New to Adsense, and having bother with ad visibility

[Cretster]

Hi all

I have an Invision forum that I have Adsense set up for, but am new to this and having a few teething troubles, mainly concerning the visibility/presence of the ads.
To elaborate, I can't see them usually.

One of my moderators mentioned today to me that he could see ads on some screens but not others.
I on the other hand was not able to see any at all.

My wife looked at my forum earlier and said she could see ads on most pages except the main forum index (she was not logged in as a member). I checked later on her laptop without logging in though and did not see any ads.

So from what I can tell there's a few things up:
1) Logged into my admin account I don't see any ads
2) Logged out, it appear the ads appear sporadically. Sometimes there, other times not.
Some pages there, other pages not.
3) Ads never seem to show on the main index page of the forum.
And on another note:
4) The ads are not at all contextual. It's an automotive forum and nearly all the ads were for dating sites etc, not for car parts or anything like that.

About 36 hours ago when setting things up, I found the robots.txt file was blocking google so I fixed that. Is it possible Google just hasn't crawled enough since then to serve up the correct appropriate ads?

Appreciate any help with these issues. I'm not too hot on this stuff and if I knew I could pay an expert a certain amount to get this all taken care of and optimise it for good earnings then I would, but I don't know any friends who are well up on adsense alas.

Thanks!

[Lame_Wolf]

Hi Cretster. Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

First thing to do is to check the page for any "stop words". This could vary from innocent words like "rear" "big end" "large top" to the more obvious, like the F word.

You may also want to check the page for validation errors. Sometimes these could cause rendering problems.

On another note, forums are well known not to generate a lot of income.
HTH

[Cretster]

Thanks for the suggestions. Will look into those points.
Swearing shouldn't be an issue hopefully as it's a no no on my site, but I see the issue potentially with 'euphemisms' like that.

I've been reading up that forums aren't great for revenue from this type of advertising, but worth a try.
I checked analytics the other night and stats wise I get about 800-1000 visitors a day, and about 250 thousand impressions a month, so hopefully it's good for generating something even if it's not a great deal of £££!

When you mention validation errors, could you elaborate a little on how/what I check for that please?

Cheers!

[Lame_Wolf]

There are online validators that you could use. Personally, I use a standalone program called "a real validator"

Both online and offline programs will tell you what the error is, and what line of code it is on.

If you are unsure of a particular error message, just google it for the answer.

Once the page is error-free and the adverts still do not appear, at least you'll know it's not that which is causing the problem.

[Cretster]

Thanks

Just tried one (http://www.adsensevalidator.com) and it said "there is a problem with your URL", but that was all.

Not sure what to make of that as it doesn't really tell me much that I don't already know. Will try looking for other sites etc.

[Lame_Wolf]

[htmlhelp.com...]
[validator.w3.org...]
[arealvalidator.com...]

[Cretster]

Thanks for those.

I just tried the first one you posted and it shows TONS of errors.

Mostly ones like this: "Warning: net-enabling start-tag; possibly missing required quotes around an attribute value"
But also some stating improper nesting of elements.

Not sure how it can be so messed up so I guess take a backup of the file how it is now, then start trying to debug through these and edit out the errors?

[Cretster]

Hmmm, I just saw an ad on one page but not the others. Don't get this really but will persevere!

[Lame_Wolf]

Once you have an error-free page, use the following code. It is the old-style code and will show adverts straight away.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-YOURPUBID";
google_ad_width = 360;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = "360x280_as";
google_ad_type = "text";
google_ad_channel = "";
google_color_border = "000000";
google_color_bg = "000000";
google_color_link = "04FCF3";
google_color_text = "FFFFFF";
google_color_url = "FFFFFF";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Change pub-YOURPUBID to whatever your pub ID is.

[Cretster]

Thanks for that - will give it a try.

Hopefully tonight I might get the chance to try troubleshooting a few of those errors.

Since they're mostly variations on a theme I'm hopeful that once I get one or two done I can apply the same correction to the majority.

Really not sure why the pages would be causing so many though when they're not things I've tampered with.

[Lame_Wolf]

No problem, Cretster.
It is always best to work on an error-free page, so that you can then narrow it down to whatever is causing it.

[netmeg]

When you don't see ads on a page, check the source code and see if your ad code is actually there.

[dougwilson]

Ads rarely show up "immediately" when I ad a "new" ad to a page. Takes a couple of hours or so.

Contextual relationship takes longer. But, for me, no more than a couple of days.

These two things are pretty much in "Google's" hands.

If you go to "adsense > allow & block ads" you can edit settings (dating etc.)

[Lame_Wolf]

Ads rarely show up "immediately" when I ad a "new" ad to a page.

They do if you use the old style code, hence why I sent it.

[Cretster]

Thanks guys.

The code has actually been there for ages now (months). I did get a payment of £62 in October but there's been changes to my forum due to problems and somewhere along the line Google got blocked by the robots.txt file while troubleshooting bandwidth problems.

I've addressed that a couple of days ago, and the ads are definitely appearing, but there doesn't appear to be any real pattern as to when they do or don't appear.
Ie my wife showed me last night on her laptop that most pages appeared to have ads on there, but when I looked a bit later I couldn't see any.

So it seems a bit sporadic.
Will try to sort out some of those errors anyway, or potentially just temporarily try the old code to see if that does the job.

Wondering if there could be a code conflict maybe now I think of it actually.
Adsense was previously implemented by me editing the script into a global footer template, but now I have a hook for invision that puts the code integration into the admin panel gui, and I don't think I removed the old code.

Will go check if it's in there twice or something like that!

[martinibuster]

Wondering if there could be a code conflict maybe now I think of it actually... and I don't think I removed the old code.

That's interesting. Please keep us up to date on that lead.