Stuck adverts, stuck revenue.....

[yump]

Every time I looked in the last 3 days, most of our pages have exactly the same adverts running. They are dynamic and they used to carry a nice variety of ads. Plus, the revenue has been increasing during the day until early evening and then more or less sticks (doesn't go up next day for 'top-up').

But our busiest time is in the evening.

This wasn't happening until this last week. Patience running out rapidly.

Support just keeps giving the same old 'tell us this, tell us that, tell us where' response.

It would really help to have a statement saying either 'there's a few things being ironed out' or 'there's absolutely nothing wrong'. Then could at least stop wasting time looking at stats and wondering whats going on.

Anyone seen one anywhere?

[Rodney]

I didn't know the ads were supposed to rotate?

[Jenstar]

Google will show the ads it feels are the best targeted and best paying. If the advertiser's daily budgets are set high enough, this could mean showing the same ads over and over again.

The ads aren't "stuck" at all, if they are showing paid targeted ads. But an advertisers CTR and high daily budget can result in little variation of the ads on pages and sites running AdSense.

[yump]

Well we've been running Adsense since the start of Feb. I'm no expert but I've never seen anything like this before. Checked again carefully just now and we have exactly the same adverts on the same dynamic pages as we had this lunchtime, this morning, yesterday and part of the day before. Not my cache.

They can't be high CTR ads. because we run a site for widget parts and on 1 page all the (4)ads. are for one type of part, which I know only a small minority of our visitors will want. On the other pages, the ads. are reasonably different page to page, but absolutely the same as they were previously on each page (about 15 pages) and mostly generic (site theme) instead of targeted by page.

We're in the UK. I'm left wondering if its a dynamic page matching problem, just UK, or whether there has been some sort of wholesale withdrawal of advertisers.

Today the CTR is 1/3rd. of what is has averaged since we started, which makes me think our visitors are well .......off with seeing the adverts over the last few days.

As we don't want to look amateurish, I'm tempted to turn the whole lot off and come back in a week or so. Anyway, have emailed support. Can't believe this is a permanent state of affairs.

[ignatz]

I've seen similar things. Only one ad showing where there should be three, and I *know* there are more advertisers (page is in a common "directory category"). Also CTR has plunged (maybe for the same reasons) All this over the last few days...

[PatrickDeese]

Please don't forget that Adwords geotargeting will end up showing a different sets of adverts for different parts of the world - just because you are seeing adverts in the UK for low-key terms - that doesn't mean a US visitor doesn't see much higher ticket adverts.

[yump]

Its the change from daily changing adverts to almost rigid sets of adverts that I'm talking about.

[Jon_King]

Our sites were in the same holding pattern but now they have different advertisers. We seem back to the usual spread. Maybe the holding pattern was part of the problem AdSense experienced a couple of days ago..

[loanuniverse]

...We're in the UK....

This might be the reason. I keep hearing that adwords has about 150,000 advertisers {probably more by now}, but I would guess only a small number target the UK. You are looking at a much smaller pool.

I would:

-look at my site through a US proxy.

-install tracking to see what advertisers are being clicked on.

[yump]

>loanuniverse

Will be installing tracking once I figure it out!
US proxy does give more variety, so it does look like a UK thing.

Late yesterday we did block a few of the persistent advertisers to see what would happen. Interesting that the variety started to come back.

Tried this because Jenstar mentioned the possible effect of combination of high budget advertisers / high CTR - looks like that might be at work as well. Although the keywords appeared very specialised, perhaps some advertisers have bid high across the board for even specialised keywords.

Or perhaps the new algo is starting to have an effect by weighting against previous adverts that had low CTR / low likely value to advertisers. I know Adwords keywords get 'deactivated' if the CTR isn't high enough. Perhaps same now true for Adsense.

If this is the case, I just hope its not too vigourous in filtering, as many of the previous adverts were very relevant and targeted, but just wouldn't get clicked very often because they weren't things our visitors would want very often.