Why AdSense revenue is dropping and what to do

Most publishers are reporting that their AdSense revenue has been dropping daily since the start of the year despite traffic remaining the same or increasing.

AdSense Revenue Drop

Adsense revenue drop is caused by a number of factors. The main four factors are website layout changes, quarter of the year, economic slowdown, and location.

Website Layout Changes

If you recently made changes to your website layout, you need to investigate and find out whether ads are displaying on your website as they used to. Website theme or layout changes can affect the ad sizes that display on pages.

Quarter of the year

Ezoic report on the percentage of revenue that publishers make each quarter shows that Q1 (January, February, and March) generally experiences low ad rates because advertisers tend to spend less.  October, November, and December (Q4) are the best months when it comes to AdSense revenue because businesses invest more in marketing.

Economic slowdown

Due to global economic uncertainty, most businesses have cut ad spending.  This means a decline in demand for ad spaces and cost per click or cost per impression.  For example, if the cost per click was $10, now it is $1.

Location

CPC, CPM, and RPM can vary significantly depending on the user’s location. If pages that had a high number of visitors from high ad-spending countries have dropped in search ranking, then you may experience a decline in AdSense revenue despite traffic remaining the same.  

Websites that have high traffic from audiences in high ad spending countries like UK, US, Canada, and Australia generate high revenue compared to low ad spending countries.

What to do (solution)

If your website’s ad revenue dropped because of economic and quarter-of-the-year, then there is nothing you can do but continue publishing content as you wait for everything to get back to normal.

If your ad revenue declined after page layout changes or redesign then you might want to check in the reports section of the Google Adsense dashboard to find out which ad sizes and formats are most affected by the decline in ad revenue and fix the changes.

If some of your pages that were the highest source of revenue have dropped in rankings, then you need to look into the cause of the problem and fix it. It might be that a Google search algorithm update affected your page rankings.

Lastly, you need to do research on the advertising ecosystem and determine which topics you can write and rank for that are highly targeted by advertisers. A website may get high traffic but still generate low revenue because of its niche.

Related: Best blog monetization platforms like Google Adsense.