Looking better than yesterday but not going to say things are back to normal just yet. What a day though, lost over 50% and Im pretty sure I will never see those earnings.

Eveything is back on track for me.

Coverage is now at 96% and still climbing, and RPM is almost twice as high as yesterday.

I can also continue to confirm that things are recovering for us, and CPC keeps climbing. It's only 9:45 am PST here too

Hi everyone. After chatting with a number of folks on my end here is where we are: Over the past 48 hours, a number of AdSense publishers alerted us to an issue with declining cost-per-click for ads on their sites. We were able to identify the cause of the issue quickly and resolve it quickly: Several ad buyers were using irresponsible campaign parameters, lowering query coverage for specific creative types in some countries. The ad buyers responsible have been blacklisted and impacted publishers should see that their coverage is back to normal in their AdSense account.

Here's my prediction - Google will have another record earnings next quarter. Publisher network will report revenue drop..

There's a pattern folks..

Well there you have it folks: [searchengineland.com...]

Looks like we won't be getting any lost revenue back.

pubpolicycomms, Thanks for taking the time to post. Someone from Adsense reading these posts is appreciated.

I have seen this for several months now. Personally I put it down to long term declining traffic, which in turn led to rubbish advertisements site visitors considered mostly irrelevant. The ones which "might" be relevant carry low CPC.

As for Google Search itself - I've found it becoming harder, and harder to get technical answers to questions I ask. Previously you were greeted with a plethora of Niche sites on your topic, now I mostly get sites trying to sell me items relating to my questions.

In a different area of questions, notably recipes [I'm an avid cook] I'm now always greeted by the same dominant sites which are owned by giant corporations.

The day of the old niche "how to" site is nearing an end I fear. And my search skills haven't deteriorated over the last 20 years.

As for Adsense I saw the big CPC drop in recent days but today it's come back and my RPM (aside from those few days) has been fairly steady for awhile - since around the time that they took down the Ad Balance slider. The key that I've noticed is that some ad positions that used to be awesome totally suck now, and some that used to suck are heavy hitters. For example, a 300x600 in the right sidebar is a SUPER heavy hitter on desktop and tablets. A 300x250 anchored to the right of the first paragraph is great. A full-page one at the bottom of the article sucks. One single link unit is awesome, but adding a second link unit results in MASSIVELY diminished returns. It's required months worth of experimentation to figure it out but things are very steady on my end now.

[edited by: not2easy at 5:12 am (utc) on Aug 10, 2017]
[edit reason] cleanup [/edit]

I did notice a #*$!load of 1 view ads when trying to debug yesterday. A number of them came from one adwords account promoting some blogspot website. Wont investigate any further as numbers were stellar today. Have lots of other things on my mind.

[Edited]

See the August 10 section of the "August 2017 AdSense Earnings & Observations" thread for a discussion of what apparently happened.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Several ad buyers were using irresponsible campaign parameters, lowering query coverage for specific creative types in some countries.

Nice to know the whole ecosystem can be negatively affected so easily. (she said sarcastically)

I was thinking the same thing.

For some weird reason this mess passed my site altogether. Haven't seen any significant drops over that period (high volume site).

For some weird reason this mess passed my site altogether. Haven't seen any significant drops over that period.

Same here. Our CPC actually went up a bit (approximately 4 percent, which probably isn't enough to mean anything).

I also run Adsense on YouTube. I notice a lot of alert with my videos saying it is "unfriendly for advertisers", which is wrong. I have to constantly click the "manual review" which they approve afterwards but takes a week to get reviewed. I think they have a bot now that automatically detects if its adult or bad content. The bot is so strict even a guy in speedo doing diving lesson is flagged. What's he's supposed to do wear a suit? Unbelievable.

Still experiencing low earnings, now CTR is really low...

The CPC dropped again.

I appreciate the info from Google, but I can say this.

I use AdX on my largest site, and Adsense on all of my others. My traffic has been about the same on all sites (with a slight increase in some), but each month this year has consecutively been worse and worse and worse as far as RPM and revenue.

July was my worst month since 2008, when traffic was half of what it is now.

I'm truly scared, I've been building this business for 15 years and really don't have a fallback. This isn't a hobby for me, I have employees and our jobs rely on this income. Next month I'll be paying employees on a credit card, and after that... I just don't know.

Whatever it is causing ad revenue to drop, all I can do is pray for a fix.

Is it more profitable than Adsense?

AdX? A little, last month my RPM was 18% higher than my smaller sites on Adsense.

It seems like I jinxed it. CPC dropped by 25% yesterday

I'm truly scared, I've been building this business for 15 years and really don't have a fallback. This isn't a hobby for me, I have employees and our jobs rely on this income. Next month I'll be paying employees on a credit card, and after that... I just don't know.

Tell me about it. Three years ago Adsense revenue paid my salary, two part-time employees, a developer when I needed him, and then some. Now it scarcely pays mine and that's it. And my traffic has grown, not shrunk. It's a brave new world alright.

Yes I also noticed bad earnings during that time - glad it is now fixed.

Sat 5th - Aug 9th RPM halved!

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System: The following 2 messages were spliced on to this thread from: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4862720.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 10:13 am on Aug 11, 2017 (utc -5)

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Hey everyone,

Since the major AdSense "glitch" that affected CPC and occured between August 5 and August 8 (see this thread for details: [webmasterworld.com...] we now know that AdSense is clearly NOT immune to hackers / spammers / thieves.

That's why I thought it might be a good thing to start a thread on bogus / fraudulent ads so we can all share our experiences with them and help eachother out by detecting and eliminating them from our sites.

There's already a nice post about this by @taljanich in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

I'd also like to share a few of my experiences with bogus ads, so let me enumerate a few ads I found to be problematic that I ended up blocking by URL.

For these examples, I'll add Ad URLs at the end that you can search for in Allow & block ads on AdSense.

- Ads that autostart with sound
- Ads that automatically redirect users to another page without them clicking on anything
- Ads that bring the user to a site disguised as a real popular site when clicked - Ads that are unclickable
- Ads that show a subject and then transition to show other ads about other unrelated subjects

So that's basically all I could find for bogus ads, but I also have worries about other kind of ads that might take up valuable ad space and may not generate much profit.

- Ads that show uninteresting videos that nobody will click on. (Free views for the advertiser and cheap cost since no clicks?)

So anyways, I hope others will share their experiences as well, and I will certainly be happy to answer questions if anybody has some.

[edited by: martinibuster at 2:51 pm (utc) on Aug 11, 2017]
[edit reason] Removed Links to Actual Ads or Actual Examples. Please No Specifics. [/edit]

Please do not discuss specifics that can lead to specific ads or advertisers. Keeping things general is more useful.

In any case, these were specific advertisers who took advantage of a loop hole. The advertisers were banned and the cause of the issue was identified, noted here. [seroundtable.com]

Over the past 48 hours, a number of AdSense publishers alerted us to an issue with declining cost-per-click for ads on their sites. We were able to identify the cause of the issue quickly and resolve it quickly: Several ad buyers were using irresponsible campaign parameters, lowering query coverage for specific creative types in some countries. The ad buyers responsible have been blacklisted and impacted publishers should see that their coverage is back to normal in their AdSense account.

Roger

Whatever it is causing ad revenue to drop, all I can do is pray for a fix.

For your own sake, and that of your employees, please don't rely on that.

I implemented the CSS and plugin recommended in the other thread. I can tell you Google has not identified all of these publishers. I blocked at least a dozen of them (so far).

Make sure you do not block the ones you can actually click thru! There is false positives! Bascially if you get a cursor hovering over the ad, don't block it. It might be valid :D