New strangeness: Some ads have blank titles

Anyone else seeing this?

[fredw]

Tonight I'm seeing something with Adsense I've never seen before. Seemingly at random times, some ads in a 120x600 skyscraper are blank where the ad title (bold underlined part) should be. It's not always all 4 ads in the ad unit but I've seen as much as two ads at a time broken.

It is doing this across all my sites that have skyscrapers, and it does it both the same in MSIE and Firefox.

Anyone else seeing this?

[sailorjwd]

It appears to be a feature.

I'm seeing it on about 1/3 of all my 336x280 ad blocks.

I don't like it. My idiot visitors will never click on plain text.

Maybe i should change text to bright blue link color?

[gamiziuk]

I am seeing it on large rectangles also. Appears at random.

I am using Internet Exploder 6, Windows XP. Broadband connection. USA.

Probably an "experiment" by the Adsense team. I don't like it.

[eeek]

At least I know why I'm not making much money today. <sigh>

[moTi]

just went to the forum to see if someone else is affected :)

seeing it here, too. leaderboard, titles for at least two advertisers (not the mentioned ones) are missing.

i can't believe this is an experiment since this would be an intervention in the ad copy that the advertiser has set up.
but of course, i could be wrong, since i see all kinds of weird stuff in my ad blocks lately..

[skyhawk133]

Seeing the same in all ad sizes on all my sites. Started around noon today (MST)

[stuartmcdonald]

Am seeing the same - across the site -- missing titles, occasionally missing adverts, adblocks of incorrect size -- eg 250*300 in a 728*90 kinda thing -- rather odd -- and ugly

[kpaul]

looks like a bug to me.

-kpaul

[ann]

Hummm, They seem to have fixed the ones in my preview tool.

Ann

[sailorjwd]

The googlers could have gone to my site to see how to write an sql select statement a month ago...

But that keyword is inactive now - see what you get!

The whole system is falling apart without my keywords.

[netmeg]

I wonder if it's mainly ads with dynamic keywords in them.

I'm not seeing any blank titles, but suddenly my preview tool doesn't work, in that I can't click on the ad in the tool and have it pop up to show me the landing page. Everything else works, but I have to cut and paste the url into the browser.

[ronin]

I doubt that it's a bug. Google plays around with my adpanels all the time: sometimes they have urls missing, or thumbnail pictures added. I've even seen dropdown form menus asking visitors if they'd like to change the theme of the ads. I'm sure they're just doing split testing to see what gives better results and what doesn't.

[danimal]

it's definitely a bug... sometimes the ads show up as no titles, with only partial sentences in the description... basically 4 or 5 words of gibberish.

and of course it had to happen on one of those rare days when google actually pays a decent epc.

[laertes]

I'm seeing it here too (Quebec).

Is it possible this is a new advertiser option given only to a few select adwords accounts, which enables them to omit the title link, in order for their ad to stand out more? (I know, it doesn't make much sense)

[humblebeginnings]

Saw the same thing this morning here in Holland. Ads without titles. Not good. Advertiseres are encouraged to put their most important message in their titles. If that disappears, conversion will go way down.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Hi everyone,

As many of you noticed, some Google ads weren't displaying correctly yesterday. Our engineers were able to resolve the issue quickly, so everything should be back to normal now. Rest assured that all ad clicks and impressions were credited as usual.

Thanks for your help in bringing this to our attention.
-ASA

[fredw]

Thanks, ASA!

[humblebeginnings]

Thank you very much for your quick response ASA!

There is one point I wish to comment on:

Rest assured that all ad clicks and impressions were credited as usual.

But if ads have been displayed without titles, it is my belief people have clicked less ads because of it. But I guess only little damage is done...