CPC has been dropping all month long. Down about 25% compared to last month.

I'm simply fed-up of all this mularky with Google ... For the first time in years I've changed all my settings, if this doesn't change things either up or down then why even bother having the options?

Why have I done this?

Tonight stood in a bar I was reading the BBC News financial site, I then went to one of my very small and very specialised niche widget sites to show a friend a "widget", and lo and behold a freakin' financial ad ... that has absolutely nofreakin'relevance to my sites!

Ok, so I had been on the BBC financial site, what's that got to do with my widgets?

It may have relevance to you Google and my "previous viewing" but not to my sites since I had not even SEARCHED for "financial stuff" ... I can feel a very rapid divorce coming on here, you are now stalking my random viewing, period!

This was NOT IBA stuff ... this is personal tracking of a very invasive nature and, I have to tell you all, this was not on an Android device, it was on a Lumia Win8!

Google you are becoming irrelevant to everything I do and I sure as hell do not need you.

I do see that a bit, and it does irk me but worse, I keep seeing ads for house removals. I have not looked up info on moving, looked at real estate, talked about moving house to anybody, I can't fathom why they'd show me that.

I liked the old days when you looked at car websites and saw ads for car sales, you looked at a dog website and saw ads for flea products or pet food, you looked at a recipe site and saw ads for supermarkets/grocery stores. My CTR was much better when the ads shown actually related to the niche of my site too.

Dire for the last few days. I'm thinking of removing a few slots as they are just wasting space at this stage.

Regards...jmcc

CPC (RPM) bounced back today and is holding.

Google AdSense is still following my browsing history. I'm not sure how long the ads will continue to show after you have looked at a particular website. Mind you, I see watch adverts on nearly every site I go to if they got Google AdSense.

Probably speaking too soon but this month has been a lot better than I expected and if the last 10 days return the same daily averages I have been getting I will have the best month ever which is really strange as the summer months tend to be the worst time of the year for me.

Interestingly on the BBC website is an article which says Google's revenue improved during the last quarter because of demand for advertising: [bbc.co.uk...]

Days upon days of pathetic. I'm probably about an average Adsense publisher, but to me, it's pretty much a collapse. I'm finding not just Adsense sucking, pretty much all those links that are supposed to make money simply are not. Adsense was for me the steady. No longer. I guess I'm getting disgusted at webmastering these days. Sometimes you look at years of work and realize it's a worthless pile of S. Up next is the continuation of removing ads, shutting down projects and sites. Aside from that, it's a fantastic summer!

Basically everything is predictable. Not complaints this month.

The only predictable thing about AdSense is its unpredictability and especially so when "things" are seemingly looking "normal".

My daily earning's fluctuations are so wild these days it's become pointless believing anything.

Heading for my worst month in years. This month obviously is beyond description. I'm sure there is an exclusive club that's relishing as always but certainly joe average such as myself is pretty much DEAD at this game. It's one thing to lose your audience but on top of that to lose money generating ads? That expression "time well spent" amounts to "time wasted". Not done, but this chapter is quickly coming to a close for myself.

as we all can see things are going bad with adsense...anyone have a better alternative?

The only thing that has come close for me (and it's a very distant close) is media.net. But it only works if you really have boatloads of traffic. On sites with under 10k sessions a day, it doesn't do much for me.

If I was to look at my earnings on a graph measuring a time period of about one year, they would look like an inverted V. This month earnings will be a quarter of what they were four months ago. I don't think I can optimise it for Google AdSense any better than what is at the moment. I think some of it has got to do with traffic, 3 months ago I was getting 3400 hits every day according to Google analytics, now it's averaging between 2000 & 2800. I've checked my keywords and they all seem to be as strong as they ever were. It's very difficult to accept, but if I'm truthful with myself, I'm just not getting the amount of clicks I was a few months ago. The amount of clicks I get on a daily basis now is averaging between 40 & 50, when I was earning good money, the clicks were often 80, or even over 100.

I can surmise with my situation that it's ad relevancy (lack of) and awful looking rectangles which reek of THIS IS AN AD. A double dose of loser points. I don't need to analyze any further than that. It tanked. I'm sure image ads are okay and at times I see text ads on other sites with no rectangles. I might be a chosen one for experimental or rubbish ads. Seems logical considering there are some who are rising above the average joes like me.

I'll update with good news hopefully as this month nears conclusion. Wow I hope so.

It's true that not every publisher has been seeing the same ad format over the last year or so. After about a month of not seeing URL's in my ads, suddenly they're back with the little favicon next to them. This makes it hard to compare and also draw conclusions unless you're paying close attention to the different ad styles people are seeing on their site. Right now, I'm seeing rounded rectangles for example. They seem to perform better than the plain square ones but I'm not sure everyone is even seeing the same thing so who knows? Working with these ads styles is far more complex (design-wise) than the old ad formats with underlined hyperlinks and the job isn't any easier when the format changes without notice.

I've never seen a month where stats were so delayed. Every day for the last week+ Google has been "reporting" that 75% (approx.) of my clicks are happening in the last few hours of the day which is completely false. Seen no dip in earnings, but intraday info has been terrible.

Yea, I've noticed I seem to get a late night bump every day too - even on non-peak days.

And just received the nightly click dump. Thanks Google!

What a love hate love relationship I'm having with Adsense. Today I've blown the doors off any day this past week or two. Today I love, but what will tomorrow bring?

Why is it whenever I enable text/img ads -- at the constant prompting of Adsense -- my CPC craters?

It's SO irritating.

Why would CPC DROP? They're constantly telling me to ENABLE text/img so improve my EPC. Doesn't happen. EVER.

CTR hasn't even really dropped, which usually happens with image ads!

Baffling, annoying. Time to go back to all text.

I'm going to try an interesting experiment. My highest paying ad unit is a 160 x 600 skyscraper. At the moment I have it on text/images. I'm going to switch to text only for a week and see what happens.

Mind you, I know what will happen, my optimisation level drop-down to one, and I will be pestered by Google telling me to enable text and image ads. Ridiculous, if they're that worried about it, why don't they make it so that you can't just have text ads, you have to have both image and text?

Why is it whenever I enable text/img ads -- at the constant prompting of Adsense -- my CPC craters?

Some of their advice is great, some isn't worth the effort to read. You can't count on getting good advice from G, or the same advice from any two team members.

They recently suggested I change from bordered/text/image ads to noborder/text-only. I did, it works great, CTR went way up and EPC more than doubled. Still working great.

But now they are bugging me to switch to image/text ads.

The only thing you can do is keep experimenting.

The experiment feature is pretty good, not perfect, but helpful. Makes running experiments easy.

Why would CPC DROP? They're constantly telling me to ENABLE text/img so improve my EPC. Doesn't happen. EVER.

How much time do you give it?

netmeg,

You're going to be disappointed in me -- only two days. I know, I know...

Tie your hands to your sides and leave it for two weeks. Minimum. Seriously.

nutmeg,

all right, I'm ALL IN. I did it for the ENTIRE account, every site. Two weeks. I'll just have to suck it up and stomach it.

For the longest time, I resisted opting into image/display ads but my earnings on just Text Only kept dropping month over month. So about 4 months ago I opted into all ad formats and the prices went back up a bit. I would be VERY surprised to hear of anyone's earnings/CPC going up by changing to Text Only in the current AdSense program. This time a year ago I would have highly recommended all text, but not anymore.

I would be VERY surprised to hear of anyone's earnings/CPC going up by changing to Text Only in the current AdSense program.

From my post above...

They recently suggested I change from bordered/text/image ads to noborder/text-only. I did, it works great, CTR went way up and EPC more than doubled. Still working great.

Recently means a couple months ago in my case.

So far, so good. :)

As for the future? Who knows.

YMWV however I'd gotten so fed-up of wild swings that over the weekend I enabled every option there is for us to have, I have even removed a whole load of urls that I've had blocked for years, even including Groupon and Google itself, the results so far are encouraging with EPC, therefore earnings, increasing.

I have no idea if this will last but at least it's going in the right direction however Your Mileage Will Vary but why not give it a go, you never know!