huge drop in page RPM after upgrade from 1.5 to 2.1?

[bzcomputers]

...very frustrating that googles own ads seem to penalize you via their own speed tests.

Google always seems to be either chasing their own tail or completely going off on tangents. Preaching one thing and doing something completely different themselves is status quo for them.

They introduced responsive ads and then auto ads through Adsense long before they were ready for production years ago. Even today they break the structure and flow for a high percentage of web sites.

Years ago with Adsense they banned people for placing ads too close to another piece of content. They called it "trying to trick people into clicking on them". Now that exact practice is how their own search engine runs and makes money - the first result of EVERY search is an advertisement and guess who gets paid for it - 100% to Google. It's all about the $$$ now and how they can keep more and more of a percentage of it for themselves.

It's a monopoly and in our lifetimes there will be no equally footed competitor. The best we can do is be flexible and try to stay one step ahead of our competitors. Some of their business practices especially when it comes to Adsense would put anyone else behind bars.

 

[djbaxter]

Well, so much for my advice above about AutoAds.

I had it working fine for a while on a couple of sites doing it the way I recommended above... until today.

Checking one of the sites just now, I see that AutoAds is once again inserting huge ads just below my logo and when it does that the fixed location ads I wanted to be displayed are not displayed.

Personally, I think I've had it playing around with AutoAds. I just disabled them, for that site anyway. I'll accept the income drop if that's what it takes to stop Google from uglifying the site.

That may have been premature.

The steps I described above are still working on two sites, one a vBulletin 4.2.5 forum and the other a Xenforo 2.1.6 Patch 1 forum. The site they stopped working on was a WordPress site.

So once again I'm left wondering what the hell is Google doing?

 

[Your Ski Advisor]

Our page views on Google Adsense the day we switched to 2.1.

What we didn't understand was our views on Adsense were higher than Analytics..by a significant amount, now it is lower/

 

[TUG]

fascinating...our impressions and page views actually went up after the switch....(in adsense...no significant change in analytics)

revenue and rpm fell into the basement however...and ive been chasing the source ever since.

certainly an expensive mistake or setting wherever it is!

 

[Jon12345]

Hey, @Your Ski Advisor, has your adsense recovered yet?

@TUG, same question really. Did your adsense recover?

 

[TUG]

I actually have seen an increase over the past week to pre-upgrade levels for RPM.

it had been very much in the dumps from Dec 26(day of upgrade) until Jan 16 hovering at the 3-4 range. over the past week its been in the 6 to 8 dollar range with no changes made by me. hopefully that trend continues.

 

[dtrumbower]

Hey, @Your Ski Advisor, has your adsense recovered yet?

Darker lines are current year vs previous year. Both charts start at November.

Pageviews


Impressions

 

[Harvey]

Did you edit any of your ad units in Adsense? Just re-saving an ad unit, even without making any changes to it, will drop all the current advertiser bids for that ad unit and its' position. Which means you will be basically starting from scratch as far as getting advertisers to bid for that ad unit. If the ad unit has been around for awhile this could have some severe negative impacts on your CPC rates. It can take months to years to regain that all back, if it comes at all.

Is this common knowledge? I hadn't heard that. My XF site is new and all my units are brand new.

My experience with adsense is not that great. And my RPM is WAY lower than what you guys are getting, even when you are disappointed in it.

I do notice that my viewability is low even for ads at the top of the page. And the ads seems to load slow, coming in a second or two after the page is loaded.

@djbaxter I like the way you think.

 

[bzcomputers]

Is this common knowledge? I hadn't heard that. My XF site is new and all my units are brand new.

It's pretty common knowledge for those of us who have been running Adsense for years.

Here is my experience:
1) You will lose all existing advertisers for an ad location if you just make a small name change to the ad unit/channel.
- Adsense freely admits this.

2) You will lose all existing advertisers by just going in and re-saving an ad unit/channel without making any changes.
- Can't say I've seen Adsense put this writing, but I can confirm it myself (others can chime in with their personal experiences with Adsense). It's been like this for years, can't say I've come across it recently (in the last year or so) just because I try to avoid changing any ad unit once it has been created for this exact reason. The negative affect it can have on your your revenue can take a long time to recover from. Revenue recovery typically takes at least a couple months and that's if you're lucky and the ad unit/channel is a desired one and the advertisers come back quick.

I can't say for sure, but it appears just a re-save of the unit/channel notifies advertisers that there has likely been a change to the ad unit/channel and automatically opts them out of the ad unit until they re-verify that they still want to use it.

In most situations, it is better to just add a new ad unit and keep the old one as it is in case you want to go back to it. For example, if you are testing ad positions against each other. Otherwise, every new ad unit/channel you create or edit you make to an existing channel is like starting form scratch and advertisers have to find it and bid on it again. Unless you are running a hundreds different websites you're not likely to run out of the 500 limit of Adsense Custom channels. This will likely save you a lot of regrets and advertising revenue.

 

[TUG]

well, i can say that march/covid everything went to **** and we lost 60 to 80% of our adsense revenue nearly overnight...it has not yet recovered as the vacation industry is still suffering and is likely to do so for awahile.

I will say that things did eventually improve over time but never quite back to the level it was pre 2.x

 

[bzcomputers]

...it has not yet recovered as the vacation industry is still suffering and is likely to do so for awahile.

I've got a site in the same industry (travel), which means I'm in the same situation. Page views down about 70% and on top of that Page RPM down about 50%. Likely won't see a significant increase in ad revenue from this sector until a vaccine comes along or at least a medication comes out that the can be proven to reduce the impact on those that are currently most vulnerable to the virus.

 

[Harvey]

You guys have advertisers specifically requesting you, I'm sure we don't.

One thing I have found is that when you specify sizes and pull them based on media queries you get more national recognized brands than if you go responsive.

Here's some heresy from the peanut gallery: I'm not really in it for the money. I just want to see nice looking ski ads in season. But as a mental exercise I want my viewability up, and I want my RPMs higher. I'm blown away by your $8.

I'm doing something wrong as there are plenty of articles online saying that $5-8 is about average.

 

[Harvey]

I was wondering... if advertisers see what you name your ad positions?

If so it might make sense to name them things that make sense to them, not me.

 

[motowebmaster]

I upgraded from xf1.5x to xf2.1 in March, and knew that the revenue was going to be negatively impacted - even without the pandemic. The same thing happened a few years earlier when I went from vb3x to xf1.

I've been fortunate to pick up direct advertisers this year, but will be making adjustments nonetheless to account for the reduced revenue. I think the motorcycle industry will have some positive "bumps", but don't think things will normalize until the summer of 2021.