Why do you bother with AdSense in the single figures? Surely there's a better way to monetise your traffic.

@MrSavage Drop Adsense, come back in 3 days, put ads on, if you make $6+ or an amount you would deem acceptable keep the ads on until they drop again, if you come back and it's $1 remove again and repeat. You might as well make money from other sources whilst your pre-determined earnings are set as low. Setup so it's as simple as 1,2,3 to remove Adsense and replace. I have done this and it takes about 1 minute to have Adsense off and completely replaced. May take time to initially set it all up, but well worth it. Why even think about giving your website space away so cheaply.

March was a pretty good month for me. It's only the last two days that I've seen lower earnings, RPM etc. And yesterday and today I had red bars. Not sure if an end of month thing or if it's the dismal Jan-Fen cycle starting over again.

Jan - Feb that is.

Thanks guys but I'm not posting looking for advice. This is an observation thread, not a plea for help thread. Is anyone stupid enough to make $1-$2 a day and keep doing the same thing. Heard of income flux? Report your observations. In terms of advice, there are a very few people here that I would put my trust in regarding advice. That trust is from respect which comes from years of reading their posts. No offense.

Observations from webmasters earning a full time living with AdSense = Useful, actionable data.
Observations from webmasters earning less daily than what McDonald's pays per hour = Spam.
No offence.

March overall was a great month. I saw a 10% higher RPM than February RPM.

Foreseeing a dip in April due to the beginning of the quarter.

Ps. As far as observation goes, with some CPC's in the range of $1~$5. Income fluctuations can vary wildly for people making $100 a day or even less. A fluctuation of $40 in an average $100 earner's account is a difference of $60 vs $140 which is more than 200% fluctuation, where in a $1000 account it becomes $940 vs $1040 is a much less 10% fluctuation.

I tend to pay more attention to the general trends of people's general observations rather than specific figures.

Generally, the daily fluctuation I observe is roughly 10~20% of the average, with the smaller accounts seeing much wilder swings due to the $ size. But that figure smooth itself out over a period of time. A $100 daily account is still $35,600 over an yearly period. And RPM values of that number should still be respected.

I think it is much more meaningful to look at monthly, quarterly, or even yearly RPM's.

The general trend that I observe are the following across virtually all platforms.
the shift of advertising to RPM based on impressions with personalized ads trumping CPC.
The increase of the page views due to mobile devices,
and the decrease of general RPM's.
Fallout of certain advertisers in certain niches.

Certain niche based platforms fare better because their niche pool advertisers better match the site, rather than adsense trying to serve those personalized targgetting ads.

And finally, sites with very strong buying intent will fare even better with affiliates.

This shift suggests that sites originally did really good with adsense CPC and keyword bidding scheme is now losing some of the CPC power, and they now receive much lower CPC based on this shift. Which makes sense, we have people with $10+ cpc's now complaining that they are getting $3~$5. The ongoing shift will only mean that their CPC will to drop to $1~$3 range. It is a matter of time before they have to make changes, and many of them have already made changes to their site's monetizing programs.

The sites that benefits with the recent environment shifts are the ones with poor targetting with low buying intent to start with. Ie. I see no major shifts in my site's RPM because my site's RPM is low to begin with. In fact, I did see higher RPM in march compared to february, and my yearly RPM is comparable to last year.

Record breaking month. Even beat Christmas. Absolutely no complaints. Would love to see again next month.

Total estimated earnings March '16 end 29% lower than March 2015. Big bummer.

On another note - and I would love to see a forum about this: If there was ever a time when website owners need a UNION, NOW IS THE TIME. For many, our websites are a business and serious income, until a few years ago, and we have virtually NO representation. Like some of you, I am now earning WAY BELOW minimum wage compared to a hourly job - and that's just crazy, in fact it is a disgrace for the quality content I provide. If a Union could understand how to represent us with these issues we are face with I would join up in a heartbeat.

There will NEVER be a webmaster's union. Too many shady practices and content theft/stealing, blackhat, spam, lies, sabotage campaigns, etc...

That's why Google can kick webmasters around, but I have to agree with Eric Schmidt that "the internet is a cesspool".

Total estimated earnings March '16 end 29% lower than March 2015. Big bummer.

Traffic up 10%, clicks and earnings both down around 40%. If not for the surge in the last week of March it would have been even more pitiful.

For the first time in five years earnings were down YOY for the month, even with a massive 57% increase in page views...

Earnings -6.21%
Page Views +57.86%
Clicks +3.35%
Page RPM -40.24%

Looks like the arrow graphics have disappeared on my sites starting today...maybe last night. Checking out a bunch of different sites and not seeing the arrow graphics anywhere. I'm all for experimenting and changing the look/feel around but the 728x90 and similar size ads without the arrow waste a lot of space. They basically have text aligned to the left taking up half the ad space, the rest is blank. Forecasting a big dip in CTR because of this change. Anyone else noticing the same thing?

@bdhmike Arrows are still on mine. I know you would not have changed it, but you could double check that 'Enhanced text ads – show performance-enhancing features on text ads.' was ticked in your Ad Serving area.

@Roman Abramovich thanks for the heads up...just double checked and that box is ticked.

Hi everybody, I am new to this forum, I have been watching from the sidelines for a while now but up to this point I have not felt compelled to participate. Now given the crazy month of March that I have had I felt I should add my 2 cents worth.

First some background on my situation, I fully updated my site in the beginning of February, it changed a lot, a better responsive design, new and improved features, I switched all charts and graphics from pure css, to SVG, and I eliminated I a bunch of useless content and aggregated it into new more relevant format. The site is informational. I do not target any one specific or small group of keywords, but a large diverse sub set of long-tailed keywords. I monetize the site exclusively with Adsense (this is subject to change).

I saw no change in February, Adsense earnings and traffic continued the slow downward trend. Google took no notice of the site update.

Then March came and I saw massive spike in Google's crawl rate, and with it a big spike in traffic. At its peak my traffic more than doubled (double of small number is still a small number). None the less,
more traffic is good, I am happy. The traffic for the month was only 3% less then my best ever month in Jan 2015.

But! My Adsense earnings did not follow this upward spike.

What is going on?
From January 2016 to March 2016 there was an 76% increase in new sessions, with only 17% increase in Adsense revenue. I am skipping over February because, it is only 28 days, I made a major change in the beginning of the month, so the data is not reliable. Also, I find Adsense's ad serving can be a little wonky after a major change.

To better understand what is going on, I stepped back, and compared March 2016 to March 2015. In March 2015 my site was not mobile friendly, it was only made responsive in July 2015.

In March 2016 vs 2015:
New Sessions:
Total 21%
Desktop -2%
Mobile +65%
Tablet -24%

Adsense Earnings:
Total -41%
Desktop -37%
Mobile -37%
Tablet -52%

Impressions:
Total 16%
Desktop -11%
Mobile +68%
Tablet -16%

Impression RPM
Total -49%
Desktop -29%
Mobile -63%
Tablet -43%

Clicks
Total -71%
Desktop -76%
Mobile -65%
Tablet -66%

CPC
Make sure your butt it firmly planted on your seat for this one!
Total +80%
Desktop +138%
Mobile +73%
Tablet +40%

CTR
Brace yourself!
Total -75%
Desktop -73%
Mobile -79%
Tablet -60%

So what is going on?
My increase in traffic is largely thanks to mobile. Probably not, because if I take Desktop to Mobile ratio that I am seeing today (2:3) and apply it to my 2015 numbers, I would have had fewer desktop users and more mobile users for the same total. So what I am seeing today is an overall growth in traffic that reflects this new general (not specific to my site) trend where there has been a shift to mobile traffic on the web.

Unfortunately, mobile traffic is less likely to click on adds and mobile impressions are worth far less. So this a significant impact on my bottom line.

But that is not the whole story, the other conclusion I draw from my analysis is that there has been a major drop in CTR and impression RPM. Fewer people are clicking on ads and we are being paid far less for simply showing the ad.

My first reaction to this is, there must be something wrong with my new site design, with the ad placement. To test this assertion, I compared January 2016 (before these recent design changes) to March 2016, and there is no statically significant changes to either CTR or Impression RPM.

The one positive observation is the dramatic increase in CPC. Unfortunately it is not enough to offset the impact of the negatives.

So what can be done? How can you get more people clicking on ads (legitimately). Tweak the content to better target the audience.

If compensation for impressions is essentially insignificant, and clicks are harder to come by, would it not be better to shift to an affiliate monetization model?

Is anybody else seeing the similar change in CTR CPC and RPM or are numbers specific to my website?

Thank you!
Nick

@NickMNS I saw some dramatic changes in RPM in January and February compared to the end of 2015, but that's to be expected with seasonal adjustments in advertiser's budgets. The CTR didn't change much - it was actually up around 6%. However, the CPC went down around 26%. Beginning in March, I saw my CPC start to climb back up and now it's approaching levels similar to what I saw at the end of 2015.

@NickMNS Have you done some optimizations like eliminating categories and subcategories that may contribute to a high number of impressions but a low number of earnings? Do you allow interest-based ads and have image and text ads enabled?

Another option is to try an adsense optimization service like Ezoic. They can help you test placement, ad features, colors, sizes, etc. on a massive scale that you wouldn't be able to do yourself with basic A/B testing. I have yet to try them myself and have no affiliation, but have been hearing good things about them. They are an adsense certified publishing partner. If you have a lot of traffic/impressions, it may make sense to give them a shot.

@bdhmike Yes and no regarding optimization. I have eliminated all the sensitive categories except politics. This was mostly done to minimize the spammy ads, such as dating services and tarot readers. Nothing says to your users "high quality and trustworthy web-site" like when your content appears next to an ad of some scantly clad mail order bride. I later tried to follow some of the adsense recommendations to allow some of the sensitive categories, but I then found myself blocking these ads manually in the "ad review center". In the end it was useless so they are all blocked now.

I have interest-based and text based ads enabled, and I have not played around with ad placement much. Again I just changed my site layout, I going to wait a bit to see if I can gather some good data before I start trying to tweak stuff.

Every day is red bar day.

By the way, Nessie buttons changed again. I like the new ones.

For March 1-31, our RPM was up 31.9 percent compared to the same month a year ago.

Last year, we were running one 300 x 250 ad per page; this year, we're mostly running one 300 x 600 ad per page. I suspect that the larger ads are one reason (though not the only reason) for the increase.

EG;

we're mostly running one 300 x 600 ad per page.

Text only, Image only, or text & image?

@NickMNS think you find that 99% of the people on this board have been in the same situation as you. 2 1/2 years ago my earnings were more than three times what I'm going to get paid for March this year. I could look at all the figures in my account until the cows come home but I'm afraid it is not going to give you the answers you want. If we knew what was causing the decline in earnings then we could do something about it and we wouldn't be having this discussion every month.

I've said all along that it's got something to do with people using mobile phones to browse the Internet more nowadays. At the very height of my earnings I didn't have any mobile ads on my website. I had a 336 x 280 at the very bottom of each article that was absolutely fantastic, I think it earned me more money than any other ad on my website. I had the same size ad at the top of the article which did almost as well. Then within two or three months my earnings were dropping like a stone.

In all seems to coincide with faster broadband and smart phones. I think people are more inclined to spend longer on a webpage if they are using a desktop then if they are using their smartphone. I really think smart phones are going to be the death of us all when it comes to AdSense earnings.

And it looks as though today isn't going to be any better, in fact I've had the red bar for the last five hours

@Ken_b Do you mind me asking how you display your 300 x 600 ads?. I actually do quite well off my 300 x 600 ad units, they certainly seem to be the answer people click on the most. However, if you think about it if somebody is using a smart phone and they are strolling down the page, when they come to one of these large ads, it's not going to take a lot for them to open up the advert. Also, I was tending to float the unit from either left or right and wrap the text around that like an image. However, noticed on a few smart phones the text is all squash stop on the left and it's difficult to read. So what I'm trying now is moving the large 300 x 600 unit and putting it smack bang in the middle of the page in between the paragraph of text. However, I'm still getting clicks so I've left a few of them embedded within the text, just to see what happens.

It's all very well everyone discussing figures on here, but what I think would be a really good idea is if people could throw some ideas back and forth, maybe do some testing with the same adverts in the same place, just see what happens. For instance, if somebody is using a 728 x 90 banner (non-responsive) where are you finding the best position that maximises earnings? I've actually started putting a responsive unit underneath the heading and above the first paragraph of text. And then try for a month and see what happens.

I really think smart phones are going to be the death of us all when it comes to AdSense earnings.

I agree, more traffic for less money.

In regards to 300 x 600 ad units I show these on many of my desktop pages, but I am using responsive ad units so they resize on mobile.

March earnings in 2016 was 70% of March 2015, with 85% the number of clicks and 90% CPC. I can't really compare other figures because the extra ghost pageviews mess every thing up.

I forgot to mention, since all my ads are responsive, I unable to track the performance of a specific size. Even in the creative size report my ads show mostly as dynamic.

Agreed that mobile traffic has crushed earnings. Advertisers see that mobile traffic doesn't convert nearly as well as desktop and tablet in most cases and therefore the bids and competition are much less for mobile. Since mobile traffic has grown, it's taken away from desktop and tablet traffic...so even though overall traffic may have gone way up for most of us, a larger percentage of it is mobile and therefore equates to less earnings from Adsense. This seems pretty clear to me and I think it's the primary reason for a continual drop in Adsense over the last 2 years or so.

The good news is that native ads are performing really well across all platforms in my experience. If you haven't monetized your site with native ads from companies like Outbrain, Taboola, RevContent, etc. you're missing out on loads of additional revenue and high RPMs.

@bdhmike what about the Adsense's matched content?