Hello,

The IP of the site has no impact on Adsense, and it can "eventually" have a little impact on your "ranking" at search engines, which "might" alter the profile of your visitors, which "can" have an impact on your earnings.

You mention RPM, does it mean you have the same number of page views? Did your "ad coverage" remain the same?

If your level of traffic remained the same, it might be an "unfortunate" coincidence, that your RPM decreased.

That being said, be sure that nothing else changed when you mgrated your site. Sometimes, a missing file, or slightly page layout modification, a difference in the configuration file (Apache, nginx, etc...) can have an impact.

Moving to a dedicated server, should, in theory, provide better performances, than a VPS, excepting if your dedicated server is running very old hardware.

However, the quality of the connection of your new host, might have an impact, like for example, if the Adsense bot is not able to access your pages correctly or things like that.

Did you still have an active ads.txt file?

Hello,

Appreciate your replies.
Traffic/page views remained the same.
Ad coverage remained the same.
Still have an active ads.txt file.
The slightly different page layout modification is an interesting point and could be a possibility, but page code was copied over exactly to the new server as was on the old server.
Performance speeds increased yes, the website became much faster.
The hosting provider is the same company as well, the only thing that seemed to change was our IP address and the server, and this has resulted in a 50% decrease in Adsense RPMs.

The only thing we can think of is that our Adsense RPMs or advertisers were somehow connected to our previous server's IP address, and changing it, even on the same website, caused a massive decrease in RPM revenue or reset the advertisers which we had built up for years.

Have you migrated a website before and noticed a difference in RPMs?

Hello,

Do you have auto-ads enabled? It has been automatically enabled, some months ago, may be it's related.

We had auto ads turned off previously and after the migration they were also turned off for 5 months.
We turned it on 30 days ago to test and have seen minimal increases or similar so far.

Then, I have no idea what can be wrong. "Eventually", you might have inherited of an IP with a "bad" background/history. However, I think that Adsense makes the difference between the history of a site, and the history of the IP on which it is running. (Changing IP is something common).

In your logs, do you see access from the Adsense bot ? (mediapartner bot)

I migrate my sites, from one dedicated server to another, once a year, or every two years, depending of the discounts, or evolution of my needs.So I change rather "frequently", and never observed anything like that.

edit: did you check the policy center, to be sure none of your sites or pages are impacted by a policy violation?

edit 2: did you check your DNS were properly updated? however, I think that if there had been an error, you would see it on your traffic.

Yep it's a brand new machine so should be a new IP. No policy or DNS issues. I'm betting it's an Adsense algorithm issue where they link RPMs to servers, so on the shared VPS it's likely other websites had high RPMs and they may have interpreted other sites being added to be related and at a certain level of value. Or could just be that previous advertisers were not funneled to the new server.

Appreciate your ideas, hopefully we figure out how to fix.

Advertisers never interact with your server. Websites that use Cloudflare or other CDNs use hundreds of shared IPs, so a bad IP as a cause is very very unlikely. Ad script is executed on the visitor's computer, and server IP is not sent to Google.

The first thing I would do, try to get a cached version of your website, copy the source code, and compare it to the current source code (use a diff tool). Even a tiny difference in PHP version, or a single configuration could knock out a plug-in, which could cause missing descriptions, or countless other under the hood changes. You should also check your HTTP-headers.

If the source code is identical, go back to basics, check robots.txt, check robots headers, dig into your analytics logs and confirm that your traffic patterns didn't change. Also check http > https redirects etc.

it's a brand new machine so should be a new IP.

What do you mean by "brand new IP". Does that mean you think it has never been used by anybody until now?

I'm very impressed with the answers in this discussion, good stuff! :)

These are great suggestions:

1. a difference in the configuration file (Apache, nginx, etc...) can have an impact.

2. Even a tiny difference in PHP version, or a single configuration could knock out a plug-in, which could cause missing descriptions...

1. Something like the memory allocation can cause a server to lose steam and stop serving web pages, particularly at night when sites are under attack by scraper and hacker bots.

2. PHP version, database version and possibly other software that may need updating. It's amazing how many server components need updating all the time.

Give your site a crawl with screaming frog or some free online tool that scans a website and see if 500 errors pop up. That's usually a sign that something isn't set correctly.

Check if your SSL is set correctly.

Check your error logs to see if there's a clue there. Log files can be useful for diagnosing server issues.

Good luck!
:)

Roger Montti