Adsense revenues 'disappearing'

Every week or so, large portion of revenues disappear...

[mertero]

Hello.

I have been active with Adsense for many years. In the last couple of months, every week or so my revenues seem to decline - historically. This mostly happens on one site.

The numbers here are just made up, but you'll get the idea -

Say my earnings were 100$ per day each day for this site for the past week, suddenly I enter my account and instead of $100 per day I see something like $0.5 per day. This happens all the time - revenues for this site is down around 90% from what it used to be 3 months ago, as most revenues are just deleted.

I don't see any messages, or anything, from Adsense itself.

Can anyone explain this?

Ron

[robzilla]

Pageviews and impressions are steady?

[mertero]

Yes, pageviews and impressions are quite steady.

It is strange - I built a report that shows impressions, page-views and earnings over the last 3 months. During most of November and part of December, earnings are just flat almost 0, while everything else is steady...

[mertero]

I just did some more checks. Some of my other sites also suffer from the strange behavior... weeks of almost 0 earnings...

[robzilla]

You don't normally see revenue decline for a week or so and then normalize again. Maybe reach out to AdSense support?

[NickMNS]

The same issue is described here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The solution was to implement a correct cookie consent banner, AdSense offers a banner solution integrated with auto-ads I recommend that.

Note that impressions are not impacted by this, the impact is best seen by checking your "coverage" metric. Typically coverage should be up well above 90%, low coverage and/or a sudden drop in coverage would suggest that there is an issue with ad-serving and the Cookie consent would be the first fix to try.

[mertero]

Thank you Nick. I have checked, and I serve only non-personalized ads in the EU region... but maybe I am still doing something wrong. I will study Cookie Consent, let's see. Although for me the situation is a bit different, the revenue is counted, but then deleted after a week or so... it's really strange. I wonder why Google does not alert us on such things as revenue disappearing?

[Sissi]

I know real time clawback and end of the month clawback but after one week , never seen this within 15 years with Adsense …..
Talk to your account manager if you have one
Good luck

[robzilla]

Ah, I see. My guess would be corrections for invalid clicks, but maybe ask the support team to be sure.

We may make adjustments to your estimated or finalized earnings to account for invalid impressions or clicks, which means that we may remove earnings from your payable balance. Invalid activity may be caused by issues with traffic sources or ad implementation. We recommend that you review AdSense policies: a beginner's guide and tips for preventing invalid activity for more information.

We reserve the right to adjust a publisher’s earnings in the case that an advertiser who advertised on their site defaults on payment.

To maintain the integrity of our invalid activity detection system and prevent users from circumventing the system, we aren't able to provide details about how much was adjusted per day or per channel. Please know that we have these invalid activity protections in place to keep our network of AdSense sites a safe and useful environment for advertisers, publishers, and users.

Home page reports: understand your earnings [support.google.com]

See also:
Clicks and earnings removed from your reports [support.google.com]
How you can help to prevent invalid traffic [support.google.com]

[mertero]

I also thought it was invalid clicks. But these are reported in the payment page, and are much lower. Also, I don't think it makes sense to drop revenues from around $100 to almost zero per day... for 3 weeks in a row...

I don't have an account manager. I will try to contact support...

[DuckyJ]

I have noticed a decline in my earnings since Christmas day. I am new to Adsense and have been using it for six months only, so I am taking this as possible advertisers not putting much in the spending until the middle to end of this month or more.

However, reading this thread, I realize I do not have a cookie consent pop-up. My site isn't based in the EU or for the EU, but I have 30% of my traffic, mainly from Germany and France. I have a privacy policy and cookie policy page. Is this enough? And I use WordPress. Can a simple cookie notice be enough, or do I need to have the complete opt-in opt-out and no cookies until accepted?

Any advice would be great. Sorry to hijack the thread.

[Sissi]

If you have 30pc of traffic from the EU Adsense will soon ask you to put a consent that is available under Ad Manager to setup.

Otherwise they may close your account

[mertero]

Hello all.

So I tried to reach AdSense, but I don't have a way to contact support. I posted in the AdSense community forums, but got no reply. As earnings are almost 0, I am trying to move to other ad vendors, this is something I wanted to do for a while as we're trying to move away from other Google solutions as well, and it makes sense now.

I will update if I have any news or if I manage to fix the adsense account. Note that on some days the earnings return to normal, and then on some days it is again 1/100 of what we consider normal...

Ron

[edited by: not2easy at 4:32 pm (utc) on Jan 14, 2022]
[edit reason] split/splice cleanup [/edit]

[robzilla]

So I tried to reach AdSense, but I don't have a way to contact support.

Sorry, used to be able to contact them via Help > Contact Us, but all I get now is the Community option.

Looks like many posts on the forum never get a reply. Frustrating!

[mertero]

I agree Robzilla. I think us publishers deserve better, we have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in Adsense over the years, you'd think we'd be able to contact support once in 10 years or so, no? :-)

[Sissi]

According to Adsense:

If your weekly earnings consistently meet our minimum requirement, you'll be eligible for email support, which you can request via a form in the Help Centre. Note that publishers earning any YouTube revenue on their AdSense accounts aren't eligible for email support via AdSense, and should visit the YouTube Help Centre.

Eligible publishers will find a contact form by clicking the ‘Contact us’ button on any page of our Help Centre. Your email will be answered by one of our support specialists within two working days (sometimes longer during holidays).

[robzilla]

According to Adsense:

Do you have a Google source for that? I think they may have changed that policy, can't find it anywhere.

[Sissi]

@robzilla
I copy pasted this from somewhere there was a source but cannot find it anymore.
Fact is that either you can you the feedback bottom in your adsense account or directly your counterpart at adsense if you have been contacted directly by them in the past to optimise your ads setup.
I suppose this assumes that your account generates „sufficient“ revenues for Adsense to „look“ at it that you have „clean“ records.

[Sissi]

Nevertheless this Sunday is the lowest in terms of revenues I have ever seen.