Arrows (Nessie Updates)

What are others seeing for the Nessie update in May.

[adchat]

Hello,

There was an April 1 update of Nessie that affected some with a loss of arrows.

We have only seen a small amount of comments since then with a varied degree of success in those arrows coming back to some publishers.

What is the latest in May for those that have had success in getting arrows back on their ads vs. those who still do not have arrows no matter what they have tried. Also have your display vs. text ads quantities changed any when arrows are not shown?

To start things off, we got the arrows back after some changes in April. This lasted only a few days and they were gone again. Then they came back full for about 1 - 2 weeks. Then May 1 gone again and still gone.

Thanks!

[ww2015]

The arrows seem to dissapear anytime I have a high % of desktop traffic on paginated posts - they come back a few weeks later, but disappear again after a few days.

Watch out for the new improved mobile earnings blocker too:

'New update: noticing that my mobile RPM has been decreasing starting yesterday, find out it’s due to about 40% drop in CTR. Checked out my site on mobile and I’m getting all image ads. Sure enough I go into my performance reports and see that Google is now showing a large and ever increasing amount of image based ads compared to text. Looks like another also update for mobile specifically.' - from fat stacks

[dantigun]

I've lost them too, I guess they'll never be seen again. The days of buying traffic are gone.

[Maximum44]

Unfortunately we lost them as well on May 27th (yesterday). Even with having text telling our users they are an ad. It does not make much sense! We had them for over a month prior to that (since middle of April).

[nosferatu]

The same here. After many improvements made to improve our implementation and prevent accidental clicks we had our arrows back in mid-April. Since then earnings were growing steadily. Yesterday the arrows disappeared again on all websites on our AdSense account and CTRs have fallen.

[robzilla]

I don't think I ever lost them, though I don't really pay attention to it either, but if you see CTR dropping significantly when the arrows are missing, that's almost certain to be an indication that people were clicking them accidentally. Be especially careful on paginated posts where people are trained to look for arrows. It's possible Google is A/B testing with and without the arrows, and that if you hit a certain threshold for probable accidental clicks, you lose the arrows. That would make most sense on a page-by-page basis, but that requires a lot of resources, and they may be testing per ad unit instead, so you would essentially lose the arrows site-wide.

[Ironside]

I have still got them, but they are black, or a very dark grey whereas they used to be blue. Is it possible to change the colour of them if you still have them?

[netmeg]

I don't pay much attention because they seem to come and go and I have no reason to think they are helping, but it does seem like they changed color when I changed some text ad colors. So you could possible try that. No idea if that was a coincidence or not though.

[Maximum44]

We got our arrows back the day after. Now they are different colors depending on ad position. The arrows help alot. They give us an additional $50 - $100 a day.

[adchat]

Thanks for the replies so far everyone.

@Maximum44

Did you make any specific changes that allowed the arrows to come back or did they come back on their own?

[Maximum44]

We contacted an adsense rep and just added "sponsored links"-text by all adsense positions that were prone to accidental clicks and they came back within a day or two.

Make sure you keep the accidental clicks low and you should be fine. Might speed up the process by contacting adsense and tell them you made changes.

[dantigun]

Well, I don't want to sound like an idiot, but how are you supposed to contact a google rep ? I could not find any options in my adsense dashboard/account.

[netmeg]

Go to this page

[support.google.com...]

And on the right, click Other and Other. if you're eligible for Email support, it'll show up there. If you're not, it won't.

(You have to consistently average $25US a week to be eligible for Email support)

[romerome]

For the nessie buttons do yall think there is a cutoff based on the percent deducted from revenue for adsense for content. And once that rises to a certain level the buttons are taken away.

Also do people see the buttons removed from all your sites at once or is it a site by site determination. So far the nessie buttons have always appeared on our sites. They recently turned grey from blue. I like the grey ones a little more.

Also has anyone used the chat support when you click other and other.

[Chronos Slayer]

I lost the arrow in first wave for my main site and its no where to return, 2 days ago I lost arrow on my every single sites. So looks like my account is effected :/

[romerome]

Chronos. Did your percent of deducted revenue increase over the last 3 months. The last month should have just been reported in your adsense account.

[Chronos Slayer]

@romerome, no they are just regular deduction, last month was around 1.2%. Which is not bad, but my ctr went do so bad now my cpm is around $0.25 :/ any decent network can beat that.

[dantigun]

It definitely does not depend on deducted revenue, I talked to a rep and they told me that it depends on abnormally high(according to them) CTR and high number of accidental clicks. This takes effect throughout your adsense account and is not site dependent.

[Chronos Slayer]

well I don't think its CTR alone, since I was getting around 1% CTR which is not high at all. :/ now my ctr around 0.20% or less.

[romerome]

"dantigun:It definitely does not depend on deducted revenue, I talked to a rep and they told me that it depends on abnormally high(according to them) CTR and high number of accidental clicks. This takes effect throughout your adsense account and is not site dependent."

I thought deducted revenue was related to accidental clicks?

If its related to accidental clicks and high CTR would blocking bots help (assuming some bots click on ads)
Basically putting something like this in robots.txt

# Deny all robots that we do not specifically want to allow
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

# Allow these robots only
User-agent: slurp
Allow: /

User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /

User-agent: googlebot
Allow: /

[netmeg]

Ad clicking bots aren't going to pay attention to a robots.txt directive. robots.txt is just a suggestion; there's no enforcement. If you want to block, you have to do it in .htaccess.

[Chronos Slayer]

update arrow back on tablet and mobile. but desktop still missing for more than 2 month :(

[Rasputin]

I talked to a rep and they told me that it depends on abnormally high(according to them) CTR and high number of accidental clicks. This takes effect throughout your adsense account and is not site dependent.

That is interesting - if it is a general site wide deduction rather than removal of specific accidental clicks, how do individual advertisers get reimbursed for these accidental clicks?

[RedBar]

Insofar as I am aware I have never lost my arrows on any device but my placements do not sail close to the wind, however close that may be!