Dire for me as well - I didn't think that it could get worse than last month, but it has and by a huge margin.
I'm seeing a huge reduction in Advertisers in Google search too - like nothing I have ever seen before.
Has anyone that uses adwords seen a big drop in prices?

It may well be that all product is sold out in my sector, and that advertisers have withdrawn for that reason.
Ironically, I did better than ever during the financial crisis and great recession, when sellers had to fight over every lead. Nowadays, demand is so great that they could probably sell 50% more than they have capacity for. And nobody needs to advertise.

@maynkParmar what is your set up in DFP? Adsense as sponsorship + FL?

@Dollarsound We were using AdX + First Look. Apparently, it has nothing to do with AdSense but I removed it.

Yes, It has to do. If you are trafficking Adsense as a Sponsorship and there is enough First Look coverage, the best impressions are going to be taken from Adx and then it may be normal if you Adsense CPC drops. So for First Look to work you have to do some set up in DFP, thats why I was curious about.

Oh, man. Anyways, I removed it. Hoping for the speedy recovery now.

Well, nobody is clicking on ads today and I'm not surprised: Ads in French, Japanese tourist attractions, flood prevention, and foreign phone companies, all utterly irrelevant both to me and my websites.

CTR is down today. Everything is same as 8th August :(

Yeah same here with one site in particular that usually earns around 1k/d dropping by 50%. All geos/devices have dropped today with the exception of South America which is worth more than the EU right now. Traffic profile is the same as yesterday.

All the garbage spam adverts have been blocked. [FWIW I don't think this is the singular problem causing these drops - I suspect its bad targeting and issues upstream with Google]

Yesterday was a slower day with lower revenue. Today looks to be the same. Adsense is a shadow of what it used to be with no sign that it will recover imo

The massive drop in the US, Canada CPC, RPM decreased my overall earning. UK is doing good but my traffic comes from US, Canada and it is awful :( Although, AdX looks normal. Something is wrong with AdSense and they will have to fix it asap!

@MayankParmar you are sounding like you have been possessed by the ghost of red bar :-)

Earnings here are pretty stable. Looks like August will just pip July's earnings if things carry on like this.

Spent the 1st half of August blocking ads/urls/adwords accounts the 2nd half start looks promising.

@martinibuster
2K urls list looks really scary to check,
but since we are doing AdS/AdX checks on a daily basis and every domain or ad we've blocked is harmful (at least for site visitors) - can't see the reason not to share it, as it is the direct way to affect revenue in AdSense/AdX
As our main website has 85% of organic traffic (Google), so every single "stupid" ad/advertiser can harm it in unpredictable way (we've already received a few warnings in WMSC because of ads with download button (social engineering charges), served by AdSense)
Once again - I can't see the reason not to share such lists in such relevant forum thread.

to ALL
check twice before blocking any advertisers/urls/ads

I was just about to post about the same life insurance ad. #*$!s got 6,000 impressions this morning before I blocked the adwords account. You can locate the ad by roofquotesnow

Got the insurance one too. Three of them.

One insurance, one life insurance and one car insurance.

Funny thing is the life insurance one goes to roof quote url :D

When I clicked it did not go to an URL, just to a Google page where it talks about how much that ad unit - not particular ad - has earned, the URL of the ad showing, ad requests, etc. It says the URL is wisitech. So on the page that pops up you can block the URL or the ad AND complain about it. You can do the same in the toolbar. So you can block it even if it is not showing up in the ad review. You just have to spot the ad on your site. Who knows how long it sticks, though, since I blocked this ad days ago and it came back.

You can also search in ad review by Blocked ads. If an ad is in there, it should not be showing up on your site.

@ember correct. I just got confused the other day when i could not find the site as blocked under "shown". But it makes sense that it gets removed from there once you block them. Just had to confirm it :D

Adsense has to do something about this junk. I cant spend every morning chasing these ads down, and they are killing my revenue and CTR every morning.

I see them even coming up on some of my other networks, but Im not worried there as they are CPM based networks, so the clicks dont matter (they must be coming in via Adx).

If you put your performance on "today" what kind of CPC is average for most people?

@Ironside right now I have .17 but it's a very slow day here.

My CPC has always hovered around 14 or 15p, today it's gone up to 22p which actually correspondence both earnings today and clicks. Ever since I altered my layout and removed quite a few 300 x 600 units from the first paragraph of text and replace them with responsive unit either below the heading, or below the first paragraph of text things are slowly improving

Just eyeballing the report for the last 30 days my CPC ranges from high teens to mid twenties e.g. ,17 to .28. But this last week has been up and down. My CTR is improving though.

Dunno if anyone else got this notice, but via Webmaster got a notice for one of my sites stating as of October the new Chrome version will show a not secure message for any page that has a form on it. Their solution? Convert any page with a form on it to https. Wonder how this will affect my Adsense if I left the forms there. I have a feeling this could be a big problem.

Today is looking really good. All of a sudden, my CPC shot from 0.21 up to 0.27 and my page RPM is £3.90.

@sillysoft, I still know plenty of websites that take login/passwords and never converted over to HTTPs and their adsense is just fine. Its really more of a case on whether or not you want the "not secure" to come up for your site pages on chome - and someone can correct me if Im wrong, but from what I can tell it only affects desktop browsers as I never see those messages on mobile on http websites that takes logins (I see the question mark, but not the full words of "Not Secure" like on PC).

HTTPs - Just another hoop to jump through

make your site mobile - now make your site mobile responsive

Do not have excessive Ads Above the Fold - Do like we say not like we do - Four ads above search results a bad user experience, but great for Google's bottom line.

My sites are all HTTPs and it made zero difference. Next hoop?

True, Nick, but something's done it. All of my ad units have dropped to 20%, across the board. I was pretty consistent for the last several days (after Google acknowledged a problem), and now I'm back to where I was when the problem was going on unchecked.

Zloan by themselves isn't the only problem, of course, but... something is.

Just found an unexpected series if ads with a lot of impressions: the NRA. The banners seem perfectly legit and have thousands of impressions a day, but they're not clickable.

The banners appear to be image, though, not rich media.

Block or not?

If these are OK and we should only worry about rich media banners, what was the consensus on just blocking rich media altogether for awhile?

My RPM is way down too. Something is up with Adsense. On Aug 9, I received a violation warning about a link on one of my pages. The strange thing is that the page in question was not even showing Adsense ads. Suggested action was to remove Adsense from the page. Weird.

That's happened to me 5 or 6 times now, and in a couple of weeks the warning goes away without any change on my end:

[webmasterworld.com...]

At first I thought that might be why my RPM was dropping.

I've also seen a huge drop in the number of pages indexed (according to Webmaster Tools), and a drop in revenue happened at the exact same time that the number of pages dropped. No explanation there, though, either.

And now this.