Troubleshoot a drop in earnings (2024)

Identify the issue that caused the earnings drop

The first step in identifying what's caused a drop in earnings is to know the key metrics that influence your earnings. There are multiple factors that affect revenue, but in general the important metrics are: cost-per-click (CPC), CTR and impressions. You can view these metrics on the Reports page in your AdSense account.

Is your Google AdSense revenue declining?

1. Review how your account has performed historically. Create a new report and extend the date range to at least the last 3 months to help identify trends or specific issues.

   

2. Check what changes you've made to your account and when you made them. This will help you to understand the root cause of the revenue drop.
3. When you've confirmed the date of the decline, start breaking down the problem. For example, check which platform your revenue dropped on. If you can see that the drop occurred only on mobile devices, this might indicate poor ad implementation, changes to your mobile site, or low page speed, etc.

   

4. Add the CTR, CPC and impressions metrics to your report and try to understand which metric actually caused the drop. Revenue is calculated by multiplying CPC, CTR and impressions. A change in any of these metrics triggers a change in your total revenue. Look to see which metric has a similar trend to your revenue.

Note: We recommend you complete all the steps in this guide to understand what's caused the drop in earnings. Please don't contact support unless your metrics have dropped significantly, or you've seen a downward trend for more than a week.

Next step: Earnings drop because of CPC.

Earnings drop because of CPC

CPC is market driven and depends on various factors like advertisers bidding on keywords and the CPC values they're willing to pay. If your earnings have decreased because of a drop in CPC, here are some steps you can take:

Three factors impacting CPC in Google AdSense

• Make sure you're not blocking any ads you don't need to. If you block too many advertisers, ad networks, general or sensitive categories, this can decrease CPC because there are fewer advertisers in the auction bidding on your inventory. Learn more in our guide to allowing and blocking ads
• Seasonality can affect advertisers' bids - for instance, retail advertisers may increase their bids during specific times of the year when their sales tend to increase. Also, CPC can fall at the beginning of each quarter. Think about your site's vertical. For example, if your site caters to students, you should expect traffic to fall in the summer. We recommend learning how the ad auction works, and how these types of changes can impact your earnings.
• Switch your fixed-sized ad units to responsive ad units by updating their ad code. Or, if you're unable to update your ad code, turn on the ad sizes optimization setting. Making these changes can lead to a better CPC and CTR.
• Start showing native ad units (in-feed, in-article) on your pages to potentially unlock more revenue.

Next step: Earnings drop because of CTR.

Earnings drop because of CTR

A drop in CTR can be caused by a site design that's not optimized or by poor targeting. Visitors either see your ads but don't click on them as they find them irrelevant, or they don't see your ads at all. A low CTR often leads to lower earnings.

Five steps to improve your Google AdSense clickthrough rate

• Check your account for crawler errors. If the AdSense crawler can't crawl your site, we’llbe unable to match relevant ads to your pages.
• If CTR has sharply decreased on mobile, check whether you site is impacted by Confirmed Click. More information can be read here.
• Have you recently changed the location of your ads? This might have impacted the CTR. If you use Auto ads, check the performance of your Auto ads to identify when the drop happened and if you made any changes to your site at that time. For ad units, run the Ad units report and compare the CTRs of your top 5 ad units to see if there's a significant change in any of them.
• Check that there are no issues with your ad code (especially if you've modified the ad code in any way) as this might dramatically reduce your revenue.
• Changing the layout of your site (including changing the number of ads per page) can significantly affect CTR. You might experience an initial rise in CTRs but then a decline as visitors get used to your new design. It’s important to check your old design and see which ad units were used, where they were placed, how they looked, etc.
• Active View viewable is a useful metric to find out how many of your ads are actually seen by visitors. It has an indirect correlation with CTR, becausevisitors can't click on ads they can't see. You should aim to keep this metric at a reasonable level (at least 50%). Learn more about viewability and Active View

  Tip: Our analysis shows that CPMs can be 26% higher for inventory that has a more than 50% predicted probability of being viewable. If you have above 70% viewability rates you will have a distinct advantage in the marketplace as buyers filter out unviewed impressions.

  • If your CTR and Active View viewable are both dropping, then this is most likely due to changes in your ad placement or site layout/design. Read Viewability best practicesto see how you can improve ad placements.
  • If your CTR is dropping but your Active View viewable is the same, check if there were changes in the served ad types. If there is an increase in impressions for display ads which have lower CTR than text ads, this can lead to a drop in the overall CTR.

Next step: Earningsdropbecause of Impressions

Earnings drop because of impressions

A decline in impressions could be seasonal or the result of changes in your content. If your earnings have decreased because of a drop in impressions, here are some steps you can take:

Four best practices for Google AdSense Impressions

• Review your Sites report. Has one of your sites suddenly started to perform much worse than the others? If so, check for problems such as 404 errors, server issues, or policy violations.
• Check the trend of the page views for your site. If page views decline, impressions will decline too.
• Check the Google Analytics data for your site to see if there have been any changes in your referral traffic.Check our Google Analytics Brochure that will help you drive ad performance.
• Check your account for crawler errors. If the AdSense crawler can't crawl your site, we’ll be unable to match relevant ads to your pages.
• Use Google Search Console to ensure your site is being correctly crawled and indexed.
• Promote your site with other major sites that cover the same topics as you.
• Promote your site through social media, and create a group of interested people who regularly visit your site.
• Update your site regularly to encourage repeat visitors. You might also want to send out an email or a newsletter about your updates.
• Develop a traffic strategy to make sure your site is seen and attracts new visitors. Review our traffic tips on how to boost and optimize your site traffic.

Next step: Earnings optimizationtips

Earnings optimization tips

Here are our top tips to improve the performance of your ads and your site.

Improve your Google AdSense earnings

Optimize your ads

• Try the new and improved Auto ads: Focus on your content and grow your business with Auto ads. Enjoy easy setup with no ad code changes and advanced customization features.
• Make your ads more visible with viewability: Make sure you increase the number of viewable ad impressions on your site. This will likely lead to more clicks and higher revenue potential. To achieve a viewability rate of 70%+ for your top performing ad units, follow viewability best practices: reduce page length, place ads right above the fold, use vertical ad sizes, keep creating engaging content, increase page speed. Check Measuring Ad Viewability for more insights for your country.
• Review your blocking controls settings: See and review the ads that have appeared on your site in the Ad review center.

Optimize your site

• Go where your audience is: Discover where your users are by using Google Analytics with AdSense.
• Develop a traffic strategy: Review our traffic tips on how to boost and optimize your site traffic.
• Check page speed of your site: We recommend you use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check your page speed.
• Create an AMP site: Creating an AMP-first site gives you a high performance - faster page load time, better user experience on mobile and more overall traffic.
• Experiment with your AdSense account: Visit the Optimization tab in your account to explore customized recommendations that could boost your income and run experiments to improve your ad settings.
• You can find more optimization tips here.