Yesterday picked up a lot, today isn't looking too bad, let's hope I haven't just jinxed myself.

Today Adsense has decided to show my ads in a different color theme than the one I have set.

Same here. Kind of annoying. I choose my colors for a reason.

Now seeing expanded text ads - seeing description at 66 characters, Title and URL appear to be the same as usual.

Same problem here (@changing colors).

Whatever is occurring is disconcerting.

My CTR for the first four days of October has been 63% of September's with yesterday being one of my lowest-ever on record at 42% of September.

Secondly, is anyone else having log-in problem here using Firefox? Since yesterday all I am getting with FF is the spinning doughnut, Chrome is fine, not tried with any others as yet.

Cache etc all clean.

Hmmm ... I wrote too soon, Chrome wouldn't log-out!

Last two days have basically returned to what I had got used to in September. Hopefully things will carry on for the rest of the month like this.

Things are not really returning here. Suspect it is the new ad unit format. The one that has a line to the left and the nessie arrow in a outlined circle. Dunno what you call it. But it does not use the same color scheme as the other formats. Colors are off. The title is not title anymore, It seems to use two colors only. Links, title and text is the same and the line to the left and the circle/nessie is another color. It is driving me crazy. Been trying all morning to color it right, but it is not easy as there is a huge delay before the changes pop up on the site and i have nothing to go by.

Can you post a screenshot so I can see. Can't say I've noticed any difference on my site.

Here you go, ad is in Swedish, but you'll get the idea :) Need to figure out how to only have the title in blue...

[i61.photobucket.com...]

Before October we had this style along with the older styles with a white nessie arrow in filled circles / square boxes. Now we only have this style. Might be something you seen before. I just do not know what you call the style :D

So, when my revenue drops or rises with little or no changes on my site.. I investigate other websites AdSense performance for insight. It seems there is a large number of sites experiencing AdSense revenue drop at this time therefore - this is probably a Google thing.

Maybe quarterly earnings need a boost..

It is probably a Google thing, you're right. But if your optimized color scheme does fit their text ad format anymore, it makes it even worse.

For me, the title changed to black from blue. It could explain the drop in CTR I am experiencing. I notice no drop in CPC comparing late September with October, but it was stronger a few weeks earlier!

Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Color scheme has been overridden for our hyperlinks on ads. This could very well explain the drop in RPM, as the color scheme they use ignores what we had chosen and uses a color that is not intuitive at all, in my view. Like others, I have tried, in vain, to change the color scheme and RPM continues to tumble.

For me it does not override. It use the same color scheme. But the colors are in the wrong place! It uses the colors i picked but only two of them!

If i try to set a title color, nothing happens. It seems to use the link color instead. I have no problem changing the link color to whatever i want!

[edited by: Maximum44 at 3:28 pm (utc) on Oct 5, 2016]

If you set the title to black. All text, arrow and the line on the left are black

If you set the title to a different color. The line on the left and the arrow change to that color.

Not sure what happens if you set the text to a different color.

Looks like options are limited. Typical Google "my way or the highway"

Breeks, something like that. Either you change the line on the left and arrow or the text in the middle. Just like my photobucket example above.

I really hope this is an oversight or something because i dont want the links to be same color as the title.

10 years with Google and I've never seen anything like this.

RPM is the lowest it's ever been going back almost a decade. Something is very, very wrong. I'm seeing irrelevant ads everywhere on my sites. I tried blocking certain categories but nothing has helped. I'll have to find another job if things don't change. It all started on September 30th for me.

Here are my RPM numbers since the crash using September as a baseline:

September (9/1-9/29) = 100% of RPM
Jan-Aug (1/1-8/31) = 88% of RPM
9/30 = 47.2%
10/1 = 51.6%
10/2 = 99.44% (thought it was all over but it came back...)
10/3 = 62.9%
10/4 = 65.1%
10/5 = 39.9%

Hi
i can report basically same thing ,large drop from september 30 , thought it came back and from yesterday night again very low earnings ....
today even worse
Hope it comes back soon as looking at stats is just killing my mood ...

Google must be getting desperate. The thievery is getting obvious by the day.

Its just getting worse and worse for me, I lost the arrow long time ago and never got it back. However, I was doing oky but after 9/30 its got really really bad. Nightmare CPM for me, I am looking to replace adsense. Any decent network with good fill rate can beat adsense on my site.

Ad unit style testing by Google is most likely cause for RPM drop - they may have tried some real 'out there' stuff this month - so of which does really well and some really badly.

They will be testing both return for publishers/themselves and return for advertisers, I'd guess.

Ian, what makes you think that? Is this something Google typically does? Did you read about this somewhere? That would make sense.

My RPM has not changed with the new ad style. Just a loss of being able to optimized color scheme.

Google doing AB testing is nothing new - they have done it on many of their products and websites. You often see a mix of ad styles with Adsense, that I always assumed was AB testing.

They were AB testing on our site in September. There have been no signs of it in October. Right now all of our text-ads have the new style that you can not color like you want. We can color it, but not the way we could on the older styles! Sucks :(

How long does the AB testing last for? A week or so? A month? At the current rate, I'm not going to make enough to pay my bills but at least knowing there's a light at the end of the tunnel would help me sleep better at night.

Ad unit style testing by Google is most likely cause for RPM drop - they may have tried some real 'out there' stuff this month - so of which does really well and some really badly.

They will be testing both return for publishers/themselves and return for advertisers, I'd guess.

How does one verify this? Why do you propose this?

From google plus adsense page "Product Update: We’re launching a new, modern look for your text and link unit ads! The new look introduces a minimalist design that brings the focus back on the text content. You’ll start seeing the new look for some of your impressions soon. [support.google.com...] ;"
This could be effecting

Another round of super relatively low RPM today almost matching to the beginning of the year.