January 2018 AdSense Earnings & Observations

In the Ad Review section, if an ad has an AdWords account, then it's an actual AdWords ad? And 3rd party ads would not show an AdWords account?

Sure coverage will plummet, when you disable ads

What he is saying is that on pages with low coverage, the ads that are showing are other network ads. Block them and no ads will show, proving that this is an Adwords issue. Adwords does not want its ads on uncrawled pages and so will not bid for space on those pages, but Adsense will let other networks' ads show. These other ads might be under the Google brand but they are not Adwords. Without Adwords bidding on space on uncrawled pages, the epc for these other networks' ads is next to nothing.

[edited by: ember at 5:20 pm (utc) on Jan 10, 2018]

I've checked the first 250 ads in my Ad Review section and they all show an AdWords account. And they all look like legitimate ads that would fit well on my site. Of course, there's 2750 ads I haven't checked yet, but so far, they've all show an AdWords account.

@NickMNS
More sense.
Now, facts ...
- I checked about 50 recently shown ads. All of them show AdWords account number. Even those from 3rd party networks. So, they are AdWords;

- I'm pretty sure the ad format I showed above is native AdWords. 3rd party networks do not use such format. Checking such format in 'Ad Review Center' didn't show 3rd party networks;

- I have screenshot where this ad format (native AdWords) is shown on the page, but ad slot next to it is blank.

How would you explain this?

Cralamarre, so you think all of your ads are Adwords? Have you checked the Ad Network section?

@ember, I just checked my Ad Network section as you suggested, and it's showing the vast majority of impressions from Google Adwords. Below that is Google DCLK Bid Manager, and third is DoubleClick Bid Manager. But by far, the majority is Google AdWords. Nothing else even comes close.

Uhh....
I found blank ads, showing in the 'Ad Review Center'.
Also some blank squares show piece of Javascript code inside.

@sdksjdksjd
Look I am not the oracle of AdSense I can't explain every situation and you may well be facing a situation that is very specific to your site. There are many other reasons unrelated to the current situation that cause ads not be shown on a website.

Now ads shown in the ad-review center are not random they are presented in order of impressions (I think it is impressions over some time span). So ads that tend to appear frequently or have appeared frequently over a short time span (eg: 10 times in 1day as opposed to 10 times in a month) will be shown first, so naturally these tend to be AdWords ads. Regardless, do as Ember proposed to Cralamarre check your "Ad Networks" report for impressions and you will see a sharp drop in AdWords ads on the 18th of Dec and then a growth in third party ads.

I must be okay then because looking at my Ad Network report from December, I'm not seeing any drastic changes, other than the drop causes by my seasonal drop in traffic. This week, traffic has returned to normal and according to the Ad Network report, so has the number of AdWords impressions.

However, even without a drop in AdWords impressions, revenue is still very low, which seems to imply that competition for ads isn't very high right now. Having said that, today does seem better than yesterday.

@NickMNS
I know you're not an oracle and that's why I don't understand why do you act as one.
I checked my stats all over already and this is exactly why your theory of 'new policy explanation' doesn't explain anything to me.

AdWords on 16.12 and 23.12 (before and after new policy) is slightly less in my stats, following a bit less of traffic.
Coverage dropped just few percents since 18.12.
And still blank ads all over my pages and unbelievably low CPC/CPM.

I see a drop in page views on adsense even though my G.Analytics shows me a different story. Is this because of the blank ads that we are seeing?

@sdksjdksjd if you don't see a drop in coverage and don't see drop in Adwords impressions your then not affected by the "brand safety" policy. It can either be seasonality or some factors that are specific to your site. Have you checked for policy violations?

@papux blank ads should be visible in your stats by checking "coverage".

When I check Ad Networks report, interesting is that CPC for Google is 4x times lower than other networks ( except Criteo ) . Anyone checked that?

@ivok..I didn't bother checking because no one could possibly be lower than mine at 0.00.

@NickMNS
It seems to me, that "brand safety" policy is specific to some sites, including yours. Majority suffer from something else.
It can be either short of the advertisers or long-lasting system glitch or both. It dropped to low to be seasonal.

I believe this is important to understand what is this about, because probably it reflects trends we will be dealing with in the future.

@NickMNS how can i find coverage if you don't mind telling me?

Ad reports - Custom

I guess in my case, the only thing that's affecting my earnings is the fact that it's January. I can't find any evidence of a sudden or unusual problem in any of my reports.

Hello!, reading you very interested hoping to find answers to worst performance in years. Never checked this before but chrome console shows strange errors sometimes display some ads such as

bad gateway ( error 502) ( and the url shown reports error )

or

The source list for Content Security Policy directive 'child-src' contains a source with an invalid path: '/sadbundle/$csp%3Der3%26dns%3Doff$/8938301033058032679/index.html?v=deexit'. The query component, including the '?', will be ignored.

could be somehow related ?

@jor70 I've seen those error messages a couple of times on my site as well.

@Cralamarre before or after this "new policy" ?

@jor70 It was after, but I can't see how the two issues would be related. I think it's a separate issue.

An Adsense rep, pubpolicycomm, has been in here in another thread and is aware of the problem now. He said he'd let the appropriate people know and get back to us. So we should have an answer fairly soon.

@Papux as ivok explained, go to performance report, select the custom tab and the select coverage from the list. You should also select some other items that you can use as comparisons such as impressions, page views, earnings etc...

@sdksjdksjd There is no doubt that other factors can be at play. But there is nothing to suggest that the "brand safety" is specific to a few sites. As I have explained before it seems to apply to all sites but some sites are not impacted because or their structure. Sites with few pages that are viewed often will not be impacted. Sites with many pages where no page ever gets more than a few views will be impacted more. I fit the latter pattern.

@ember Which problem is it that he has suddenly been made aware of? That AdSense revenue is low? That AdWords introduced a new policy limiting ads on non-crawled pages? Are you sure he is an AdSense rep if he was unaware of these issues?

Cralamarre, he's in the Coverage Dropped Below 70% thread, so that's the problem he's aware of. Maybe others, too. He's been here before about other issues and is legit.

Its been 3 weeks after this update. If we all haven't started to see an slight increase in our coverage percentage by now, then there is a problem. I see their Mediapartners-Google bot in my logs but am still not seeing any rebound in coverage. Blank ads all over. The worst is that these blank ads come with a width and height to make everyones site look terrible and empty.

when people say they're seeing blank ads, do they mean they're just empty white boxes? because that's what I'm seeing.
i was just wondering if other people are seeing actual blank ads (ie. nothing there at all)

@Iondrum Yes, the blank white spaces!