Strange decline in AdMob requests and revenue

[GopalAppmaker]

Hi guys,

I have a strange problem.
Until Feb 12 I had requests around 1300, and it was stable for the last month. Suddenly, it has started to decline rather extremely. From 13 Feb it fell to ~ 300 requests and been there.

Anyone knows that this could be? I would understand if the request rate fell down slowly, but this seems like another issue?

Please help me out here.


Regards,
GopalAppmaker

[david]

Do you have Google Analytics for your app? If so, you should be able to tell whether there was also a sharp decline in the number of active users during that period.

[reiti.net]

watch your installations (on market) - also many users has turned their inet connection off to save battery - if your app stops getting new downloads, admob will also drop

[bahaahamza]

i had a similar problem, sudden decrease in revenues since mid Feb.
But requests and impressions are ok, they didn't change.

I searched a lot but i didn't find anyone reporting the same decrease in revenue :s

Maybe it's related to the following
http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2012/02/admob-auction-enhancements.html
http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/02/08/googles-admob-eliminates-minimum-bids-and-targeting-fees-in-move-toward-adwords-style-auctions/

Admob had removed the minimum click bid, maybe that had effect on revenues. I really wish that anyone confirms this info.

[reiti.net]

admob changed something in their bidding system on 15th feb - there was a message about it on the campaign tab.

I've also seen this drop, but it was recovered after some days.

the minimum bid prevented publishers from getting crappy ads .. I prefer non-crappy ads xD

[david]

Today I received a strange email:

From: Google Admob <admob[email protected]>
Subject: You’re missing out on AdMob revenue!

Hello,

We’ve noticed that you’re currently not using your Google AdMob account to generate earnings from your app and would like to encourage you to give it another try.

We’ve made a lot of changes in the past year, and invite you to give us another try.

- Improved fill rate through AdSense backfill
- New tablet and rich media ad units
- Automatic updates

If you want to learn more on how to build a business and not just an app, we recommend to check out the "Guide to the App Galaxy" [link]

Your AdMob account is still open, so you can always try AdMob again. Log in and reactivate now! [link]

We would also appreciate if you completed this survey to help us understand why you have stopped using your AdMob account. [link]

Sincerely,
The Google AdMob Team

I say this is strange because I am actually still using my AdMob account. They sent this to my main email address, which earned $0.04 revenue today, and a couple of dollars so far this month. Those figures are significantly lower than previous months, but still more than nothing.

Is this perhaps another symptom of major problems with AdMob?

[reiti.net]

Maybe they have a threshold of some earnings before they count it as "earning" :-)

I got relativly normal numbers yesterday again (out of sudden) .. and also yesterday the january earnings were paid .. so something seems to work again

[reiti.net]

confirmed, numbers are back to normal again .. eCPM ~0.80 (completely out of sudden), the days before was not over 0.50.

[david]

Ok, maybe that email was just a one-off issue with my account. Or perhaps, as you say, they could have a threshold which they consider to be "zero" earnings.

Although it's strange, because I'm getting a lot of impressions. I'm just choosing to fill those with House Ads, not general inventory.

[doptrix]

Here are my figures after first 5 days of using AdMob:
Impressions 30,000
Fill rate 99.9%
Revenue $3.80
eCPM $0.13
CTR 0.39%

Why is my eCPM so bad?..
I set refresh rate to 90 seconds and filtered out religion ads. All other settings are default.
Maybe I shouldn't use Google ads to improve fill rate?