Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Why don't we each contribute a little bit of information and see if there is a pattern emerging. Only contribute about your own site, please, rather than in general about "all sites" - you never know what those other sites might have done to result in PSAs ;) With luck, we might see something pop up that could explain it.
Here are some possibilities:
For me, I have been running AdSense for month, am showing targeted ads, with only a few brand new pages running PSAs (but are changing to targeted after a very short time). I am viewing ads from Canada, and nothing else seems out of the ordinary that I can see.
Viewing ads from the UK (but seeing the same from US IPs too)
Currently seeing targetted ads on all pages.
My sites tend to be niche b2b - rather than mainstream consumer sites.
Noticed a large decline in both clicks and revenue however. while my impressions keep climbing (more every day).
Friday it dropped really low, then saturday off the map (I freaked out) and has been rising since, however I think many like me spent most of yesterday looking around at alternatives and started putting feelers out for other agencies.
As for stats, impressions have gone steadily up but is mostly stable now. CTR has gone steadily up but is mostly stable now. Earning-per-click has gone down by an overall factor of 6 since July.
I have Googlebot-mediapartners show up typically within ten minutes of first viewing a new page, and at least site-level targeted ads follow immediately. Then the targeting gets better, I suppose as a subsequent refresh occurs somewhere deep in the plex.
The only thing notable so far is that all those who mentioned durations have all been with AdSense for 6+ weeks, they are not sites that recently joined AdSense.
Please continue contributing so we can see if something jumps out as a possible reason as why or why not PSAs are showing.
As per this thread:- [webmasterworld.com...]
I have noticed PSA when site loaded into Ask Jeeves Frameset :(
Then since the weekend (SAT), wham bam i noticed that my site has been plagued with them, but as yet it has not affected a drop in CTR, but i would like to know how much it would have been up if the PSAs were not showing so much.
Also i would like to know what the visitor must be thinking and its effect it may have when they visit my site which is a sales site, and they see all these non related links (Ads)
The 29th day had an Adsense CTR about 83% of the 29th's, with impressions about the same on both days.
It is pretty useful to be able to serve alternate ads instead of PSAs. Makes it easy to tell what percentage of PSAs you would have gotten.
I chalk it all up to the end-of-the-month affect, since I saw a similar drop in EPC and CTR at the ends of previous months. In other words, no judgements being made until after the first week of next month.
2odd...
Their first response looked like a form letter telling me to try a bunch of things to make sure the ads could show up, but it also said to write back if that didn't fix it. So I did.
Within hours I got a reponse back that said, "thanks, we've fixed the problem, let us know if it happens again." And they did fix the problem.
PSAs cropped into the homepage again, so I dropped them another note and they fixed it again.
I don't think you should be getting PSAs, so if you are seeing them, drop Google AdSense an email and point out the malfunctioning pages. That will help both parties earn more revenues.
On both the 22nd (first full day I ran alternate ads) and the 28th, the alternate ads count was about 11% of the Adsense impression count on dynamic pages - these pages vary according the widget the user selects from a list so there are often "new" pages seen.
However on a high-volume static page (where I track a different alternate ad), only 6% of impressions are alternates (which is still more than I'd expect - there should be none for an unchanging page that normally has 4 ads).
Analysing the static alternate ads, there doesn't seem to be anything special in their geographic distribution, very similar to the site as a whole, so it's not a case of some places not seeing ads.
Nothing unusual in the time of day, browser, or operating system either. 2.5% of the alternates (i.e. only 0.15% of impressions) are from Google cache views, not a factor for me.
I have noticed PSA when site loaded into Ask Jeeves Frameset
I've just been looking closer into why I get 6% alternate ads for a static unchanged page, and I agree there is something strange about Ask Jeeves.
I've looked at the referrer for the page that displays the ad. In nearly every case when the referrer is an Ask Jeeves property (mostly ajkids.com for my site), the alternate ad is served. This alone accounts for 57% of the times the alternate is shown.
I've also noticed that the alternate ad is usually served when the browser is MSIE 5.1x on Mac_PowerPC. This is another 10% of my alternate ad views. The referrer on those browsers seems broken (gives the googlesyndication.com URL rather than the page url), which probably has something to do with it.
So, those two factors account for 67% of my alternate views - without them it would be alterate ads on static pages 2% of the time. Has anybody noticed any other reasons like these? I can't spot much of a pattern in what remains.
Conclusion: if you have a lot of referrers from AJ, you mostly won't get targeted ads on the first page they see. If you have lots of Mac users with MSIE 5.1x they mostly won't see ads on any page. (Note I said mostly, there does always seem to be exceptions). There should be other similar causes lurking in the alternate ad stats.
Does AJ serves your site in a frame ala About.com? I only get a couple of dozen referrals a month from AJ so I pay it no attention.
Both ajkids.com (the main one) and ask.com show my site in a frame. Between them they're the fourth largest source of search engine traffic for my site, three figures a day.
I only get a small number of referals from About, but trying it just now it is indeed the same as AJ: serves in a frame and the ads are alternates.
So it looks like it's not an AJ thing but framing: when the page is framed externally only alternate ads/psa are shown on the first page (even though this follows the guidelines in that the adcode is in the frame with content). Maybe the javascript detects this intentionally to cut double-serving.
Hmmm, perhaps time to put frame-busting code back on the site, took it off years ago when the framing-with-ads fad died down.
Since my site is an information and community site focused on crime nearly all of the site's pages contain words which are apparently trigger words. For about two months I removed AdSense from all but a single page (lets call it Page A) of the site on which AdSense consistently showed targeted ads.
Recently I implemented the alternate ad option. And I spent a lot of time redoing a part of the site consisting of several dozen pages in order to improve the pages' usefulness to users, improve usability and appease the negative content algorithms by reducing the number of what I perceived to be trigger words and effectively also reducing the word density of such words. This was very effective - the percentage of impressions that are alternate ads was only about 3%. Beginning yesterday this began to change dramatically and now it has increased to over 90%. The content of these several dozen pages has not changed by even a single byte. CTR, CPC, CPM, the number of advertisers and supply of ads do not appear to be relevant. All of the pages showed well-targeted ads from the same batch of 10 or so advertisers. I do not use any tricks to force a higher CTR, but given how well-targeted the ads are, the CTR is probably higher than what many AdSense publishers see and the CPC is probably on the very low end.
I have not contacted Google yet because I want to monitor the situation for a few days in case it's somehow related to month-end AdWords budgets or trends the other way.
What is really odd is that a week ago I redid Page A and changed the filename associated with it.
Until a week ago there was just Page A at page1.html. I changed the internal links for Page A to point to a new file page2.html and page1.html and page2.html are identical to the last byte. I also moved the old version of Page A (which showed targeted ads for over 2 months) to page3.html. For 4 days all 3 pages showed targeted ads. Now of the three, only page1.html shows targeted ads, while the other 2 show alternate ads. I find this extremely perplexing.
And Mediapartners hasn't visited the page that still shows targeted ads since the 29th, page2.html since the 21st and page3.html since the 30th, yet PSAs began showing on the latter two yesterday. Mediapartners has visited some of the other few dozen pages it's enabled on each of the last few days as well as a visit to a page on the 31st that has *never* had AdSense enabled on it.
After discussing on WebmasterWorld and with Google it became clear that it was due to algorithms used to detect "negative content".
I have not contacted Google yet because I want to monitor the situation for a few days in case it's somehow related to month-end AdWords budgets or trends the other way.
a visit to a page on the 31st that has *never* had AdSense enabled on it.
I will blame Opera or one of those engines that frames the content.
I hadn't considered that. Thanks for mentioning that. I just checked the entire last month and found dozens of other pages that Mediapartners visited, but which never had AdSense code enabled so I think you're correct.
loanuniverse wrote:
I am sure that their negative content filter has been tweaked a lot and that the latest version {or the version that has caused a lot of PSAs and is yet to correct itself} is the most likely culprit.
That's the way I'm leaning since it's happened to this site before and I was in contact with Google about it a couple of months ago. It's pretty demoralizing. It's unfortunate that they can't (or won't) whitelist the site since the ads are all entirely appropriate. The pages where AdSense is enabled are all about information and resources dealing with crime prevention and education, not gruesome news stories about violent or heinous crimes, which from all accounts are what Google is trying to avoid showing targeted ads on since they'd be in poor taste at best and offensive at worst.
I don't mind modifying content on some of the pages to avoid the negative content filters, but I don't want to have it to be an endless cycle and it's difficult to impossible in my case to do so without having a negative impact on SERP positioning. Revenue is less important than achieving the mission of the site so at this point optimizing for AdSense is not a very compelling option.
Here is my situation:
-71 days 100% targeted ads
-3 days 100% PSA
* I have two very small sites that are receiving targeted ads still. These sites are on the same host.
-100% Static Pages
-Ecommerce Site
I haven't made any changes to my site. It is very clean and has been ranking in the top of Google for a long time. Adsense showed great targeted ads the minute I placed the code on my page in August.
Something is definately very wrong here. I can not figure out what is going on. I do quite well with adsense. I wish we could discuss this further to see if others having this problem make good money. I would really like to know if people with small amounts are having this problem.
Something leads me to believe that this problem that we are experiencing is not algorithmic. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this issue. I am sorry to those who rely on adsense for their income. I have the code on an ecommerce site that is my full time project. So for me, this is more of a confusing riddle. I also doubt that we will receive any explanation when this issue is resolved (If it gets resolved).
# How long has your site been running AdSense?
Over four months.
# Where are you located?
Australia.
# How many PSAs is your site showing?
Every page now seems to have PSAs. I've never had more than about 10% PSAs before, though I had one patch in September with site- instead of page-specific ads everywhere.
