@ Ironside, actually blocking ads pushes the cost of advertising up for those advertisers, as there is less supply available for their ads. However, this cost increase provides no added benefit to the advertiser, they simply pay more for fewer eyeballs. Advertising on a network where the ad type your are serving is being blocked will provide less value than a network where it is not blocked. As a result these advertisers are more likely to go to a competitor network, and Adsense looses out.

Your average searcher will never click on an ad promoting AdSense/AdWords. Complete waste of ad space.

To maximise targeting you also need to be cleaning up the ad review centre frequently.

This is pretty basic stuff and it can make a huge difference to revenue if you're scaling.

they don't actually care about us at all.

We are a tool that they use to spread their ads. Nothing wrong with that. They make money; we make money. They care about us only to the extent that we're worth the trouble of keeping us around as revenue generators. When the cost of fighting click fraud, bots, scammers, etc. outweighs the revenue we generate, then they'll get rid of us. That day may come sooner than later. Who knows. Until then, I will appreciate the opportunity to monetize my site, make plans for the day that the opportunity may end and not worry if Google cares about us.

[edited by: ember at 3:38 pm (utc) on Apr 11, 2016]

@RyuUK I almost agree, maybe 1:100,000,000 might click on Adsense/Adwords ads, but those are better odds than 0 for a blank space.

I fully agree about the ad review center, I diligently review ads on daily basis. The most frustrating thing is that you block an ad today (ad block, url block, adwords account block), and tomorrow it is back slightly modified but clearly from the same spammers.

How do I clean up the ad review Centre

@NickMNS I never get blank spaces, but the filler cr@p that tends to have low CPCs. I don't review daily like you, so I'm sure your targeting is spot on.

@Ironside "Allow & block ads", "Ads (Ad review centre)" and then you'll see all the high impression ad units. It's worth scanning a few pages deep.

@ironside, if you have never used the ad review center, once you initialize it will take a few days before it is populated, and ads can be reviewed.

@RyuUK is there a way to see what the CPC's of the specific ads have been? Or are you making assumptions on the CPC?

Kind of an assumption really. Looking at the wider scope my financial sites used to receive guaranteed clicks of £1+. These are now worth 50p. It's been like this for months and I can't see it changing. This is why affiliate has become a greater priority for me. One of the programs I'm joined on to pays £250 per converted lead. 4 sales per day = £1000 (doesn't require tons of traffic). Pulling in £1000 from AdSense would take a shedload of hits.

@RyuUK Yeah but it's easy to say. how often do you get 4 sales per day giving you £1000? If you are running a financial site which I presume gives loans or something, and you have traffic, even giving away your traffic to Adsense for £1 a click is too cheap. You are spot on to focus on affiliate ;) If your finance site gets good traffic companies would pay top £££ just to be featured on your site each month, something well worth looking into if you have not done so.

At the moment most of us are lucky if we get £0.20 / $0.20 a click, more like £0.05 / $0.05 in this mess things are now. Somebody at Google forgot to turn back on the pre-determined payment amounts for each day, and left them at low.

@Roman I hear you bro. Been working on the program for a month and am already getting leads, but the problem is that the validation period is nearly 3 months so it's a waiting game. If they do come through then I'll quickly switch to fully focus on the affiliate side. I still get a full time income from AdSense, but it has become a minefield in recent months.

@RyuUK Yeah it will be like hotels and things I guess, just guessing as never promoted things like this, but I know for travel it can take up to a year or more as they of course do not pay the affiliates until they have had the experience as they can always cancel up until that date.

Best thing for you is what you say, keep running Adsense as it's making you money, then see how all the leads turn out ;) I had to take the unfortunate approach of just removing Adsense (apart from one low traffic site for testing) and focusing on affiliates, it's not good for the health seeing sites that were on £10-£30 a day fall into £1 a day terriroty as it totally smells of corruption, until things change I would rather have a blank space than promote Adsense ads :)

I'm still seeing crap ads on my site for desktop. I haven't seen a text ad in a couple of days now even using incognito. The ads review center shows a bunch of text ads with arrows so I don't know what's going on.

At least now the image ads are more relevant and not some completely generic ad that nobody will click.

@Jericho try to check using chrome incognito mode, I was checking the text ads shows the arrow in incognito mode but in regular mode they are gone. It could be big G testing something, I have to agree so much crappy images ads are showing up.

That's what I mentioned in my last post that I checked in incognito mode and still no text ads.

CTR has dropped massively. CPC is going back to normal a little bit tho.

Is like the entire system is resetting to new, lower coordonates. Lower in every way, but in the end much lower revenue for us.

No More Deceptive Download Buttons [webmasters.googleblog.com]

You have to appreciate the hypocrisy, when Adsense is full of Fake Download Buttons or text ads like "Start Download", "Download NOW", "There 2 messages waiting for you" etc

example: [i.imgur.com...]

That is one of my pet hates at the moment. Google are filling my big ads with multiple rows of text ads, but the only text on show for a lot of them is something like "download now".
That is literally all they say -- "download now". No description, no URL -- nothing!

Who on earth is going to click on something like that? No wonder are click rates have gone down when they show junk like that.

Glad to read I'm not the only one that suffers from low earnings in April.
February was sky rocket high, March started great but in the end of March it was crap.

From the beginning of April I lost 50% in revenue. CTR and RPM are unacceptable.
At one website I had CTR from 2 till 6%, yes 6% because my niche website is about the keyword and I had several banner ads with that keyword. Now in April I can’t find those Ads on my website anymore. Huge drop on one domain.

Strange thing is that I have European websites as USA websites. Both are underperforming.

Hope to see solutions soon. I’m trying with Media.net to see if I can bring up earnings.

Tanking today and yesterday. International traffic outside the US just isn't worth trying to attract anymore.

What's "unknown region"? That's doing well.

Sunday and Monday click volume normal, EPC at 45% April average, WTF?

Yeah something is really off this April. It will be a 5 year low for me.

in OS X I am getting the following error in safari debugger. And almost 50% of the site ads are blank in OS X safari.

Blocked a frame with origin "https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net" from accessing a frame with origin "http://www.example.com". The frame requesting access has a protocol of "https", the frame being accessed has a protocol of "http". Protocols must match.

But in windows I am not getting any error in chrome debugger. and almost all ads r showing (though crappy ads).

Someone here said he replaced some of his responsive ads with a 728x90 and things got back to where they were before 1st of april
Well I did that too: using css : if it's a mobile device I show a responsive ad, if not, I show a 728X90 instead of the responsive ad, and it works quite well.
non-sense ads have gone and text ads seem to be back, as cpc & ctr.

Give it a shot!

A disaster since Saturday. A big f u to you Goog. I dream a new competitor will arise. I can't wait!

Clean up the ad center for sure, especially for directly competitive sites if you're like me...


But what I guess I didn't quite realize until recently was something simple, which might sound stupid but:

***IF your site is unique/you feel that advertisers will want to target it directly/your niche is more valuable and advertisers are willing to pay for its exposure: *** It's all an automated bidding system. While you might *know* an ad isn't relevant to the majority of your audience, the people who *want* to show their ads on your site will have to pay more in order to have their ads exposed on your site. They have to beat that more irrelevant ads bid to show their ad. So naturally this is across the board.

Just look at all aspects. To me there are some very obvious ones i will always block, but perhaps consider not being too picky for these reasons. But wtf adsense, those "Start Download" ads are HORRENDOUS AND SPAMMY. why the f*** do they even allow those? They are all malware too. if you download one they will spam your browser or set your hard-to-setback default homepage to their spammy search engine etc. And they're always irrelevant to your site. always.

Yeah EPC's have been down since this all started for me, despite the traffic being - as always - extremely targeted & organic. The advertisers are noticeably the same/if not more compeitive, yet CPC is on average ~$0.45 a click; the same ads were averaging ~$0.80-$0.85 a click a few months back (and for the year prior before that). For almost probably 2 months now, adsense has been in the dumps :( And it all really happened in about a week. One week ~2 months ago, every day was in the red NOTICEABLE. Each day dropped about ~10%+ off average of same day week prior. after that horror week, they just simply havent recouped. and no, no remotely big changes were made around when that happened :(

Last 5 days were excellent with very good RPM. Hope this will continue.

You are clearly in a good/small boat!

My CPC from the U.S is now below $0.06 ~ adsense is total horse sh!t on my side. SMFH