Delayed PSAs

Spidered, shows paying ads, then 5 days later, PSAs

[ThatAdamGuy]

Sometimes I think Google has it in for me :O.

On one area of my site, I created a new page (with content) and the following day, it was showing relevant paid ads and my AdSense revenues increased significantly.

My revenues suddenly decreased yesterday, and upon investigating, I found that the page which had shown paid ads for five days was now showing exclusive PSAs. No changes had been made to the page at all.

Why would Google retroactively "PSA" a page? Are human editors saying, hmm, there are too many clicks off of this page, so let's PSA it? I can't think of any other explanation. And after having bugged the AdSense tech people multiple times over the last month, I'm loathe to bother them again, fearing that they'll (understandably) decide to kill my account since revenues from my site are offset by the trouble I'm causing. :¦

[Blue_Fin]

I see it differently, Adam. The AdSense Team needs to know about things like this and I don't see how anyone here can really help if relevant ads were showing, you've made no changes, and now you have PSAs. You're not going to get canned for bringing to their attention technical problems on their end of which I've learned there are many from my own relevancy issues on my site.

I continue to have the same problems that started in mid-October which coincided with broad matching. Still no PSAs, but ads themed to the overall site and not the page content.

[cyberprosper]

if there are too many pages shown for a particular topic and not enough advertisers, you will get the PSA. Refresh your page a few times and/or try again a couple of hours later. There is a good chance you will see an advertisement pop in there.

[Jenstar]

Could it possibly have been "over-optimized" to show certain high $$ keywords? Did you check your stats to see if a Google employee stopped by for a hand check of your site?

The most common reason is lack of ads, though, especially if you had been showing targeted for that many days.

[andrew_m]

ThatAdamGuy,
that happens to me all the time. My theory is that when they run out of advertisers willing to pay for keywords on the page they display PSAs.

More interesting is why would not they show more generic ads. For instance, on my widgets.com site, on pages where the content is minimal they display generic ads on where to buy any kind of widget.

On specific "blue widgets" pages they alternate specific ads for blue widgets with PSAs -- where it would make more sense to alternate between "blue widgets" and "generic widgets" ads.

Hope this "widgets" code language makes sense and you see what I mean :) Anybody else exeriences this kind of behavior?

[ThatAdamGuy]

The space in question is in a very, very popular area; given the bazillions of companies bidding in this particular space, I can't imagine there being a dearth of advertisers. Though I suppose there could also be a corresponding huge amount of publishers in this space, too.

The weird thing is when I redirected all page accesses from the newly-PSAd page to a non-PSAd page, the latter continues to show targeted ads -- so it would seem that running out of ads wasn't the issue. Weirder still, when I access the PSA'd page now, it is once again showing paid ads.

I now even more convinced (half-jokingly, I admit) that someone at Google is f... er, playing with me :O. I've given up trying to rationally understand AdSense targeting.