December 2020 AdSense Earnings and Observations

And so it begins Again Again Again Again!

[martinibuster]

AdSense earnings... here we go!

[IndyMattR]

Are Adsense reports delayed?

Mine is ok today.

[JorgeV]

Hello,

Stats seem to work here. December continues on the good trend that I am observing sine summer. So far so good. For how long, only god know, and ma be not.

[gatormark]

@JorgeV

Yes, December is going well. Up 12% from last year for me (USA). It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the normal post-Christmas advertising blues. Last year, it was worse than normal for me. Hopefully the November and December uptick will continue after Christmas.

[worker]

Adsense stuck for anyone?

[NickMNS]

Here is a good one. A few years back I worked on a project with a friend, we put together an amp only website, launched it and it basically flopped. We left it running for more than a year and then finally decided to take it down. We deleted all the files and killed the server. Typing the domain into the browser today returns nothing. The site is as dead as dead can be. The Adsense account was kept alive, in the event that we wanted to start another project.

But this week we got the "November Report" email from AdSense, "Your revenue grew in November. Nice Job!". Whah? We actually earned a small amount of revenue. We are guessing that this is because some of the AMP pages must still be included in Google's AMP cache. But remember, the site has been dead for over a year.

To put this ridiculousness into perspective, I have a secondary website that is live but that doesn't get much traffic, specially since Covid. It earned less than the dead site.

[NickMNS]

Well after further investigation the above is not the case. It turns out that the ad-code for the account was put on pages of a different active website in order to keep the account active, but then we forgot that we did that, or some of we (me) was never informed. Live and learn.

[ember]

I wonder if the usual post-Christmas drop will happen in January. With the vaccine comes hope, and businesses are eager to get back on track. There will be pent up demand for things that have been postponed - travel, hotels, dining out, in-store shopping in general - and advertisers will want to capitalize on it. Maybe the 1st quarter of 2021 will be better than it normally is.

[fearlessrick]

My ads all vanished. Anybody else?

[Lisa01]

Yes, even for me. I am panicking right now. There's no policy error or anything. Even the other ad network that i was using isn't displaying ads.

[fearlessrick]

LIsa, what other ad network? Also, I am seeing Adsense on my other sites, just not my main site.

[Lisa01]

Same for me. The ads are not appearing on my main site, that makes me some money.

[fearlessrick]

Is your site controversial or opposed to Democrats or anything that could cause you to be in violation? Are you hosted by HostGator? I am.

[Lisa01]

No no. Nothing controversial. And there's no policy violation notification as well. What about your site? What is it based on?

[MayankParmar]

Everything is normal here. Temporary issues can happen.. have you guys checked your ads using a different browser, OS or ISP?

[fearlessrick]

Oh, I'm all over the place, some controversy, some sports, politics, money, business.

Im noticing some ads appearing on some pages. Wondering if it's a new algo rolling out and maybe they're having inventory issues. Mostly, though, no ads. And I don't have policy violations either. You know there's a lot of hacking going on, so that's a possibility too, of google being hacked, not our sites, but affecting us.

Well, I have things to do. Don't panic. Worst thing you can do. I'll be back online in a few hours. Keeping fingers crossed.

[fearlessrick]

Just checked on Safari. Same as on chrome.

[Lisa01]

Same for me as well. Ads not appearing anywhere. Thanks for the reassurance, @fearlessrick. Keeping fingers crossed.

[fearlessrick]

Aha, mine are back. Told you not to panic, Lisa. Glitch? A disturbance in the force?
We will never know. Good luck and Merry Christmas.

[Lisa01]

Ads are back. It was the GDPR issue of the other ad network.

[Lisa01]

Good luck to you too, Rick. And Merry Christmas

[fearlessrick]

Thanks. Glad it worked out for you.

[dollarsound]

Are your reports delayed today?

[CommandDork]

My reports are just catching up from the outage this morning, so I guess delayed in a way.

My "inside man" explained to me that the provider of the Content Management Platform (CMP) used for GDPR rolled out an update last night that caused ads for many to not be shown for hours. They eventually rolled back the update to have ads be shown again. Back to the drawing board for them I guess.

[Lisa01]

Yes CommanDork, that's exactly what happened

[dollarsound]

@commandork, my impressions are just gone. It's like they took away 30% of the page views according to analytics. Today it seems to be running fine.

Would you mine to explain a little bit more about CMP they use for GDPR? I don't understand what you mean. For the record, impressions missing yesterday were in countries where there is no GDPR, though my CMP is also being called there.

[gatormark]

Last week the GREAT numbers started to taper off. This is the week that my Adsense numbers start to lose steam and bottom out. School is out (important for me) and the Christmas money dries up. However, I'm still up 31% over the past week and a half over last year's numbers. I'm hoping this bodes well for 2021.

[CommandDork]

@dollarsound

The way I understand it, the ad provider I'm using alongside Adsense is using Quantcast's GDPR/California solution ahead of their ad delivery to my site(s). As that went down for them due to a botched overnight update, no ads showed for me (and others) during that overnight stretch - and this included any direct Adsense ads I use alongside them as it all got delayed/not shown by whatever GDPR/California solution they use.

FYI - This ad provider is a Certified Google Publisher.

The only sites affected for me were ones using this ad provider. My other sites using just straight-up Adsense were not affected at all.

[Lisa01]

You're absolutely right, CommandDork. I was given the same explanation by my other ad provider.

[MayankParmar]

Can we see our lifetime earnings on AdSense after the classic/old data is removed?

[IndyMattR]

Can we see our lifetime earnings on AdSense after the classic/old data is removed?

If you mean in reports, then I think it will only go back 3 yrs.

I've been using Adsense since 2006 so quite a chunk missing for me after the change.