Low AdSense Earnings in January

In January, I had a huge drop in earnings. A bit lower earnings may be normal, but surely not 70%?

1300 views
d

By. Jacob

Edited: 2019-02-04 12:45

January was a very bad month for my website. I saw AdSense revenue dropping as much as 70%, and I am still not sure how much of this was because of issues with my GDPR cookie wall implementation (which should now finally have been fixed).

I used to be able to cover the hosting expenses with AdSense, but ever since I started asking for consent to use of cookies, ad revenue has been dropping. Hopefully my recent fix will help improve revenue, and return things back to normal.

When I saw revenue drop this much doing January, I did a quick search on Google, and found a forum thread at Webmaster World where people reported similar drops in earnings. Some even same huge 70% drop!

A user named lakybel wrote:

This month is look like started very slow..my earnings are down by 70%.. I get click with 0.01€

Some users said lower earnings was normal in January – but I doubt a drop of 70% is normal?!

If you are having problems with ads not showing and/or low earnings, and your traffic is sufficiently high, I would check if you got a problem with some other technology on your site. One possible cause is, maybe the AdSense crawler is simply not able to access your pages properly.

In my own case, it seems to have been caused by a problem with my cookie wall implementation, which may have prevented the AdSense crawler from crawling my pages in some situations.

Read more about this issue here: Adsense Crawler May Not Like GDPR Cookie-Walls

Lower AdSense earnings doing holidays

It seems, however, a bit lower earnings is to be expected in January. At least if we are to believe the reports on webmasterworld.

A user named mentat also wrote:

The drop is normal, as a lot of campaigns ended on 31.12.2018

I know my own revenue tend to go down a bit on certain times of the year. But, I have, as far as I remember, never seen this huge a drop before. It got the the point where I am now considering taking off AdSense from my site, since I am not earning enough money on it.

It is unlikely I will do this, as there is a difference between thinking about something, in frustration, and actually doing it. Nevertheless, it is a incredibly frustrating situation.

There is not much else to do, than to just keep debugging the issue until you find what is causing it.

Links

  1. January 2019 AdSense Earnings & Observations - webmasterworld.com

Tell us what you think:

  1. To reach compliance with GDPR while using Adense on out sites, we need to disclose our ad providers and obtain consent from users.
  2. There is a problem with Google AdSense that cause huge blank areas in pages instead of ads.
  3. AdSense Vignette Ads are coming to desktop, but you might want to think twice before enabling them.
  4. Making money on AdSense is not very realistic for Bloggers, the competition is just to high.
  5. How to block certain ads in Adsense.

More in: Adsense