Creating an AdSense Alarm

find out when pages stop running ads!

[incrediBILL]

Many of us have the alternate adsense ads page installed but hardly ever look in our logs to see if it's being displayed or if it is, what pages are invoking it.

Ran into a situation today where I found Google must've tweaked something and I didn't notice that these pages were no longer serving AdSense, I don't see any stop words on some of the pages so no clue what's wrong yet.

However, I came up with the idea of the AdSense alarm to immediately alert me to this situation.

Instead of pointing AdSense to a static alt_adsense_ads.html page, I decided to change it to a dynamic page so I could send emails to my mailbox notifying me when the ads aren't displaying.

When you have multiple ad units you don't want to be notified when a single ad unit doesn't display, this can happen at any time. Therefore, using a session cookie I counted the number of times the alt_adsense_ads.html page is displayed per page. When it counts 3 ad units not being displayed for a single page (see HTTP_REFERER for the page), it will now notify the webmaster that AdSense has stopped on that page.

There you have it, and AdSense alarm!

[dataguy]

I've been doing something similar for about 6 months. Every time an alt ad is served, it's recorded in my database.

The problem I've run into is that I'll have articles which are years-old suddenly stop serving ads for a few impressions, and then start again. I haven't been able to figure out the pattern, so I am hesitant to remove AdSense from these pages altogether. I don't have an alternate ad network set up, because I haven found anything that pays enough to be worth my time coding it in.

I'd love to know if you see the same thing, and how you decide to deal with it.

[Scurramunga]

Thanks IncrediBill.

[rajivatre]

incrediBILL its great idea.
In our case we have number of multiple dynamically generated pages and many different sites. So this could give really good idea about which pages are showing public service ads from which sites. Also it will give us fair idea that which pages are not known to google (Normally I have seen if the page is in google index then it shows paying ads) or dont have enough advertisers.
I was thinking of how to make it in a way that it will tell me exactly which site and which page is not showing google ads.
Also is it possible that we keep another script which will go through the finding of this script and stop serving adsense on those pages for time being? Will it be helpful in increasing the eCPM may be?

Thanks
Rajiv

[Leonard0]

I was thinking of how to make it in a way that it will tell me exactly which site and which page is not showing google ads.

You can set up the Adsense code to serve an alternate ad (now called backup ad) instead of PSAs by entering the URL in your Adsense set-up.
[google.com...]
The URL of the ad is on your server so if you serve the ad from a php page, as Bill suggested, you can set a cookie (or log the referring page) and send yourself an email - though you might get dozens a day.
One backup ad could be used for multiple sites to save yourself the trouble of checking multiple logs.

Also is it possible that we keep another script which will go through the finding of this script and stop serving adsense on those pages for time being?

The backup ad will load the code for another advertising company so there is no need to change anything.

[incrediBILL]

It appears my problem was a bit bigger than anticipated, too many emails, some new tech info on this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]