So when Google announced that HTTPS pages would rank better its search result pages, I jumped on and migrated all my pages to HTTPS. I have been running HTTPS for the past few days now and I must say, my pages are loading fast despite what people say about HTTPS and the cost it puts on page speed.
Well, the move to HTTPS is over but here’s the shocker. It appears that moving to HTTPS hurt my AdSense income badly. We depend on AdSense to run this blog and AdSense is our only source of income. We usually don’t ask for help from individual user and AdSense has been a good income source.
Without AdSense, I can’t see us running the blog for long because the cost of hosting and managing the site would overwhelm us. That’s why we implemented AdSense to help pay the bills around here.
Now, before switching to all HTTPS traffic little did I know that AdSense income would be impacted. If I had known, maybe I would’ve push the pause button on migrating. I can easily switch back to HTTP only traffic but I didn’t have a backup plan or plan B.
- Why AdSense Income was impacted
After doing some digging online, I couldn’t come up with any explanation as to why our AdSense income was so badly impacted. On some popular forums, users are pointing to an overall site-wide change causing AdSense bots and crawlers to re-crawl the site, force lower CPC and CPM ads to appear.
One user pointed out that once a site go through a drastic change, like switching from HTTP to HTTPS, AdSense bots usually re-crawl the site and while re-crawling the site, fewer advertisements are shown with lower CPM or CPC.
Others are just not sure as to why this happens after changing to HTTPS.
If you’re about to or in the process of switching to HTTPS traffic and you depend on AdSense, you might want to read more into this before going forward. It’s because your AdSense income may drastically reduce after switching.
At this point, I am not going back to HTTP. I will just have to ride the waves and see if it improves over time.
One good theory is that some of AdSense ads only support HTTP. And most likely the HTTP ads are more and pay higher CPC than those that are HTTPS.
If you switch to HTTPS, those HTTP ads get remove from the inventory for your site and only those that are HTTPS are shown to your audience. Maybe this is wrong, but that’s what I am trying to think right now.
For those who haven’t switched over to HTTPS, they should decide if switching to HTTPS to get a small bump in traffic out weights AdSense income. If AdSense income is vastly important to you, then you should wait before switching over.
Simple as that. If you’re not running ads on your site, then you might thing about switching.
If you feel differently about this, please comment below and tell us.
Enjoy!