I'm also seeing a 25-30% drop in CPC/RPM compared to December/November and almost 50% down from last year - UK traffic (>95%).

Today is 20% lower than the last few days in January. Another new low point. Frustrating.

@Dark side: same situation here...

Same here…..

For anyone experiencing a drop compared to before, look at where your traffic is coming from. If there is no drop in pageviews and impressions, and RPM and CPC are drastically low, then you should definitely look in Reports and see if the source of traffic has changed in terms of countries and if that is not the problem.

China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh... are basically countries that send solid traffic, but with very low CPC 0.01$-0.05$

If there is a significant amount of traffic from USA, UK, Canada, Australia, EU, then RPM and CPC will be much higher.

My traffic is solidly US, followed by Canada, Australia, UK, Sweden, those four pretty inconsequential. My RPM and CPC have hit the skids since about the middle of September. My revenue is the worst ever, and I've been with Adsense since 2005. I would love to get more traffic from China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Philippines, Brazil, they seem to be headed in a favorable direction.

I believe it will improve. Besides economic factors, Google is apparently moving things around, algo-wise.

A schism is coming soon. Start looking into the BRICS and their plans for a competing reserve currency to the US dollar, or, as I like to say, are you ready for the silver/chicken standard? Just my 2 cents.

Things (EPC mostly) started tanking here starting on September 7 and did not recover in the 4th quarter. First week of January was abysmal, but now EPC and CTR are starting to come up. They usually increase as the year progresses. I hope that's the case this year, but we seem to be in weird waters these days.

My cpc is 50% down,countries are the same UK-Germany.Something is definitely not alright

If you take a broader perspective and look at Ad Revenue Indices, you can see what Ember has already described: Things started to get weird in September 2022.

[adrevenueindex.ezoic.com...]
[optad360.com...]

The two above-mentioned ad indices show my personal revenue drop quite accurately. Of course, we have the Ukraine war and the fear of a global recession. I wonder if there are more factors that can explain this rather sudden drop in revenues. There was basically no Christmas business last year.

Something is up with the Adsense reporting, impression and page-views are way down from their normal levels in relative terms. Normally AS PVs or ~80 of GA PV's over the past view days the ratio is down ~40%. My coverage numbers look normal. So something is amiss.

I have some friends working in Europe for an TV ad agency.
Their main clients are big pharma.

For 2023 all is in stand by for the moment, no buget has been approved and no data is provided as everyone is preparing for recession, so we will have a recession ;(

My US/Canada/UK eCPM revenue is -50%, but EU country is almost missing.
I ignore the revenue from India&Co.

I'm seeing decent ads. They're just paying about half of what they were the first three quarters of last year.

Has anyone tried "Auto optimize" and have you seen a difference (good/bad) if you did?

Thanks

I have noticed some improvements in the past days.

not great not terrible :D

@Coldfaun: Not for me. ^^

I figured out what my problem was, my db crashed. Traffic was being supported by cached content amp/cloudflare, un-cached traffic was going to a 404/500 but still showing in my GA stats, I just never took the time to see that user we landing on error pages. Oh well... all fixed now.

What about your CPC ?Was that normal

Another important thing that has huge impact on the CPC is weak dollar. Many of us are getting reports and payments in European currencies, so we see big drop because of weak dollar.

The matter of currencies is likely to be much more complicated and would go completely beyond the scope here. Therefore a few general considerations: On the one hand, you have to consider in which currency the advertising is purchased. I assume that this is mainly done in dollars. I, as a European, am paid in euros. In the last few months, the euro has gained significantly again. Overall, however, I would still say that the dollar is rather strong than weak at the moment. If the dollar is strong, that tends to be favorable for European publishers because we get paid in euros. But on the other hand, if there are ads on European sites mainly from European advertisers and they have to pay in dollars, this leads to the fact that buying ads is relatively expensive for these companies and therefore the demand is lower.

These are just a few effects to think about. The matter is complicated and cannot be answered in general terms without further study.

Well CPC was the lowest today since I’ve started with AdSense…

Actually, looking at my statistics, CPC in Jan 21 was equally as bad as in Jan 23, but CTR was much higher. Which makes this by far the worst January in 12 years.

Same here, 2023 is starting out real bad.

Today was the worst CPC day I've ever seen on Google Adsense.... ever since 2011.

Almost every day is a new negative record for me. ^^

Actually, there is a very simple explanation to this phenomenon.

A global recession should have starter 2-3 years ago, if not earlier. There used to be a recession every 7-10 years prior to the 2008-2009 recession. But, this time, the recession that should have already happened was pushed into the future by the governments. People kept spending artificial money that shouldn't have existed in the first place and even started taking loans/mortgages, but this situation couldn't last forever. It never does.

What is happening right now is simply a consequence of people and governments getting totally broke. It may last a couple of years, it may take a decade before we see the 2011-2021 numbers again.

I get the same negatives earning sice Mid December . I thought that it was a mistake from our website which recieve more than 2M visits /month.
But as I see : alot of publishers are facing the same issue .
I wonder if other networks like Esoic / Media.net are in the same boat !.

@trocobob: I posted the link to ezoic‘s ad revenue index some postings above. They are facing the same problems like we describe here.

I'm staring blank at my earnings report and wonder what to explain to my employees.
Things are so bad, that I need to unplug some servers (electricity cost has gone up a lot), but the main problem are salaries.

So today I'll send termination notices for 50% of the crew.

2023 is all about survival.

All I see on my site are ads with a large green button START !