Some AdSense ads not showing after site redesign

[shallow]

My site was redeveloped by a very competent web developer and launched several months ago. Ever since that time there has been an unrealistic drop in clicks on AdSense ads, and as a result a painful drop in monthly income.

I should point out that traffic has increased and that AdSense are the main ads run throughout my site.

I was told that the most likely reason for the drop was the poor economy, and I'm sure that plays a small part. But I never totally bought that explanation because I could pinpoint the exact day the dramatic drop in clicks started: the launch date.

Then just the other day I noticed something we both have missed.

In entire sections of my site, the right-hand sidebar AdSense ads don't display (and sometimes they do), randomly and for long periods of time, on main category pages. I've done spot checks at all times of the day including when I should be asleep.

Only two AdSense ads run on these pages, and only the right-hand sidebar ads are problematic.

For example, if a category has five subcategories, three may show both ads, while two subcategory pages show only the top ad. The area is blank where the RH ads should display. I don’t see the code for the RH ad in the page source code either when this occurs.

My site was put in WordPress. There is a Blog section. The remainder of the site, the main section where most of my content resides, is set up to use WP as a CMS.

I also note that the problem with the RH sidebar ad not showing *only* occurs in the Main section, not the Blog section.

I'd sincerely appreciate any suggestions, insights as to how this problem can be addressed and, hopefully, solved. Thank you.

[explorador]

You'll have to check out your code as there is a pattern of "sections" that aren't working.

On the other side I have a site where I checked everything already and sometimes a block of ads just won't appear, I guess is the low inventory as they used to appear but DOUBLE, repeated. I blocked some advertisers being ring tones and stuff like that and since then I have this issue on THIS website. So, my guess is low inventory of ads.

I also redesigned a site, HQ site and traffic went up, lots of readers but the clicks kinda went down. There is a theory that was talked about here that some sites work fine with adsense as they look bad and have little content... so people click on the ads to leave your site........ I guess it happened the opposite here as I have better traffic but less clicks.

[martinibuster]

My goal is to simply to find out what may be at the root of the problem now that it has been discovered.

The OP had his site redesigned and the CTR dropped. The site is redesigned with a WP Template. Assuming the issue is not on Google's side (which seems possible considering the timing of the outage coincides with the redesign) here are some possible explanations:

WP templates use XHTML which displays badly on older browsers. What browser are you using to view the ads?

WP code generally does not validate. This could also interfere with the way a browser parses code, causing ads to be displayed but not visible. I have seen this phenomenom where WP hides content. Your AdSense Ads may be there but they are either hidden behind a div or pushed offscreen.

Try changing the Doctype to HTML Loose and see if that makes a difference. When doing something like this be sure to view your site in different flavors of IE (IE 6, 7, &8), plus Opera and FF. If there is a quirk it will show up in one of those five browsers.

There is a way of coding Divs that blows up on older browsers, causing divs to hover over other divs, hiding the content beneath it. There is a workaround that consists of adding an extra line of code that fixes this. You'll have to search around in the CSS forum though, I don't have it bookmarked.

[shallow]

I use Firefox. V3.5

I will check with IE 8; the ads are showing now in IE so I'll have to check at different times of day and night. I'll also check with Chrome and Opera; they are all the latest versions.

I've given my web developer, who will begin working on fixing the problem early this week, a link to this thread.

I so appreciate the input and suggestions. Once a fix is found, I'll post it here.

Again, many thanks.

btw, explorador, the individual who redeveloped my site is also fabulous at design. I'll have my site redesigned ugly, so perhaps clicks will increase. :P

[netmeg]

You don't have to redesign your site ugly, but I'm a big proponent of experimenting with different styles & colors of ads. On some of my sites, the blended ads work better, and on other sites, the totally "stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb" ads work better. If your designer can't write you some PHP code to equally serve these ads so you can figure out what works best, then you're going to have to do it manually - run one set for a week, then another type for another week, and keep track of the results. Make sure each ad has its own channel so you can track it separately (the tools AdSense has for ad rotation apparently doesn't do this)

That doesn't solve your problem of ads not showing. You can test this too. Set up some kind of a graphic that's the exact same size as the ad - it can be just a blank color block, but it's better if it actually has some kind of content - advertise some portion of your site, or whatever. Then go into your AdSense panel and reconfigure your ads to show this graphic when it can't display ads. Then after a day or two, look in your stats to see how many times this graphic actually displayed. That'll tell you if your ads are really not showing up. You can also check your site periodically and see if you see your own ad instead of the AdSense. It will give you a little more fuel before you approach AdSense with the problem.

If you can't figure out how to do any of this, your designer may be able to help.