CPC is still low, the lowest in this then years

CPC is still low, the lowest in this ten years

Ever since the "new" algos were introduced slashing my traffic, I've been expecting this, after 11 hours of a Googleday I have:

0 Clicks
£0.00 CPC
0.00 CTR%

Looks like my time posting here will be gone come Sunday and do you know what the most annoying thing is?

After the first 8/9 days I thought I'd got AdSense back on track and had a way forward, now it's dead in the water and especially so with the huge reduction in USA traffic they're now not sending.

Thanks G, you're really serving searchers perfectly by denying non-USA business results, actually and in reality, you are now defunct!

Looks like my time posting here will be gone come Sunday

;-)

Cue broken record... ;)

This industry is so high-low for me these days.

I had a decent-to-good 2017 but it was still another year of decline (both in traffic and earnings). My January numbers were in the dumps by historical standards until, just after Valentine's Day (February 14th), it seems a switch was "flipped": some lost traffic came back but, more importantly, RPM, CPC, and earnings began to steadily rise across my whole network. Don't know why and I cant point to a single change I did that did the trick (I tackled site redesigns, new ad channels, new ad placements, updated sitemaps, on-page code changes/cleanup, HTTPS, etc...) - just the nature of this beast I guess - but this work spanned from February of 2017 until just recently.

Cue broken record... ;)

You must have a very broken record player since it's been 6 months or more since I mentioned it however this time it looks terminal since traffic has been drastically slashed owing to me not being an American business site.

It's up to you whether you want to believe that or not.

So far today with 41/2 hours to go, 2 clicks and 50 Cents, awesome eh?

I've done 18 clicks at 15p CPC :-). It's around 2 o'clock and 3 o'clock eastern and central time so I've got quite a few hours to go.

So you're saying you won't be posting here as of next week? Or will you be back to proclaim the end of the world again in a couple of weeks? It's getting old dude. AdSense is working fine and dandy for many people so to say Google is defunct, etc. is silly. If it's not working for you, find something else.

I gotta defend RedBar a little bit. He does have the determination and drive at this thing, no matter how tough it gets. I believe that's what it takes in this business. It appears he has been trying everything to boost his traffic / adsense revenue for close to 2 years now (or more)? Since the image search change?. I look forward to one day he sees positive changes, and ask him what he eventually did. It'll be a good material to learn from at that time :).

I take their notes seriously, in terms of self motivation. My tops sites are in continuous decline due to their topical nature. I've been working my ass off to branch out. Have to beat that decline in both traffic and RPM to stay afloat, it's heart breaking sometimes to work 10+ hours for less revenue. Our business usually does not see instant results, but rather continuous improvements.

Gotta be positive sometimes.

I am seeing some RPM boost for either Easter or end of quarter, it's clocking at the highest level of the month. But also at reduced traffic levels, which results in roughly similar revenue.

March revenue is looking to be 10% weaker than last month, even though march has more days. It appears the trend is against me with the macro that's going on. Personalization data issues.

AdSense is going really good these days for me :) Only thing that is down is traffic :(

Are you sure it wasn't a chatbot?

I don't think so. She sent me an email about the discussion afterward.

If I run an Ad Balance experiment, does anyone know what percentage of pageviews they use for the experiment? So 10% with fewer ads or 20% or more?

Re: ad balance, if you go to Advanced Reports --> Experiments you can see exactly how the experiment vs the original did. Clicks, epc, RPM, earnings, etc. Who knew.

AdSense is doing terrible today.

10 clicks so far with CPC at 34p, I could live with that quite easily.

Doing pretty good over here.

Down in income by a factor of 20 in the past 7 years and wondering if it is worth the time.

Those who are thriving please ignore and/or gloat. I am happy for you. Honestly.

For those who are not doing as well over the recent years what do you attribute the decline to:

1) Ad blocking
2) Mobile (perhaps not as conducive to clicks)
3) Quality of ad inventory
4) Banner blindness
5) Unpredictable search results
6) Sites without ads at all making site with ads look too commercial
7-x) You experience/suggestions.

Not hear to complain, just learn from anyone who wants to share. There is no such thing as an entitlement when it comes to ad income, of course.

Adblocking, its increasing which will bite every publisher in the butt lol

@Kash1111 I wonder if G and/or others will find a clean/transparent to all way to handle ad blocking. That was my primary theory as well as you see even large sites ask/beg to turn ad blocking software off.

@honestman

My earning is also significantly less compared to last year. Every year it is going down compared to earlier year(s).

I think there is only one major reason behind this. The reason is - so many publishers have joined AdSense and put AdSense codes on so many pages that the market is too much saturated. There is more supply than demand.

If half of the AdSense publishers kick out AdSense from their sites today, the rest of the publishers will immediately see a significant increase in earnings.

Many publishers are already frustrated and asking the question - is it worth publishing content for websites where AdSense is the earning model?

@Maximum44

You said, "Doing pretty good over here."

Well. Same here.

But it is only because of Easter.

Once Easter is gone, this good performance will also be gone.

The usual poor performance is the new normal.
Sad but true.

I have the same perspective, Paul.
I made millions of $/year, now I have 15% of the workforce and 10% of the revenue.

I don't measure my clicks in cents, but still, a very long and bad fall.

The fall is still to come, as there are wild variations in revenue that make me feel that the system is trying to balance too many variations.

@Paul Stewart, I believe that's one of the biggest reasons why earnings drop but why should Google/Alphabet change things? They don't care if 1 million or 2 million publishers earn them money. The publishers split all the spendings of the advertisers.

Other problem is adblocking but last time I measured it was about 15 percent of my visitors who are using them.

Google should exclude publishers with less than 100,000 ad impressions a month. Kind of the solution they made with YouTube advertising.

Not sure what's happening today, so far I've only had four clicks. However, my CPC is 32p. Strangely, my page RPM is 81p which is extremely low compared to what it normally is. I suppose the click through rate at 0.26% is because I've only had a few clicks. Things were, at least CPC is fairly high so even if I only get 30 clicks today, at least I would have made some money.

End of the month, Easter Weekend in the West World?
I'm surprised that's not much, much worse.

End of the quarter so spendings are low? Just wait till after Easter.

Normally, if I've got quite a high CPC then it will normally drop as the clicks increase. So far today I've had very few clicks which is extremely unusual. Before I had four clicks without CPC of 32p. That's has now increased to 41p with an extra two clicks.

My stats seem to be really behind today

@Runfun

I was going to suggest that as well since YT has a minimum requirement, but don't you think there were too many YT channels trying to earn from Adsense?

You would be surprised if you knew how much publishers use Adsense at small websites. It's still a difficult decision like YouTube but for publishers point of view it's a race to the bottom. Next step is publishers who are looking for alternatives and I'm using several affiliates just before Adsense thanks to DFP. They earn me more money and Adsense is just for leftovers.