AdSense Earnings and Observations - December 2022

[dolcevita]

November final earnings 12% lower than October. But it's no wonder because RPM is 10% and CPC is 8% lower than last month.
I hope that December will be better.

[Pixby8]

Anyone else seeing impressions fall off a cliff this past week? My page views are the same, but impressions are down by more than half.

[ubound]

I don't even check anything at this time of the year, for me everything falls off the cliff around December 10-15 and continues until around January 7

[Calisto997]

I think it is same for everyone,I was averaging around 600-800€ per day then suddenly last 4 days went down to 250-350€ CPC is awful

[robzilla]

It's to be expected, most of the Christmas shopping is done by now and many advertising budgets will be spent. RPM is now on par with early November for me. Nothing lasts forever, folks :-)

[Mentat]

Anyone else seeing impressions fall off a cliff this past week? My page views are the same, but impressions are down by more than half.

Depending on the demographic, it means that there is no ads offers for a lot of your visitors.

This is common for non-US traffic.

[Pixby8]

My traffic is all U.S. based though, and this time last year I didn't experience a fall off like this. Seemed rather abrupt, is all. I guess I'll see if it improves in January like some of you experience.

[Mentat]

My traffic is also US/Canada based, that's why this abrupt cut in eCPM does not have any sense historically, except maybe recession.
If so, January-March 2023 will be much worse.

[Breathofair33]

Last few days CPC has increased. Seems AdSense inventory premium is up for my sites before EOY. (US traffic).

[robzilla]

PIP! Probably MIB tomorrow. Merry Christmas everyone :-)

[Soulofmonk]

Stats so far(December 22nd)
18.70% down vs Nov '22
36.24 down vs Dec '21.
No change in traffic. A disappointed Q4.

Happy Holidays!

[eriky]

Things are going better. It looks like high-quality advertisers are back all of a sudden. This is in the tech/programming sector.

[engine]

I haven't found any good news in the stats, so far, but i'm hopeful for the new year. This period between Christmas and New Year used to show an up-tick, but i've not yet seen that. Inventory appears poor, and, because of that the clicks are very poor.

I have a very strong feeling that the site has lost its rankings it's had since I started with AdSense the program came out in 2003.

[Mentat]

Well, nothing good this x-mas.
Now os really down, only crappy ads, but the traffic is not that bad.

Prepare for ‘23!

[robzilla]

Same pattern as last year for me. There's always a post-Christmas dip. Doesn't usually recover until early/mid January.

[magician]

Revenue down 22% wrt last Dec even though pageviews are slightly up. I am worried about Jan which historically is much worse than Dec for us.

[engine]

For those of you that missed ChatGPT discussion because you only visit this thread, we have a few threads around this site. Here's just a few for you to get your teeth into.


[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[dolcevita]

For the last 7 days the CPC has been #*$! awfully low. In the circle, where the average is currently around +/- 10 cents per click, it is on the verge of despair.

[Calisto997]

Yeah,for me as well, CPC went down like 40%

[dolcevita]

I have actually come to the conclusion that the low CPC for the last 7 days is due to increased traffic from India; both in terms of page views and in terms of CPC.
I just put all of India on 'Managed challenge' with Cloudflare. If this tendency continues for the next 5 days, I am thinking of blocking India for a certain period of time.

btw
Just added an extra layer to check traffic from India with threat score equal or higher than 5.

[robzilla]

If the increase in Indian traffic reduces your average CPC, that's not necessarily a bad thing is it? That should only increase revenue, if only marginally when CPC is low there.

Assuming your content can still be of value to those people in India, why not simply disable ads for them instead of giving them a challenge? That way they don't affect your stats and you're actually improving the user experience rather than worsening it.

[dolcevita]

You're right robzilla, but I want to see first if the spike in traffic and clicks from India is the result of bots or not. 2 hours ago I set CF managed challenge and the result at this moment is CSR 21%.

GA shows that traffic from India compared to the same day last week was:
- 26.12 (since then the increase started) was increased by 34%.
- 27.12 increase by 83%.
- 28.12 increase by 113%.
- 29.12 increase by 155%

As for disabling ads only for visitors from India (or any other country), I don't know if there is any easy, say 5-10 minute implementation method, or maybe I'm just not well-informed?

[robzilla]

CSR 21%

Keep in mind that a fair share of human visitors will simply not bother, go back to the SERPs (if that's where they came from) and click a different result.

if there is any easy, say 5-10 minute implementation method

Depends on how your site is constructed. Mine is custom so I just added a GeoIP check in PHP (stored in the session at the first page request).

There are actually 120+ countries I don't show any ads to because it's simply not worth it. I lose out on maybe $50/month but thousands of visitors get a better user experience.

[OldFaces]

Is everyone here just Adsense or do folks use Google Ad Manager (ad server)? I ask because Ad Server has stopped reporting impressions for today 12/30/2022 since around midnight PT. This is the fourth time Google's ad server has had issues with reporting impressions. On 8/31 reporting was delayed for a month for 8/30-8/31, and on 11/15 Ad impressions were delayed by a number of hours, and on 12/8 ads just didn't display for 3.5 hours and were completely lost for Google.com and publishers.

Oh looks like they are finally aware: [ads.google.com...]

Sigh...time to look for an ad server alternative it seems. Kinda like I'm feeling almost forced to find a GA4 substitute for analytics. Boy how times have changed.

[Breathofair33]

GA4 - similar issues. Very erratic and never recall GA being this bad in 10 years.
Oh AdSense still pitiful. Looking foward to 2023.

[allhearts]

Traffic remains high for me post Christmas, but RPM, CTR and CPC have really taken a dive, low inventory I guess?

[not2easy]

The January thread continues here: [webmasterworld.com...]