Google ad's stopped, then started, then forever penalized?

[jost]

One of my sites was averaging 300,000 adsense page views per day.

Then Google Turned my AD's off for a violation which was rectified quickly, and they turned them back on a few days later.

However, ever since then the pageviews shown in Adsense immediately started to trend down and settled at about 42% lower over a period of 2 months :( thats a huge hit.

I can find no explanation for this other than google dinging me somehow. Nothing else changed on the site during this time period. I can find no other variables present.

Google analytics in the mean time has show a steady increase in traffic to record breaking levels, WHILE my adsense page views were steadily going down over a period of 2 months, and ended up 42% lower.

Has anyone else seen this? Has my site been marked by google?

page views are down
ads requests are down
matched requests are down

I use the same adsense units on all my sites, so I checked the stats on the other sites and they were not affected. It seems ONLY this URL channel was affected.


Funny thing is, I see ad's on every page every time. No blanks, no community service ad's, nothing. Its like 42% of my ad's dont count anymore.

Any ideas?

[ken_b]

Opps, I misread the post. Sorry.

[edited by: ken_b at 1:53 pm (utc) on Jun 18, 2011]

[HuskyPup]

Any ideas?

Sounds like a lack of ad inventory.

IIRC a page impression is only made when the ads served change if the ads remain the same then there is no new impression.

I'm sure netmeg will give us the answer:-)

[jost]

"a page impression is only made when the ads served change if the ads remain the same then there is no new impression"

HuskyPup... thats very interesting. That MIGHT explain it.
I just think its a huge coincidence that as soon as that switch was turned off then on, it immediately started falling.
Further, none of my other sites show the same pattern, but they are smaller, so maybe the difference is this big site was already at the inventory saturation point just as available inventory started dropping? Hmmmm....

Has anyone else with bigger sites seen their page views going down starting around April 1st in general? Im getting about 3 million visitors a month on this bigger site.

Also...
Google Analytics shows traffic up a whopping 65% since April 1st.
Googdle Adsense Page views trended straight down to 42% lower since April 1st.

If this is a general economic patter of less advertising that only shows up on sites big enough to hit ad availability saturation, then its a really bad sign for the economy. Double dip time?

[Lapizuli]

Do you use ad placements with your channels? Are your targeting settings intact?

I'm thinking maybe ad placements reset when ads were disabled, so any advertisers doing placement targeting were dropped from your pool.

"If you rename an ad placement, you will lose any existing advertiser bids for that placement. This functionality is to ensure that we provide a good experience for advertisers as well as publishers."
[google.com...]

[jost]

Have never used targeting or ad placement.

Like your line of thought though... what else may have been shaken loose by the bounce?

[jost]

*sigh* Im still left with no theories on this. :(