, another big clawback today.

They should offer us more help as it's both depressing and a little stressy to say the least.

thewallman

3:55 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

TravelMan,

I'm in basically the same boat. 28% clawback this month after going through thousands of IPs and banning hundreds, setting up honeypot traps to quickly find and ban abusive IPs, giving ads a bit more padding and pre-allocating height to my units so the page isn't jumping around when ads load in. My traffic is 82% organic, 13% direct, rest is social.

I have contacted support a couple of times. At least in my case, they told me the countries with the highest IVT, as well as the ad units.

The advice given:

Utilize Google Analytics (or a similar tool) to assign a User-ID to each user ( [support.google.com...] ). From there you can narrow down suspicious users based on factors such as location or number of site requests. You can then cross reference this data with your server logs to identify IP addresses that could be responsible for the invalid traffic. A quick Google search should be able to assist with blocking particular IP addresses from your site that could be causing invalid traffic. See this article ( [support.google.com...] ) for help.

My plan this month is to run the sites through something like Cloudflare with fairly restrictive security settings, and see if that makes a difference. I spent way too much time last month trying to fix this with no effect.

JorgeV

8:57 pm on Sep 1, 2020 (gmt 0)

Hello,

You should block all IPs which belong to Data center. Since I did it, my claw back is nearly gone (~ 0.1, 0.2%), last month I had 0% clawback, and the month before, I even had a finalized earning slightly above the monthly estimation (!)

thewallman

2:03 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

JorgeV,

That was effectively what I was trying to do last month - but IP by IP. I can now block by ASN which should be quite a bit more effective. Did you have a specific list of hosting companies that you blocked, or did you just block the most popular?

MayankParmar

5:21 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

High clawback: 8%

Literally lost all the additional income I made last month because of this clawback.

I haven't made any changes to the site ad placements in three years. How come the clawback increased from 2 to 8%? That too when I have Sucuri firewall which is preventing invalid traffic.

This is getting annoying.

Lisa01

8:36 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

This has been happening a lot lately with several publishers. I'm pretty sure Google is up to something because this just doesn't look natural.

robzilla

8:53 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

4% here. Above average but nothing unusual. I don't block any traffic apart from the most obvious user agents.

That too when I have Sucuri firewall which is preventing invalid traffic.

Clearly, it isn't :-) "Invalid traffic" is an AdSense term, covering "intentionally fraudulent traffic as well as accidental clicks" (definition [support.google.com]). Sucuri mostly prevents hacking attempts. I suspect you may be overestimating the protection they offer.

[edited by: robzilla at 8:56 am (utc) on Sep 2, 2020]

TravelMan

8:56 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

@wallman here's the thing, if they (google) don't value traffic from countries like say, Nigeria for instance (sorry Nigerians), then they could do their own IP detection and determine whether or not it's of value to ad serve and block at source. Shifting the emphasis on to the publisher is a bit of a cop out and rife for abuse and puts the publisher into a state of constant fire fighting.

I've added a little referer based blocking too. If FB or (list of social) then pagead.google script isn't shown and no ads appear but again it's a bit whackamole

Would you mind sharing the countries with the highest IVT via PM or something? I'm pretty much going to ramp up blocking today.

@JorgeV can you possibly elaborate what you mean by "data center" Google's, Bings' or something else?

JorgeV

11:00 am on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

Hello,

Did you have a specific list of hosting companies that you blocked

This is the AS I block. I didn't put the owner's name, I don't know if this is against the TOS. Also, I do not guarantee this list, it's possible I am catching false positive too. so if you use it, use it with great caution, and don't take me liable for any side effects.

kegnum

1:42 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

how are you blocking by ASN?

not2easy

1:57 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

Just a quick note here, this thread is the monthly AdSense Earnings and Observations discussion and it seems to have drifted off into a discussion about data centers, UAs and blocking techniques. Those discussions belong in our S E Spider and User Agent Identification [webmasterworld.com] forum.

The search function (upper right for desktop) can help you find lots of this kind of information much faster. If you'd like, we can split off this part of the discussion to a separate thread, just drop a report (from the Msg# dropdown) and it will be done at our earliest available time slot. ;)

thewallman

2:11 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

@JorgeV - Thank you so much for that list. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you sharing exactly what worked for you.

@not2easy - Sorry :D

On the topic of earnings, once October hits I'll be able to let everyone know how the ASN blocking went. I'd be happy with anything < 10% clawback at this point.

gatormark

3:21 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

[adrevenueindex.ezoic.com...]

This suggests ad rates are back to the pre-pandemic level.

Yes, for me, the numbers seem to be reaching pre-pandemic times. CPC has gone up almost 50% from the pandemic lows. Adsense numbers seem to be rising the most. My other advertisers are lagging far behind. Now, if I can only regain my traffic which has been killed with the school and university closings.

ronron

4:01 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

I had only 3.3% clawback last month. For every month since August 2019, I've been getting 20-35% clawbacks. I mentioned this in another thread, but blocking ASN's is the way to go. What I do is to use Cloudflare's firewall and create a rule for all the ASN's.

Here is a sample of what is blocked:

1) data centers
2) a lot of crawlers. Ones that I believe are executing scripts are blocked, as they are likely rendering AdSense ads.
3) VPN's and proxies. Some users have complained about this, but in my case, it was a very small minority.
4) Cloud SaaS: Amazon AES, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. You won't believe how many malicious bots and crawlers exist on these platforms. I manually allow - based on useragent - the good ones and block the rest.

Lisa01

5:43 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

@gatormark, but the US schools have already reopened, right?

gatormark

6:05 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

@gatormark, but the US schools have already reopened, right?

Many schools have opened. More should be opening up this month. However, most of the learning is virtual.

As far as colleges and universities, many have not reopened.

gatormark

6:32 pm on Sep 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

5.2% Clawback. Lower than normal for me.

gatormark

12:40 am on Sep 5, 2020 (gmt 0)

For the first 4 days of September, my Adsense revenue is even with September of last year. That's the first time that's happened in a long time. I hope it holds up.

MayankParmar

6:33 am on Sep 5, 2020 (gmt 0)

September is not off to a good start but it'll eventually improve hopefully.

Mentat

8:44 am on Sep 5, 2020 (gmt 0)

Labour day week-end.
All down...

nomis5

10:02 pm on Sep 6, 2020 (gmt 0)

Adsense income 108% up on the same period this month last year. Affiliates approaching 250% increase over the last year.

August clawback is 2.5% - a bit higher than normal.

UK informational, hobby site - no sales at all, just adverts and affiliates.

Coronavirus has been the main driver in the increased earnings. People are turning to the hobby I specialise in.

Mentat

11:17 am on Sep 7, 2020 (gmt 0)

This Monday is very low, as expected.

MayankParmar

11:30 am on Sep 7, 2020 (gmt 0)

Both traffic and earnings are low.

Runfun

7:37 pm on Sep 7, 2020 (gmt 0)

I reduced Adsense to a minimum in almost a decade of using it because of being fraudulent:

- fake ads with famous people promoting stuff and businesses;
- very low quality ads;
- blank ads;
- not able to get in contact with this company;
- huge clawbacks since the covid outbreak...

Adsense is near dead.

MayankParmar

7:40 pm on Sep 9, 2020 (gmt 0)

what is this json id thing?

CommandDork

7:54 pm on Sep 9, 2020 (gmt 0)

Nothing's really known about the json thing just yet...

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